In Ascension

Leigh

Leigh has always been drawn to what is furthest from the surface. As a child, she was fascinated by the deep sea — not the glamorous visible ocean of beaches and boats but the dark zones where sunlight does not reach, where life exists in forms that challenge most definitions of what life is. As an adult, she has made this fascination her profession: she is a marine biologist who works on the deep-sea thermal vents that release chemically rich water from beneath the ocean floor and support ecosystems that have no need of sunlight.

In Ascension is her novel, and Martin MacInnes has created in her one of the most fully realised scientific protagonists in recent literary fiction. Leigh thinks like a scientist — precisely, with a specific relationship to evidence and uncertainty that distinguishes her from both the romantic and the functional modes in which scientists are usually rendered in fiction. She also feels like a person: carrying a specific childhood, a specific set of relationships, a specific relationship to her family and to the particular part of the Netherlands where she grew up.

The Discovery

Working at a site in the Atlantic, Leigh’s team discovers something in the hydrothermal vent system that does not fit the existing models. The discovery’s nature is withheld in the novel’s first section — communicated through its effects on the people who encounter it rather than through direct description. Something is there. Something with properties that require new frameworks to understand.

This discovery is the pivot point of the novel: it transitions Leigh from her specific research context into something much larger — a scientific and eventually governmental apparatus concerned with what the discovery means for our understanding of life’s origins, and with the possibility that what is happening in the Atlantic Ocean is connected to something that is simultaneously happening in deep space.

The transition from deep-sea biology to space mission planning is the novel’s most dramatic structural move, and MacInnes prepares it with care. The connection between the thermal vents as a site of life’s possible origin on Earth and the search for life elsewhere in the solar system is scientifically grounded — this is genuinely where astrobiology research points — and the novel earns its scope by building from accurate science rather than from narrative convenience.

The Ocean and Space

What connects the deep ocean and space in the novel is not merely the narrative thread of Leigh’s trajectory but something more essential: both are places where human scale and human experience become irrelevant to the processes occurring. The deep sea thermal vents have been running for billions of years; the microbial ecosystems around them are as close to the origin of life as the Earth currently offers. Space is what existed before life, and will exist after. Both environments reduce the human to an observer of processes so vast and so old that the observing self is negligible by comparison.

MacInnes is interested in what this experience of scale does to a person — and specifically to a scientist, for whom encounters with the incomprehensibly large are mediated by training and methodology rather than directly felt. The novel’s most powerful passages are those in which Leigh’s professional apparatus fails to contain what she is experiencing — in which the sublime breaks through the methodological frame.

The Literary Science Fiction Tradition

In Ascension belongs to a specific tradition: literary science fiction that maintains rigorous scientific accuracy while using speculative scenarios to explore genuinely literary concerns. The tradition includes Ursula Le Guin’s social science fiction, Jeff VanderMeer’s ecological horror, Kim Stanley Robinson’s planetary science. MacInnes is working in this tradition with considerable confidence.

What distinguishes his work from genre science fiction is the intensity of the focus on the protagonist’s interiority. The novel is concerned with what the experiences in it do to Leigh as a person — how the encounter with deep-time life changes her relationship to her own temporality, how the selection for the space mission restructures her understanding of what she is and what she is for. These are novelistic concerns given speculative occasion.

The Question of Ascension

The title is deliberately ambiguous. “Ascension” in the religious sense means the rising of a human being into a divine presence. In the biological sense it could refer to the evolutionary trajectory that produced Leigh and her consciousness. In the spatial sense it means movement away from Earth’s surface toward something beyond. The novel’s Leigh enacts all three in a narrative that refuses to prioritise any single interpretation.

What MacInnes is asking, through Leigh’s journey, is a question about the relationship between human consciousness and the vastness in which it finds itself: whether the impulse toward transcendence — toward something beyond the ordinary scale of human life — is a feature of being alive, built into the biology of mind, or whether it is a response to the specific discoveries that Leigh has made at the bottom of the ocean and at the edges of the solar system.

The answer is not given. This is correct. The question is the achievement.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — The most ambitious British literary novel of 2023. Scientific rigour and genuine emotional depth, together.