Laura is hosting #DoorstoppersInDecember partly as an antidote to #NovNov25, but as the weather gets colder/more unpredictable, what’s better than getting stuck into a chunky novel. There are no hard and fast rules as to what constitutes a doorstopper, but I’d normally call a book over 450 pages a chunkster. So far this month, I’ve DNF’d one, and just devoured and loved another. Let’s get the DNF out of the way first.
Juice by Tim Winton
I managed 60 pages of Winton’s 513 page cli-fi epic, published last year, before losing the will to carry on. A man and a girl child cross a stony desert in a van. They reach what appears to be an abandoned mine, but they need a refuge for a while. Turns out the mine’s occupied by the ‘bowman’, who imprisons the pair, so there’s a survival tale in there. The man starts telling his story, and he never shuts up basically.
I’d sort of been expecting an Aussie take on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but this wasn’t it and Juice is double the length. I’m sure had I been in a different frame of mind, I might have enjoyed it, but not this time.
Source: Own copy. Picador paperback 2025, 513 pages. Buy at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Now to a sublime work of literary SF. MacInnes’ novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023, and went on to win the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2024 – and on this reading, the prize was richly deserved.
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam with her younger sister Helena, an abusive father and a mother who couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything to stop the beatings until he dies. Leigh moves with her life to become a marine biologist specialising in algae, marine bacteria and archaea (a single cell organism without a nucleus, unlike bacteria which have one), getting a place on a research ship going out to explore a new vent in the Atlantic ocean floor that could be deeper than the Marianas Trench. The sea area affected appears large and the readings are rather anomalous. The ship is anchored outside the vent’s influence, the mini submarine is sending back data from km down, when it stops. When volunteers are asked for to go scout the surface of the vent – of course Leigh is one. Later the sub is lost and the team will recover parts to send back for analysis. As for the divers, they will have a transcendant experience in the vent water which will make them ill, changing their outlook forever. End of Part 1.
I swallowed oxygen, tested and flexed limbs, told myself relax, you’ve done this a thousand times before. Then something strange happened, […] I lost myself into a wide, vast warmth, a wholly enveloping medium. Suddenly the sea was bright with colour, as life surged: a purple and yellow sea lily uncrushed itself, pushing away water in a spray; red-tipped tubeworms undulated successively like the drift of a breeze over a wheat field, a thought unfurling across a bed of neurons;; jets of bio-light glowed and pulsed, as outlines of animals burst in rapturous communication then disappeared again into the darkness transparent cephalopods hung suspended in an immensity; bacterial symbionts draining and nourishing everything; archaea under it, at the heart of it, crawling, synthesising. stretching back, inexpressible return–
For parts 2-5, we fast forward a bit and Leigh is offered a job at a top secret research facility in the desert. Despite her sister’s insistence (Helena is now based in Jakarta) and Leigh help with their mother, who is beginning to show signs of age, Leigh takes the job knowing that leaving the base will be difficult. Her job is to scale up algae production to make a product edible by humans, and that can be grown in space. For scientists have discovered a new form of propulsion that will allow rockets to achieve speeds greater than ever – so they can reach the edge of the solar system, the ‘heliopause’ in less than a year and catch up with Voyager 1. Given that they’ll need an expert on the maiden voyage to grow the food and Leigh finds herself part of the three person crew.
You’ll notice that I’ve deliberately given you the blandest outline of the plot above. While I don’t intend to give direct spoilers, discussing the novel’s themes further will involve some details you may wish to discover for yourselves. Suffice it say – if you read my review no further – do read this book! If you loved Orbital, you’ll love this, although three times the length.
In the first part, when Leigh dives and tries to recount her experiences, we’re made to feel as if there might be something down there, that could be ancient, waiting to be discovered. A new type of archaea or bacteria with a hive mind perhaps. But the submarine fails at the critical moment, several tens of km down; the scientists on the ship can’t believe how deep it went, but wish it had been able to come back in tact, rather than rescuing some parts that surfaced, covered in vent material to be preserved and investigated. We do know it’s not like the ancient creature unleashed from the ocean floor that infects worked in The Rig (Prime), and we don’t find anything more out until way later in the novel. We’re left to think about the crew’s experiences in the vent, and a little bit sad that they seemed to have reached the technological limit when the sub stopped working.
When Leigh goes to work for the research facility, she is so thrilled to be heading up her own lab, she consciously uncouples from everything else, her partner – but their relationship was rocky anyway, her sister in Jakarta, and her mother Fenna, although she does visit for a short while before moving to the desert. Once there, she’s excited, living for the job, but always coming up against the need to know nature of the facility’s top secretness. It’s a tribute to her pester power and her team’s expertise at growing the algae, that doors start to open, leading to Leigh moving onto the astronaut programme as a mission specialist. The facility liaison is a lady called Uria, who strongly reminded me at the outset of Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) in Severance, although Uria is less cold than Cobel!
Interestingly, Martin MacInnes never really info dumps on us; other authors, like Andy Weir and Becky Chambers, while writing very entertaining SF thrillers and stories find entertaining ways to give us a lot of technological information. MacInnes just doesn’t bother. We don’t need more than the absolute basics about how to grow algae. We don’t need to know about the new method of rocket propulsion that has been discovered – save that they’re not quite up to Zefram Cochrane’s first warp ship yet in Star Trek: First Contact. Yet the idea that the flight of Nereus as the spaceship is called (Nereus was a titan, father of nymphs and known as the ‘Old Man of the Sea’) might result in first contact is left dangling for us. I couldn’t help thinking of Star Trek: The Movie too when I read how they hoped to catch up with Voyager I as it left the solar system. MacInnes is too subtle for that though. His style echoes Samantha Harvey’s in Orbital, with some lovely observational description. Here they are passing Saturn.
The larger moons – Pandora, Prometheus, Rhea, Dione, Enceladus – shepherd the rings so that they hold their form in ice and rock and dust. The outermost ring is 12 million miles from Saturn’s body. The planet’s ammonia yellow hue lights the mid-deck and strikes our faces. The discs have sublime geometry, the first truly perfect objects I have ever seen. I smell my tears before I feel them moving down my face, the novel saline intensity. The rings appear so close, so deceptively full of body, it’s as though we could reach out and touch them.
Such lovely words. And there is a lovely circularity to the whole story which I wont explain. This novel goes to prove that science fiction can be literary. I adored it and it will go straight onto my year end best of list.
Source: Own copy. Atlantic hardback – 496 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s in pbk via my affiliate link (free UK P&P)
