In Ascension
Martin MacInnes
Having read it
★★★★★
Brilliant.
Great (science) fiction that speaks truth – alluding to broader themes when certain, predominately economic, attitudes and practices continue – imagines and describes some intriguing, emotional and compelling ideas, story arcs and characters and leaves a few questions hanging around, alongside interesting answers all to inspire and contribute a bit more intrigue and wonder on the journey of life, through time and space and from archaea and bacteria, larger organisms and ultimately up towards the Earth, our solar system, the Milky Way and the universe.
A good passage
The microscope seemed to generate the creatures spontaneously, producing life where there had been none before. They appeared like tiny circular pieces of glass, and if they hadn’t been moving independently I might have thought they were reflections of the lens. Having received the gift for my eleventh birthday, I became increasingly interested in microscopy. I got better at looking, expanding the world by diminishing it, peering down into the smallest crevices. Digging deeper and deeper into the micro-scale brought out unimagined receptacles of time and space.
A second good passage
Life is not necessarily carried in a body.
And what is a body, in the loosest terms, but a set of agreements among matter and energy that endures for a period and exhibits a metabolic response? The alien may be a particular way of calibrating energy, not constituted in any one of the properties that delivers the power, but in the act of delivery itself. A state and not a body, a pattern not a form. [...] Then the alien exists for the length of time the journey endures, the process of realising a journey. Not arriving to meet the alien at the end, but enacting the alien for the duration. The alien could never be as simple as an end.
A third good passage
The mystery of the ship applied equally to ourselves, and always had done. Our immersion in the past, our existence, wherever we might technically be, in times and places remote from the present. So many times I had identified errors – in my work and in my relationships – stemming from the original mistake of too many assumptions, of predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there. I noticed this more as l got older. Age was, among so many other things, the realisation that you couldn’t correct this, that the pursuit wasn’t meaningful, there was no perfect clean reality on the other side. You’re flawed, and the world you see corresponds to these flaws. Weaknesses define you, drive new and original strategies to cover them, and they make you who you are. You don’t exist without them. Correcting the errors – seeing perfectly and objectively – is neither desirable nor possible.