Leigh, the heroine of In Ascension, is a marine biologist whose undersea research leads her on an unlikely route to an expedition to the edges of the solar system. This would be a decent premise for a story by Arthur C. Clarke, Peter Watts, or Kim Stanley Robinson. Instead, it is in the hands of Martin MacInnes, who gives it enough literary flourish to earn a longlist nomination to the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction. I have seldom seen a book whose ratings oscillate so consistently between two and five stars. Like many slipstream novels, it struggles to meet its conflicting genre requirements. Characters in stories by Clarke, Watts, and Robinson may have faults, but they tend to attack problems in engineering and science rationally. MacInnes’s characters treat such issues as symbols of their own character: “So many times I had identified errors—in my work and in my relationships—stemming the original mistake of too many assumptions, of predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there.” They are not so much interested in the world through which they travel as they are in the weaknesses that they assume define their character. Is such stuff good enough to win a Hugo or a Booker? Not for me. ( )

A dreamy, sci-fi ish, novel. The story involves Leigh who grew up as an abused child but her adult years are filled with scientific explorations and discoveries.
I thought it a tad too long but felt it was very well written, often the prose is down right beautiful.
This novel was available to me on audio, which seemed rather slow paced to me. I look forward to reading a hard copy when I see it in my area.
Personally, I think this novel would make a very good movie ( )

45. In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
reader: Freya Miller
OPD: 2023
format: 13:38-audible audio book (512 pages in hardcover)
acquired: August 1 listened: Aug 1-18
rating: 5
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker 2023
locations: Rotterdam around 2000, and somewhere in California around 2030.
about the author: Scottish author of three novels, born 1983.

A literary sci-fi book of tone. What I mean is that if you take to the language, a cold, careful, logical tone that can bring out something both distant and beautiful, then this book is a 5-star listen. It's read beautifully on audio by Freya Miller.

The book itself has elements of DeLillo's [Ratner's Star]. But whereas DeLillo used adolescent wry humor, satire and sex, this is all restrained tone. It takes place mostly about 10 years in the future, where a Dutch marine biologist studying algae finds herself involved in a newly created ocean chasm with ancient microscopic life forms, and then later a for-profit space agency in California looking to for self-creating food supplies for long missions.

I loved this, loved listening to it, could relisten to it again, starting at any point and ending at any point. Would I feel differently, if I read it? I suspect I would still have liked it a lot, but maybe not at 5-stars, as I have given it here. Those 5-stars in this case are partially for the experience and enjoyment of listening to this.

Recommended to anyone who likes the Audible sample.

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one quote: "The silence that surrounds us, the un-meaning of deep space. Terrifying, endless directionless plane. It wasn't possible to domesticate and cultivate this non-place."

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/351556#8216640 ( )