By Kavan Stafford

---

In Ascension leads me to wonder how close we come to the alien (in the literal sense of the word) in our own lives, as well as how much separation there can ever be between humanity and the strange flora and fauna which surrounds us.

You don’t see a huge amount of science fiction turning-up on literary fiction prize lists and, when you do, it tends to be written by well-established authors like Kazuo Ishiguro (Klara and the Sun was on the Booker Prize list in 2021) or Margaret Atwood (The Testaments actually won the prize in 2019).

This year, however, both the Booker Prize longlist and the Saltire Society’s National Book Awards Scottish Fiction Book of the Year list featured a remarkable science fiction novel in the form of In Ascension (2023) by Martin MacInnes. It is a fine addition, given that it is one of the most intelligent and interesting Scottish novels of the last year.

MacInnes is no stranger to awards. Infinite Ground (2016), his debut, earned him the Somerset Maugham award, and Gathering Evidence (2020) led to his being included in the British Council of Literature’s list of ten writers shaping the future of the UK. It is fitting that he followed this accolade with In Ascension, a book about what the human race is now, and what it may be in the future.

Though he lives and writes in Edinburgh, the roots of this book lie in Rotterdam, the childhood home of Dr Leigh Hasenboch. Leigh is a marine biologist who is investigating a strange vent in the middle of the Caribbean, which appears to be deeper than any other trench in the world, with the potential for strange life in its depths. This investigation eventually leads from the deepest part of the Earth to the far reaches of the solar system as Leigh joins an investigative mission into space. 

MacInnes’s apparently irresistible inclination towards asking the huge and unanswerable questions in his fiction (which was so evident in his previous novels) returns and the reader is asked to consider where human life comes from and, crucially, how (or if?) it differs from the rest of nature.

The last question is key; MacInnes resists the idea that human beings are somehow above, or inured from, nature itself. Leigh’s, and by extension humanity’s, proximity to nature is emphasised in the very first line of the novel when Leigh says she was born “22 feet beneath the sea” and the novel, right up to its rather disturbing final part, insists that human beings are part of nature and irresistibly intertwined with it.

Leigh was born in Rotterdam, a city whose prosperity is only made possible by the careful separation of land and sea, of humanity and nature, by a series of dams (which Leigh’s father maintains). If one collapses, the people of the city will no longer be safe from the nature they hold back.

The separation of nature from humanity is framed as an endless battle; Leigh’s father is constantly watchful of the encroaching natural world, “paying careful attention to the tides” and telling a young Leigh playing on the beach not to dig too deep lest even her childish play weaken the defences he maintains.

Even as the third section of the novel brings Leigh to the far reaches of our solar system, MacInnes uses his characters’ very distance from Earth and nature to emphasise their dependency on it. So far away, Leigh begins to find Earth and nature “inexpressibly exotic”, begging the people transmitting from Earth to describe every aspect of the world around them.

Then, as Leigh and the other astronauts on the ship move out of view of the planet, their dependency becomes clear. They all experience “high temperature, fatigue and intermittent vomiting [… and] overwhelming depression”. To MacInnes, humanity and nature are one and the same. To separate them, either through the dams of Rotterdam or through blasting off into outer space, is foolhardy and, ultimately, pointless.

In Ascension is a long book – my edition runs to almost 400 pages – and it can’t be denied that it slows down in places. However, this is not to say the book ever feels like a slog. Rather, it slows so that the reader can enjoy the beauty of what is being described. One doesn’t like to rush through a gorgeous park on a summer’s day. Nor would one like to rush through In Ascension.MacInnes has written a book resistant to the current fashion for bitesize literature which can be described simply and quickly in a quirky Tik-Tok video. This is a brave decision but one which pays off.

In Ascension is one of those novels, so unusual right now, which continues to occupy the thoughts after reading and, certainly, will reward rereading. Although it did not make the Booker shortlist, the fact that it has since been awarded the Scottish National Book Award, Fiction Book of the Year may be some consolation, and MacInnes remains one to watch.

---

About our contributor

---