hardback, 496 pages
Atlantic Books, 2023
In his opening note to the reader, Martin McInnes writes. “I thought of In Ascension as a case for full human integration in the natural world… an attack against the assumption that humans are somehow outside the (earth) system… an attempt to show humanity differently and more vulnerably…” (For the last words of the quote, see below.) The front cover reprints an excerpt from the heroine’s description of what she feels when swimming, “I imagined a life of this, in close contact, as I saw it, with the stuff of the world”.
Certainly the novel is characterised throughout by close attention to detail, in the various locations on Earth visited by the heroine, Leigh, and later her sister Helena. Her childhood in Rotterdam is described at unusual length, for a science fiction novel, and makes clear why and how she is drawn to a career in marine biology. That sends her, as a junior researcher, on an expedition to check on a new undersea vent which has opened on the spine of the Atlantic floor. From the outset it seems to be extremely odd. In particular it’s very large, and thermally very active, sufficiently so to produce noticeable effects at the ocean surface – yet it’s never been detected before. Initial readings suggest that it’s 12 kilometres deep, ‘as deep as any vent in the world’ – and incidentally, although not stated, as deep as any known depression in Solar System, equal to the huge Aitken Basin on the Farside of the Moon, which is so big that it wasn’t recognised until it was photographed by the Galileo spacecraft at a distance of over 4 million miles. Yet this one has suddenly been found within a busy shipping lane, and the embargo placed on the area is a severe inconvenience to commerce and to seabed prospecting for minerals.
Even worse, the expedition’s probes register a new depth of 36 kilometres, ‘three times the depth of the Marianas Trench’. Again it’s not stated, but as I understand it, that would be in the range of temperatures and pressures where water becomes solid, in forms as weird as the ‘Ice-9’ of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. We’re now finding Earth-sized planets of other stars where the density is so low that they may be largely composed of water, with such conditions within them, and G. David Nordley has imagined life within such a world in his 2002 story ‘War, Egg, Ice, Universe’ (in his 2014 collection Among the Stars), and in Galaxias, 2021, Stephen Baxter imagines that if such life permeates the Galaxy, it might try to confine our kind of life to our own Solar Systems.
Chemical analysis doesn’t reveal anything harmful in the water, and yet the divers including Leigh immediately suffer drastic effects including hallucinations, while the robot sub has lost contact after registering a depth of 200 kilometres, far below the depth at which water can exist as we know it. The authorities order the ship to withdraw, and meanwhile, strange things are happening elsewhere. By extraordinary coincidence, or by some undetected outside influence, four research groups have simultaneously made breakthroughs in different parts of the world which together add up to the invention of an interstellar drive, or at least one which can reach past the heliopause, the boundary of the Solar Wind, into the region of the Kuiper Belt where the Voyager probes are now, in real life.
A new multinational space agency is created to explore its possibilities, and Leigh quickly finds herself seconded to the development of new strains of algae for life-support, using the samples she’s brought back from the Atlantic anomaly. There follows a lengthy period of training, in total secrecy, in which she’s ostensibly part of the backup crew, a control group for the development and testing of the life-support, but it’s obvious that she’s really destined for the mission. The target is Datura, an asteroid which has begun to accelerate as if leaving the Solar System (as Saturn’s moon Janus does in Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds, 2005). Attention is drawn to it by a surprise message from the long-defunct Voyager 1; Datura proves to be covered with carvings bearing some other kind of message, and then disappears. Voyager 1 is now apparently much further out than it should be, on the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, and obviously that’s where the space mission will have to go.
I hate to say it, given the praise for originality which Martin MacInnes has attracted, but this has been done before. In 1971-72 Jeff Hawke, the world’s longest-running SF comic strip, created and drawn for the Daily Express by Sydney Jordan from Dundee, ran a story called ‘Here be Tygers’, later reprinted in the first issues of Starburst in 1978. It began with the launch of the ‘Grand Tour’ TOPS probes, of which the Voyagers were a much scaled-down version. Decades later, a mission to Pluto is diverted because one of the TOPS probes unexpectedly turns back on to show images of a mysterious object on the edge of the Solar System. It’s covered with carvings in different languages – mostly nonhuman, but one of them is in an ancient Peruvian script, and when eventually recognised and translated, it warns that the object is one of a ring of markers, beyond which lurks a dangerous and savage race. But the warning turns out to be intended for incoming ships – the savages are us. In this novel, as the spaceship Nereus approaches the heliopause, one of the crew speculates that maybe humans aren’t intended to go beyond it – and sure enough, when they do, onboard power fails immediately.
Such episodes have been common in SF since the BBC’s Journey into Space in 1953, at least. The algae in the life-support seem almost to have been waiting for it, and soon begin to mutate, taking over the ship and increasingly entering into symbiosis with the crew, as some algae due with much simpler animal forms on Earth’s beaches. They never catch up with Voyager 1, and never resume contact with the space agency. Eyewitnesses report that the return capsule has indeed made re-entry on schedule, but no splashdown is reported. There’s an eyewitness sighting of Leigh on the water, but she’s on wooden wreckage, which makes no sense, and she can’t afterwards be found.
Another of the crew is found back on Earth, leading a normal life and with no knowledge of a space mission. Conspiracy theorists suggest it never took place; the space agency dissolves and reinvents itself as a commercial company specialising in communications, particularly satellite applications, all unmanned. Leigh’s sister Helena and the daughter of Leigh’s boss launch private investigations and discover more anomalies, particularly that Mission Control, located at a former military facility, not only does not exist, but neither does the facility. Their search leads them to Ascension Island, where they find the building created for the rehabilitation and debriefing of the returning crew. It exists, but has never been used.
Finally, in an Epilogue, we find Leigh and her crew returning through a significantly different Solar System, closing with an Earth which is entirely water-covered, perhaps around 3.8 billion years ago, before the rising of the continents and the earliest traces of life. Around the midpoint of the book, there was discussion of how life evolved, and in particular how it achieved the giant evolutionary leap to the first algae. At the end of the book, Leigh’s companions die in the splashdown, and the algae break out of their bodies through the smashed faceplates. Leigh’s last act is to open the hatch and let in the sea.
So has Martin MacInnes achieved ‘a case for full human integration in the natural world’? In SF terms, yes, certainly. The idea of a time-travel loop leading to the origin of life is not entirely new, but it’s never been done in quite this way – see above remarks about the nature of the writing, which is high-quality throughout. But whether he has achieved his true aim, “… a philosophy that would then drive direct action”, I’m not nearly so sure. If I weren’t convinced that we do need to treat the biosphere with more respect, I doubt if In Ascension would convince me.