In Ascension
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In Ascension
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Narrated by:
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Freya Miller
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By:
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Martin MacInnes
About this listen
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as a refuge from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the marine world of her childhood, she excels in postgraduate research on ancient algae. When an unfathomable vent appears in the mid-Atlantic floor, Leigh joins the investigating team; what she finds there will change her life forever.
Around the same time, a trio of engineers, unknown to each other, make a seismic breakthrough in rocket propulsion, announcing an almost limitless era of space exploration. Billions of dollars is poured into projects, and Leigh's classified research on the ocean vent sees her recruited to develop an experimental food source for off-world travel. From her base in the Mojave desert, she's drawn further into the space agency's work, where she learns of a series of anomalies suggesting a beacon sent from the far side of the solar system. In responding to this beacon, Leigh embarks on a journey that will take her across the breadth of the cosmos and the fullness of a single human life.
©2023 Martin MacInnes (P)2023 W.F. Howes LtdWhat listeners say about In Ascension
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Charles H
- 20-12-2023
SF based on a pre-teen understanding of the world.
This book is set in what is clearly meant to be the real world and more or less in the present, and the author has a few speculative ideas involving time travel, the origin of life on earth and alien intervention. The story follows the career of a biologist who is employed to work on biological life support systems and is then chosen as a crew member on a journey to the edge of the solar system.
This might have formed the basis of a really interesting SF novel, but although the language is of a good university graduate standard, none of the ideas are followed through to any conclusion, nor is there any attempt to weave them together into a coherent story-line. However, what killed this book for me was the author's incredible ignorance of any of the technical aspects of his subject matter other than knowing a few catch-words and phrases.
This ignorance is more profound than can be explained by him perhaps being too lazy to do any reading around his topics, and I seriously suspect that a lot of the writing may be the work of a chatbot. Even that fails to explain how a biological life-support system only needs to generate oxygen and food, without having to remove CO2 from the air, nor why the purpose of a "scrubber" on a space vehicle is thought to be to maintain oxygen levels. In fact I don't believe that the phrase "carbon dioxide" appears in the book at all, which must have been the result of a specific directive to the presumed chatbot.
Those mere technical details might have been overlooked if anything else in the ... story ?...series of fragments of story?... had rung true, but people and institutions just don't behave as portrayed. So ;
The principal protagonist's abusive father couldn't pass an exam, but was nonetheless appointed as a senior engineer controlling Netherlands flood defenses;
The scientific team investigating a mysterious bottomless trench that had opened in the Atlantic seabed were scared to venture into the surface water several kilometers above the anomaly, so the expedition leader called for volunteers without necessarily any experience or training in the equipment, took them out in an inflatable into the kilometers-deep ocean (no anchors here!) and they all went in, with no predetermined plan, no instructions to stay either in a group or in buddy pairs, so each member of the group went alone over the side, leaving no-one behind to watch for them or offer assistance - or stop the inflatable from drifting away over the horizon!
Our biologist heroine is picked for the crew of the space mission...ok, but her mental abnormalities, strongly suggestive of a pre-psychotic condition (flight of ideas, knight's move etc) - and her complaints of burning discomfort over her entire skin - are never picked up by the NASA team of doctors and psychologists: presumably they were on holiday that year!
Later, it transpires that the new, experimental drive that can propel the rocket to a significant fraction of light speed, has never been tested in an unmanned vehicle, and billions of dollars have been invested in developing it even though neither engineers nor scientists have can find any reason why it would work - the design was apparently sent in a dream to engineers in different countries, and that was enough for the planet's dwindling resources to be funneled into the project.
There is only one short section where the writing rings true, and that is our heroine's farewell to her sister. That seems to have been written by a human.
The reader did a reasonable job, although unfamiliar with some of the words, but there was a tendency to monotonous repetition of the cadence of her speech which eventually became irritating. I suspect she may have become as bored as I was.
At the first try, I only got up to the 5th section of this book and missed what I supposed would have been the amazing, explanatory denouement, which must have been what got the author the Booker Prize, so eventually I went back and listened to the rest. There was no such startling revelation - it just got progressively sillier, despite the language suggesting that some deep truth was emerging.
How on earth did this book win a prize?
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- JB
- 28-07-2024
Slow & Boring
I got this off the back of the recent award win. Very disappointing.
14 chapters in & can be summarised like this: lady with rough childhood goes to sea...
Something about this narrator's voice makes it hard for me to follow the story.
A lot of flowery description & very little action.
May get better, but I'm moving on.
Author could consider getting new voice talent.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Dr
- 06-08-2023
Realistic near future dystopia sci-fi
A thought-provoking and wonderfully written novel with recurring motifs that expand to engulf you by the final chapter. A bit introspective at times, but exploring and building on themes which come together in the last quarter of the book.
The narrator's voice is spot on for the protagonist, but her lack of convincing ascents for supporting characters is the only dull spot in an otherwise stellar read.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Phil Endley
- 16-08-2023
Patience is rewarded
Very interesting story that steadily grows in scope through its telling; at the end I found I wanted more answers and yet it’s good sometimes to be tantalised.
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