The Brooklyn Rail

In 2018, I moderated a panel on “environmental institutions” at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. In her opening remarks, Dr. Nicole Heller, an associate curator at the museum, described what she saw as the harmful and artificial boundary that people regularly draw between humans and nature. She saw an opportunity, she said, to challenge that boundary at the museum and tell the story of natural history on Earth as one that integrates humans into planetary, multi-species communities rather than setting them apart as observers or even masters of the planet. Then she went a step further, suggesting that we might even see human bodies as multi-species communities, since we’re filled with microbial life that enables essential functions like digestion. I don’t know why things clicked at that moment, but Dr. Heller’s comments helped me see human life as continuous with all life on Earth in a way I hadn’t before.

Leigh-Ann Hasenbosch, the scientist at the center of Martin MacInnes’s mind-altering new novel In Ascension, is no stranger to moments of recognition like mine. Growing up in Rotterdam, she frequently swims in a local river to escape her abusive father. During one of her swims, when she feels particularly hopeless about her home life, Leigh senses that she’s on the verge of giving herself to the river completely and escaping her home life forever. She plunges down into the water and hovers a few meters below the surface. She sees the worms, sponges, and lichen on the rocks. She notices riverweed floating nearby. And then: “I gazed at the scene, hanging horizontally, suspended beneath the surface, no further movement to cloud my vision, and as if from nowhere I realized, suddenly, with appreciation, that absolutely everything around me was alive. There was no gap separating my body from the living world.”

For Leigh, this moment serves as a catalyst for her life’s work, which she devotes to studying marine microbiology. In the novel’s first section, she joins a research expedition studying archaea—single-cell organisms commonly thought to be the origin of life on Earth—in a geothermal vent on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. On one of her dives, floating far above the vent, Leigh once again loses herself in “a wide, vast warmth, a wholly enveloping medium.” But this time her body responds strangely to the archaea, as if it’s being drawn back to its origins. For days after the dive, Leigh and the other divers are consumed with an “automatic and involuntary” urge to return to the water. When one of Leigh’s fellow divers submits to the urge, Leigh thinks that his “death, as much as his life, was an act of creation.”

This pattern of cyclical return informs MacInnes’s novel on all levels. Set in the near future, most of the five-hundred-page book details Leigh’s involvement in a space mission to the Oort Cloud (the most distant region of our solar system) made possible by a radical advance in propulsion technology. Brought on to develop a method for growing nutrient-rich algae that will feed the crew, Leigh creates “a perfectly circular system” that requires the crewmembers to cycle their bodily discharge back into the crops. When she ends up on the mission herself, Leigh enjoys discovering that the ship accelerates so quickly that its positioning readings are always obsolete, because it reminds her that our efforts to make sense of the world often say more about our efforts than they do about the world. Throughout the novel, Leigh wonders whether her life amounts to a struggle to flee her father’s abuse; or, whether all her attempts to explore the furthest reaches of life in the universe simply return her to the origins of her own.

In Ascension was published in the UK in 2023 (MacInnes is Scottish) and has received rave reviews since then. Notably, reviews have come from mainstream outlets like the Guardian and the Scotsman as well as online sites that review sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction. Some of these reviews try to claim the novel for one genre or another, but most celebrate it for blurring boundaries, comparing it favorably to other genre-crossing works like Carl Sagan’s Contact, Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” or Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. This has likely pleased MacInnes, who has campaigned for the importance of sci-fi and recently wrote an essay arguing that Virginia Woolf was a science fiction writer.

One of MacInnes’s reasons for reading Woolf as a sci-fi author is her interest in how people travel through time—one of his central concerns in In Ascension. Early in the novel, while contemplating the earliest life on Earth, Leigh feels like she’s “annihilating the concept of straight and linear time to suggest something more circular and repetitious instead.” I won’t spoil the novel’s ending by revealing how it performs this circularity, but I will say that MacInnes manages to pull it off in a way that enriches rather than undermines the narrative.

In his essay on Woolf, MacInnes also argues that her depiction of human consciousness grew more delicate and sensitive as her awareness of the vastness and mystery of the universe expanded, and I see a similar sort of sensitivity throughout In Ascension. On nearly every page, details arise from the novel and demand their own attention, rather than only contributing to a scene. Sometimes these details appear during descriptions of people or places, sometimes in careful accounts of processes on board the spaceship. Regardless, they all seem infused with the sort of delicate appreciation that grows from experiences like Leigh’s when she floats in the water and understands her continuity with the life that surrounds her. In a book filled with substantial literary achievements, In Ascension’s primary achievement is sustaining this appreciative sensitivity throughout its pages, inviting readers to be fascinated by every detail in its world, and then equally fascinated by the world around them.