I’m fascinated by the sciences, and I love mysteries. I’m too lazy, unfocused, and poor at math, ever to have been a scientist, and I’ve never been tempted to try a career as a detective. Instead, I’ve spent my life pursuing fairytales, thrillers, ghost stories, and even horror and romance — as long as there are mysteries involved. By now I see the patterns and rhythms, and set-pieces that appear again, and again, and I can point them out to you (as long as you don’t mind knowing how the story’s been made). But I never get tired of the endless variations on this theme of finding things out.
I wrote...
Proof of Concept
By
Gwyneth Jones
What is my book about?
On a desperately overcrowded future Earth, crippled by climate change,
the most unlikely hope is better than none. Governments turn to Big
Science to provide them with the dreams that will keep the masses
compliant. The Needle is one such dream, an installation where the most
abstruse theoretical science is being tested: science that might make
human travel to a habitable exoplanet distantly feasible.
When
the Needle’s director offers her underground compound as a training
base, Kir is thrilled to be invited to join the team, even though she
knows it’s only because her brain is host to a quantum artificial
intelligence called Altair. But Altair knows something he can’t tell. Kir,
like all humans, is programmed to ignore future dangers. Between the
artificial blocks in his mind, and the blocks evolution has built into
his host, how is he going to convince her the sky is falling?
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The Books I Picked & Why
The Gods Themselves
By
Issac Asimov
Why this book?
Issac Asimov’s “comeback” novel is to my mind streets ahead of anything else he ever wrote. It’s about saving the world (of course), by setting up a heat-(energy)-pump exchange with a parallel universe. Structurally complex enough to keep you guessing; set in the back-stabbing world of (all male) earthling scientists. Light on clunky explanations of the device, and featuring a splendidly weird, triple-sexed-aliens strand that steals the show. My takeaway (on first reading this, long ago) was Ah! So that’s how it’s done!
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The Clewiston Test
By
Kate Wilhelm
Why this book?
Brilliant young scientist develops a miraculous new pain-killer. A goldmine for the pharmaceutical company! But is the serum really safe? Ann Clewiston Symonds, the scientist at the heart of this story, comes up against Big Pharma’s disdain for ethical issues, and then a car crash dumps her on the customer’s side of the counter. What follows is riveting, chilling, and still horribly relevant today. Kate Wilhelm was extremely good at telling the hard truths about sci-fi material, that sci-fi usually avoids, and this is her best.
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Timescape
By
Gregory Benford
Why this book?
In a dreadful near-future, two scientists hit on the wild idea of sending a warning to the past, using (currently still hypothetical!) faster than light tachyon particles. In the near past two young scientists pick up the strange signals, as interference in an experiment, and realise they can be read as Morse Code. But the message is misunderstood, mangled, and almost lost in the same confusion and infighting that plagues Asimov’s earthling scientists. On the ‘Gods Themselves’ spectrum, but darker and deeper (though leavened by plenty of sex!).
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A Door Into Ocean
By
Joan Slonczewski
Why this book?
Microbiologist professor Joan Slonczewski loved Dune (as do I), so she decided to create a living world with no dry land (which would work) instead of a living world without free water (which, sadly, wouldn’t...). Shora, colonised by an all-female human society, and maintained in continual creation (but untamed) by Shoran microbiologists, is dangerous, beautiful—and threatened by the Evil Empire of Profit. Gripping, harrowing take on how to win a war, save the world, and utterly renounce violence all at the same time.
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Frankenstein
By
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Why this book?
Right from its mysterious opening in the Arctic wastes, this deathless story of the impossible (but never the fantastical) is built on a huge scale. The bravura, horrifying detail of Victor Frankenstein’s studies. His bizarre triumph of reconstruction and resuscitation (no electrical apparatus mentioned). The murders. The proto-detective mystery. The love-hate that locks Victor and the Creature (please don’t call him Monster, unless you call Victor a monster too) together... I could go on, and on, but I’ve run out of space.
