#Spiritual ascension books series#

#Spiritual ascension books series#

Leigh has a series of long-distance video calls with her sister, but the secrecy in which the mission is shrouded means she can’t tell her what she’s doing or where she’s going. All this is set alongside the mental decline of her mother, on the other side of the Atlantic. A spaceship is fitted out to follow, explore and hopefully re-encounter this object, with Leigh training to join the crew. Initially it is believed to be on a collision course with Earth, but instead the object swings out into the Oort cloud and vanishes. Astronomers detect a strange object on a path through the solar system: a kilometres-long ovoid decorated with a gigantic grid of intersecting spiral lines. When a crew member is lost, the voyage is abandoned, to Leigh’s disappointment: “As we pulled away I was fixated on the water, waiting and waiting for the crucial piece to finally come into view.”

Exploratory dives in the area result in strange, inexplicable consequences: there’s an odd light divers fall ill Leigh experiences unexpected bliss. This voyage uncovers an anomaly: a huge cavity in the mid-ocean floor, a crater so deep that the scientists assume their measuring equipment must be malfunctioning. Leigh takes a position on a survey ship called the Endeavour exploring the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean. MacInnes evokes a spread of human intimacies, simultaneously capturing them in the largest possible contexts Leigh travels all around the world, while Helen feels more closely bound to their ageing, widowed mother. Her sister, Helena – a quieter, smaller person, who avoids being on the receiving end of their father’s violence – ends up as a financial lawyer. Geert mistreats Leigh, who can’t wait to get away and begin a career as a marine biologist. Leigh’s father Geert works for a water board, maintaining the dykes and engineering the supply to keep the sea at bay. There’s Leigh: tall, clever, slightly chaotic, fascinated by the sea and its biology. In Ascension starts with two sisters growing up in the Netherlands.

Science fiction novels have sought to capture the sublimity in the sheer scale of the universe, but I don’t know many that relate that to the human level quite so brilliantly as MacInnes does. The publisher applies the word “epic”, which is ballpark, although it misses something of the way MacInnes evokes a spread of human intimacies, simultaneously capturing them in the largest possible contexts: oceanic vastnesses and cosmic backdrops. MacInnes’s previous novels have weighed in at around the 250-page mark: his latest is double that. Again the novel gives us connected mysteries – the fate of the apes, strange mists, unexpected deaths – which are neither neglected nor tied up neatly. In a near-future dystopia a social media tech called “Nest” dominates human life, and the world’s last remaining population of bonobo apes are being studied in a jungle sanctuary. From its title you can see that his second novel, 2020’s Gathering Evidence, is also about mystery-solving.