{"id":216911,"date":"2024-03-25T21:07:56","date_gmt":"2024-03-25T21:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/25\/in-ascension-author-martin-macinnes-science-fiction-can-be-many-different-things\/"},"modified":"2025-06-25T17:19:56","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T17:19:56","slug":"in-ascension-author-martin-macinnes-science-fiction-can-be-many-different-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/25\/in-ascension-author-martin-macinnes-science-fiction-can-be-many-different-things\/","title":{"rendered":"In Ascension author Martin Macinnes: ‘Science fiction can be many different things’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Martin MacInnes, author of In Ascension<\/p>\n

Gary Doak<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Martin MacInnes is the author of the latest read for the New Scientist Book Club: In Ascension<\/em>, the story of a marine biologist, Leigh, from her childhood to her adventures among the stars. He sat down with our culture editor Alison Flood to answer some of her questions about his novel. But be warned \u2013 as this is a book club discussion, there will be some spoilers about the plot ahead, so do read the novel first before diving into this interview.<\/p>\n

Alison Flood: Martin, welcome to the <\/strong>New Scientist Book Club<\/strong><\/a>! How would you describe what\u2019s going on in your novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Martin MacInnes: I\u2019ll give a slight caveat in that, as a former bookseller, I\u2019m quite sceptical of the ability of a quick synopsis to do justice to a book, but I\u2019ll do my best. It\u2019s about the story of one life and of life itself, from a young Dutch marine biologist to 4 billion years of evolution<\/a>, from difficult childhoods and complex family dynamics to voyages to the seabed and far beneath, and to the edge of the solar system. It\u2019s a novel of connections, and loneliness.<\/p>\n

Lots going on there then! So, we are the New Scientist Book Club, and so far the books that we\u2019ve read have all been <\/strong>science fiction<\/strong><\/a>. Are you happy to describe this as a sci-fi novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Yes, I am. I know that\u2019s a difficult question for some people and maybe some readers would take issue with its science fiction status. But I love reading science fiction and I don\u2019t have any problems saying this is science fiction. It has a spaceship in it! But just because it\u2019s science fiction, it doesn\u2019t limit it in any way. Science fiction can be many different things.<\/p>\n

How about a climate change novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe, sort of surprisingly, I\u2019m kind of less happy with that, because I\u2019m really against the ghettoising of fiction into climate change fiction, as if that\u2019s something we can section off and say \u201chere are the books that aren\u2019t ignoring ecocide and the devastation of the planet\u201d. Everything being published just now, regardless of what it thinks it\u2019s doing, kind of is climate fiction, because that\u2019s the world we\u2019re living through. It\u2019s less dramatically climate fiction than something like Kim Stanley Robinson<\/a>\u2018s The Ministry for the Future<\/em>, but it is a novel about ecology and about what humans have in common with the natural world. So yeah, in those senses, it kind of is a climate novel, but I kind of resist that.<\/p>\n

Yes, I see \u2013 so we don\u2019t need to separate it out into its own little enclave. Where did it start from, the idea to tell this story?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are two ways of answering that one. The first would be that I visited a really special place, Ascension Island, in 2008 and as soon as I arrived there, I thought: \u201cI\u2019m going to write about this place.\u201d It always stuck with me.<\/p>\n

Then, my second novel was very difficult to write. I felt a huge sense of relief after publishing it, and I wanted to do something big, both in length and in scope, next. This was just before the advent of covid. And I thought \u201cOK, I want to do something about a journey, I want it to be a first-person narrative, I want it to be epic\u201d. I was thinking about circular journeys. I was thinking about Atlantic green turtles, and the impulse to return to where one was born. I was thinking about that in humans, our psychological preoccupations with our past, with childhood especially, and from that fractal patterns repeating through the animal kingdom. Then suddenly the world changed for everyone. I was living in alone in an isolated village without wi-fi, and my story grew more epic.<\/p>\n

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A green sea turtle on Ascension Island<\/p>\n

Alamy Stock Photo<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

How about Leigh \u2013 why tell the story through her eyes?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is probably unusual for a writer, but character and voice come very late on for me. So I knew it was going to be someone around Leigh\u2019s age, and I knew she would be from the Netherlands for a couple of reasons: the risk of inundation in the Netherlands is as great as anywhere in the world because of the lowness of the territory, so it was the Netherlands as a sort of advanced example of what will increasingly happen throughout coastal regions across the world. So that\u2019s why she was Dutch. And I don\u2019t want to say too much about this aspect of it, but Leigh does have a historical precedent. Aspects of her biography are based on a very little known, early 19th-century Dutch East India Company employee, someone I found out about when I was researching Ascension Island, who lived through a period of extraordinary loneliness. So that was a starting point.<\/p>\n

One of the things I was looking at was, why does she need the natural world so much, what happened during her childhood, and from that the aspects of her character and her family circumstances arose.<\/p>\n

A few of our members have found some of the early bits of the novel hard to read, about the trauma that she goes through in her childhood. I didn\u2019t, personally, and in fact I knew I was going to love the book from the very moment that you have her <\/strong>go into a river and experience a sort of epiphany<\/strong><\/a> with nature. Can you talk us through that bit?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a really important scene. She\u2019s 9 or 10, and she\u2019s feeling particularly hopeless and she goes for a swim, feeling a dread and a hopelessness about her life. She enters the water and opens her eyes to what\u2019s around her and she sees that everything around her is alive. She\u2019s a part of it. She\u2019s not separated from it and she sees that the river is not a medium to pass through, it\u2019s an assemblage of life itself, and that activates her sense of wonder. It\u2019s almost comparable to what many astronauts report when they go into space and they look down on Earth, which I think is referred to as the overview effect, when you have this sense of wonder and egolessness.<\/p>\n

At that moment, she finds something that she knows she can cling to, that will keep her alive, will possibly allow her to find some sort of satisfaction, meaning or even happiness in her life. So everything that happens in the novel is sort of made possible in that moment. In fact, I would say she experiences a greater sense of wonder in that moment than when she reaches space and looks back on Earth as well.<\/p>\n

For me, that idea of the sense of wonder was really at the heart of the book \u2013 particularly the moment when Leigh learns about the asteroid that isn\u2019t an asteroid, and where it might have come from. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a scientist by any stretch, but I have a similar need for wonder to Leigh. That has enriched my life in all sorts of ways, and it\u2019s really one of the reasons I turn to writing, to evoke that sense for myself. I know that probably seems hopelessly earnest, but it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n

Did you ever feel slightly daunted by what you were setting out to do \u2013 moving from the wilds of space to a deep trench in the Atlantic Ocean?
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Absolutely, I\u2019ve never done anything like this before, and especially at the start, I almost gave up so many times. One of the things that helped was I wasn\u2019t writing to contract, I was just writing for myself. Another thing that helped was being able to go on long walks every day. I had a very strict routine. I was living in a flat on my own, but with thin walls surrounded by loud flats. So I worked from about 4 to 6:30am every day, when the building was silent because everyone else was asleep. Later, I would go for a long walk towards some standing stones about 3 miles away and think about what I\u2019d written, and it really helped me picture the scope of what I was doing. I tried to make the material more manageable by breaking it down as well, into parts, sub-parts, with quite clear distinctions, almost like separate books themselves, before integrating them all again.<\/p>\n

Do you think writing it during the covid-19 pandemic affected your writing \u2013 the claustrophobia of the crisis compared with Leigh, who is claustrophobic in her spaceship or diving? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Definitely. And I think I was also drawn to writing about the biggest possible journeys because I couldn\u2019t leave my own flat. I was reading a lot about mountaineering, and the idea of expansion and voyages and mystery and pushing on that was thrilling to me and was something that was sort of self-sustaining for me during this period, like, there will be other journeys to go on.<\/p>\n

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Martin MacInnes: \u201cI was drawn to writing about the biggest possible journeys\u201d<\/p>\n

Shutterstock \/ Romolo Tavani<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

You write about all sorts of areas of science here, from marine biology to the emergence of life to space travel. Tell us a bit about your research for the book.<\/strong><\/p>\n

These are all things I\u2019m interested in and have been for a long time. I feel especially sheepish talking about this to New Scientist<\/em> because I\u2019m a novelist, I\u2019m not claiming to have any kind of scientific authority, I\u2019m just an amateur and an enthusiast doing all of this with love. I think some of these perspectives, like cell biology, can have a place in fiction and so I\u2019m just trying to experiment with that. So I did read a lot, but I was also careful not to cleave too closely to research, as I think that can have a deadening effect. My aim with research was to get to a stage where I felt I knew stuff well enough that I could also invent, and that invention would appear strong. So yeah, the science is really important, but it\u2019s not a research book.<\/p>\n

There was originally a lot more in the part\u00a0where Leigh is talking about the emergence of eukaryote cells \u2013 that conversation went on for many more pages, and my editor was like, \u201cpeople are dropping the book right now Martin, you know you really can\u2019t do that\u201d. So it\u2019s become much more concise.<\/p>\n

When the book first came out, a letter was sent to reviewers talking about how you believed that \u201cclimate disaster has been and continues to be enabled primarily through our refusal to accept human integration in the natural world\u201d. Can you tell us a bit about what you meant by that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think sending that letter out was a mistake, actually, because I\u2019m not particularly articulate as a polemicist. Fiction is where I do my thinking. But I want to talk about this particular topic and I\u2019m trying to talk about it in every interview I do, in every event I do. I\u2019m not sure the phrase I used was the best \u2013 \u201chuman integration\u201d, I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s fluent enough.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m really talking about is a total lack of separation between us and everything else. That\u2019s how I see the world. That\u2019s how my fiction presents the world. But a lot of the time, when I\u2019m reading English-language contemporary fiction, I get the sense that there\u2019s a glass wall around the characters sealing them off from everything else, with all non-human life existing on the other side of that wall. So characters occupy a sort of zone of privilege inside, one of safety, and it\u2019s almost like it doesn\u2019t really matter what else happens out there, because we\u2019re the main actors in the world. The world was prepared for us and has no meaning beyond our drama, ignoring the 4.5 billion years that preceded our species. I think fiction should challenge this consensus view \u2013 it\u2019s wrongheaded and it\u2019s dangerous.<\/p>\n

With those tacit assumptions, it\u2019s easier to continue the habitual behaviours that\u00a0enable ecocide. Perhaps if we keep chipping away at some of these assumptions, we might take away some of the barriers to changes in behaviour. And I\u2019m not in any way trying to diminish humans at all \u2013 for me, it just makes our existence all the more remarkable and interesting that we are merely animal life and that we are intimately connected with not just animal life, but viral life and bacterial life, all of this recombinant matter swirling around for billions of years. And that our species can be lost just as easily as any other species.<\/p>\n

At one point, Leigh says that life is already alien, is already rich and strange. We don\u2019t need to say it arrived seeded on a meteor to make more so. I guess that\u2019s the same thing right? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes \u2013 and that\u2019s why I\u2019m writing science fiction even if I don\u2019t take my characters into space, because that\u2019s the lens to me. It is so incomprehensibly strange that we exist.<\/p>\n

Why did you decide to have a section towards the end of the book, set in the future and told from the perspective of Helena, Leigh\u2019s sister?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I always knew I was going to switch things at the end. I always knew the narrative was going to return to Earth and I was going to switch narrator. Obviously, that is a very risky thing to do, 400 pages into a 500-page novel, but on an instinctive level I knew had to do this, I had to shift it. When I was writing the space parts, knowing I was going to go back to Earth from a different perspective, that made it so much more interesting for me writing the bits in space. I was thinking, \u201cOK, this is going to be placed next to a very different voice and world.\u201d That gave a different energy to what I was writing, so it influenced what went before it. And I wanted to just challenge the idea of Leigh\u2019s perspective being our only access to reality \u2013 that there might be a slightly different way of looking at her childhood.<\/p>\n

And how about your extraordinary finale, \u201cOceana\u201d, when you have your astronauts returning to a much-earlier Earth, and to a new beginning? Was that always the plan, when you were writing \u2013 and how has it been received by readers? It certainly shocked me!<\/strong><\/p>\n

It definitely wasn\u2019t always the plan, but a return to beginnings came to feel more inevitable as the writing process went on. It still wasn\u2019t there in the first completed draft of the novel. In that original draft, the \u201cAscension\u201d part was considerably longer and contained several possible \u201cendings\u201d, including one similar to what became \u201cOceana\u201d. So the seed was there. But the decision to commit to something less ambiguous came through conversations with my editor.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s obviously a really grandiose, melodramatic ending, and I was a little uncomfortable with that at first because I\u2019ve never done anything like it before. Ultimately, I think it works as a scaled-up version of a theme that\u2019s there more intimately throughout the novel: we are connected to everything around us. This is never clearer than in the moment of death, which is not an ending, but a transformation. And I think it\u2019s possible to see something beautiful and optimistic in this.<\/p>\n

As for how it\u2019s been received by readers, this is something I\u2019ve deliberately stepped back from. Readers can interpret it in their own way, and I don\u2019t want to get in the way of that. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s healthy for writers to examine reviews and reader responses \u2013 you can\u2019t please everyone, and you shouldn\u2019t try to.<\/p>\n

Martin, is there anything else you\u2019d want to say to our readers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

First of all, I would say like thank you for reading, that\u2019s a real honour for me. And hopefully I\u2019ve given the sense in this interview that I don\u2019t see this as being a dystopian novel or a doom-filled one. Writing it was celebratory for me, and it occasionally had moments with a sense of the ecstatic, and I hope that comes across. That\u2019s really important to me, that one should ideally leave the novel with a sense of possibility and looking around slightly differently, even on a moment of hope.<\/p>\n

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