In Ascension
In Ascension is beautiful, fascinating, frustrating literary science-fiction. Our narrator, Leigh, describes growing up in Rotterdam with an abusive father and distant mother. Rotterdam and the Netherlands are an immense artifice, land torn from the bosom of the sea and kept dry only by immense human effort. She becomes fascinated by water and aquatic microbiology, an obsession which takes her through a PhD program.
Several ruptures occur in succession. Leigh’s father dies. She joins an expedition to a mysterious rift in the Atlantic Ocean, where what was ordinary seafloor appears to have fallen away into a void deeper than the Mariana Trench. Leigh experiences a rapturous hallucinatory fever after a dive above the rift. The expedition’s experimental submersible is destroyed, sending back scanty data, and a handful of samples of archaea prokaryotes.
The expedition is associated with a shadowy multinational space agency called ICORS, founded to exploit a novel and unexplained new space drive technology. Leigh’s research into agricultural algae is of interest to ICORS, and she leaves her mother, who is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s, to join the project at China Lake Naval Air Station. Leigh befriends the program administrator, an older woman named Uria, and forms a surrogate mother-daughter bond. The program opens doors: The plan is to make an expedition to an immense alien object called Datura, which is connected to the rift and the drive in unexplained ways. Leigh trains as an astronaut and becomes part of a crew with Tyler and Karius, two more conventional Right Stuff types.
Her crew is the backup of a backup, but after a terrorist attack disables the primary crew, she is sent out into space. Datura has vanished somewhere in the Oort cloud and a mysterious message was sent from the derelict Voyager probe. The journey is one of psychological estrangement, sealed in an automated ship drawing further and further away from Earth. Lightspeed lag makes the idea of relevant information from Earth a joke. Each step into the void seems to create psychological and physical lapses, as if Earth exerts a mysterious pull on its descendants (I’m reminded of a moment in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where Ford Prefect hits a human with the telepathic distance from his birthplace. Every creature can do this, but since no human has been further away than the far side of the moon, no one has ever noticed it). Crossing the heliopause the ship is disabled by an unknown and unexplained force. The constellations show that time has moved, backwards by 2 billion years. Leigh and the crew expect to die in space, their bodies drifting into the void for eternity.
The final section shifts to Leigh’s sister Helena, as she tries to uncover what happened to her sister. ICORS has locked everything about the mission behind a veil of corporate secrecy and then bankruptcy. Helena’s quest carries her to the South Atlantic island of Ascension, where the mission was supposed to be quarantined, and the hallucinatory strangeness of this cinder in the ocean. And then in the epilogue, we see that it was all connected, all looped. Leigh and her comrades are re-entering to a primordial Earth, the algae in their bodies bringing life to the planet in a great circle.
I’ll admit, I don’t know how to feel about this novel. The conventional parts are gorgeous, the psychological portrait of a very strange family and how it expresses love. There are elements of fiction about scientists, about the mindset it takes to uncover and prove a novel truth. There are ultimate questions about where life comes from, where it ends, what else is out there in the universe. But just when this novel should touch down, the bottom falls away in a void of darkness and sparkles of light. A braver novel would conclude with something solid about humanity and existence, where In Ascension chooses water.