I have just finished Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension, one of the best sci-fi novels I’ve read for ages. It is narrated by Leigh, a marine biologist who joins a team exploring a 36-kilometre-deep trench in the Atlantic Ocean. Around the same time, NASA engineers make a breakthrough in propulsion tech that will transform space travel, and Leigh is hired by a secretive space agency.
I’m not sure I’ve read a book about space exploration that also felt so grounded in the human world, or one about the origins of life on Earth that also looked so far into the future. My mother, who I’ve already …
