Skip to main content

The Real-Town Murders (SF) - Adam Roberts *****

Of all the contemporary science fiction writers, Adam Roberts can most be relied on to deliver a book that combines an engaging story with extensions of current science and technology that really makes you think - and The Real-Town Murders does this perfectly.

 Set in the south east of England, a few decades in the future, this book delivers a trio of delights. The main character, Alma, is faced with constant time pressure as she faces physical and mental challenges (including a lovely homage to North-by-Northwest), there is an apparently impossible locked room mystery and there is fascinating speculation about the impact three technologies - AI, nanotechnology and virtual reality - may have on human life and politics.

 Roberts' inventiveness comes through time after time - for example, Alma's partner is locked into a genetically engineered nightmare where she suffers a different medical emergency every four hours which only Alma can fix. It's just a shame, in a way, that Marguerite, the partner, hardly gets a chance to contribute as we are told she has Mycroft Holmes-like abilities. And then there's that locked room - or, rather, the locked boot of a car - where a corpse turns up in the boot at the end of a vehicle production line, despite the car being constantly viewable on video from several directions as it was built and it being clear that no one put the corpse in place.

 There's so much going on here, despite this being a short and very readable novel. Admittedly, there are a couple of points where there's an awful lot of talking in rather vague terms (other characters complain about this), but this is relatively painless and we're soon back with the action.

 My only real complaint is one that also applies to a scene in a much less sophisticated movie trilogy also dealing with AI and virtual reality - The Matrix. In The Real-Town Murders, towards the end, Alma realises that there is only one possible solution left to explain how the corpse ended up in the boot of the car - but there is another, arguably more likely, solution that simply gets overlooked. I won't say what it is, but Alma would surely have thought of it if she were familiar with the movie Inception.

 What's really impressive here is that Roberts manages to make this book both a page-turning adventure and an intelligent and thought-provoking exploration of the benefits and dangers of AI and virtual reality. It's also unusual in that every major character is female (a refreshing contrast to Foundation), though there are plenty of men around - again, part of Roberts' cleverness is that he can do this without trying to justify it in some way in the storyline.

 While not as intellectually meaty as The Thing Itself,  this is one of Roberts' best books and a good introduction to his writing. If you aren't already a fan, but you like intelligent speculative fiction, read this and you soon be looking for more titles by Adam Roberts.

 Hardback:  

Kindle:  

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more