The author of In Ascension, the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club, on why he wrote his novel, cultivating a sense of wonder and the role of fiction in the world today
Martin MacInnes is the author of the latest read for the New Scientist Book Club:, 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 – 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.
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: “I’m going to write about this place.” It always stuck with me. 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’t, personally, and in fact I knew I was going to love the book from the very moment that you have herThat’s a really important scene. She’s 9 or 10, and she’s feeling particularly hopeless and she goes for a swim, feeling a dread and a hopelessness about her life.
I’m 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’s really one of the reasons I turn to writing, to evoke that sense for myself. I know that probably seems hopelessly earnest, but it’s true. Definitely. And I think I was also drawn to writing about the biggest possible journeys because I couldn’t 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.
When the book first came out, a letter was sent to reviewers talking about how you believed that “climate disaster has been and continues to be enabled primarily through our refusal to accept human integration in the natural world”. Can you tell us a bit about what you meant by that? At one point, Leigh says that life is already alien, is already rich and strange. We don’t need to say it arrived seeded on a meteor to make more so. I guess that’s the same thing right?
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