Book review: the Incandescent Ones

By Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle. Who have form; I liked Fifth Planet, though you may struggle to deduce that from my review. And I fondly recall The Black Cloud from my childhood. 

However this one is weird, and not in a good way. Perhaps reading the plot on Wiki will give you some idea of why. Goodreads doesn't like it, but has few reviews, which is also telling. It is also more novella than novel.

It is set (like 5P!) in the distant future, whose social mores and political context are, unsurprisingly, exactly those that F+G grew up with. It is weirdly obsessed with skiing, as though they've just started watching Ski Sunday or summat.

Briefly: Our Hero has been recruited to Moscow by shadowy presumed intelligence services to do something on a given trigger; that trigger occurs, as does a succession of following events. That Our Hero, a Westerner in a Cold War Moscow / Soviet Union, gets to move around so freely seems odd. He meets up with his long-presumed-dead father, but is in no way surprised, who is carrying a super-battery of alien tech, which they use to melt water for tea (faint shades of The Left Hand of Darkness). They cross a border, some skiing happens, he has brushes with intelligence, is sent off into space on a ship the book can't be bothered to describe to be at a conference on Mars, changes ship to go to Jupiter instead, arrives at an empty space station, is told he is really a robot and surfs off into Jupiter to enter a glowing ball of light (rather more than just shades of 2001).

If that plot sounds disconnected, it is: the book feels like it is missing bits. For example, on leaving Earth he is heading for Mars to take an unspecified intelligence role at an Earth-Aliens conference. For no obvious reason this plan gets cancelled (actually even that implies too much: the plan is never cancelled, its just that a new thread takes its place) and he is dragged off to Jupiter instead.

The sudden assertion that Our Hero is a robot is another: he accepts it with no thought, yet he is at the very least a biological robot: he has grown from childhood to adulthood; he eats, drinks, pisses, shits, bruises and fucks. Nor does it have any particular consequences. Mind you, before that he thought he was an Alien, and Outlander, and yet his biology differed in no visible way from human.

Hard Sci-Fi books are often written around a core of a genuine idea: Fifth Planet, of the idea that solar systems move and could intersect. Here, the skiiing (surfing?) down Jupiter's magnetic field feels like the original core, but unfortunately there's nothing built "on top of that"; instead it just trails into that at the end.