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Most science fiction pursues encounters with something alternative, something unknown—contact with aliens, planetary discoveries, the potentially grim consequences of innovation and ambition. But in Martin MacInnes’s hands, this pursuit becomes subordinate to a quiet, winding reapprehension of all that is familiar and known.
In Ascension follows Leigh, a microbiologist who obsessively interprets her difficult childhood with an abusive father, an absent mother and a younger sister. Driven by a need to transcend her past, she turns to nature for the possibilities it offers for even the elemental to mutate. Every time a mission suggests a revision of how we understand life, Leigh is on board: into a vent deeper than the Mariana Trench, or on a spaceship travelling into the Oort Cloud.
All the while, she revisits her life, in either rumination or tense family reunions. The ambition of MacInnes’s project rests here. In threading together the personal and the otherworldly, a strange effect is produced: just as every excursion into nature and space is an expansion of the planet, so all contact with her own existence becomes Leigh’s attempt to expand and change life as it is happening to her.
The novel does not always succeed in bearing the magnitude of this project. Leigh has one major impulse that can be summarised easily—turning events into instances of self-interpretation—yet too much time is spent exploring this. The five-part structure doesn’t do much to support our understanding of the themes or characters, which can make it difficult to maintain good faith in MacInnes’s vision.
But sometimes In Ascension achieves its lofty aims and reveals something precious—such as when, while floating past the last planets in the solar system, the crewmates watch a plant blooming. Loving a “simple thing in the world, a green plant growing,” in the midst of everything.
