This is a good book. The story, mostly told in the first person, seemed at first to be mostly plot-driven the way sci-fi often is. Even though Leigh does describe growing up in her, close, caring, but not at all warm sort of family in Rotterdam, she speaks more about her early interest in biology and her path toward a pHd, and eventually a job heading a lab that is an important part of a new space project.

But I gradually became aware that, in this complex novel, each step on her way was related both to her traumatic childhood, to her parents and sister, and to her adventures to come. The book is about people and emotions as well as scientific and engineering details There are also questions about how life on Earth, including we humans, came to be the way we are now and, what might happen in the future.

Only when she finds herself one of a crew of three on a spacecraft moving rapidly through the solar system, toward interstellar space, did I think the pace slowed and wander into maybe too much detail. But that doesn’t last for long, and in the rest of the book Macinnes skillfully describes what could be only day-to-day routine in ways that kept me entranced to the end. ( )

an interesting and well written novel that to me does not really work, because it is caught between its imaginative near-future set-up about a space flight and bioengineering immortality and the very different inward-looking focus of a contemporary family psychological novel. so it moves awkwardly between the momentum of an sf story and the more static inner issues of a psychological novel, and that complicates and ultimately compromises both impulses. at the same time both the author's attention to detail and the rhythms of his prose herald a gifted writer, but i'm not certain that this approach could ever work; perhaps he tried it as an experiment. ( )

I love this book.

As an extremely picky reader with a lot of jaded feelings towards fiction, I seldom find works with characters and concepts that speak to me but I genuinely felt changed after reading In Ascension. I found MacInnes's writing to be exceptional and never tone deaf, corny, or obnoxious. I wholeheartedly cared for the characters in this book and was fully committed to understanding whatever it was that I could about the main character, Leigh, and their family. I was gutted by the book's resolution and having to part ways.

Despite being branded as science fiction, I would argue that this book is so much more. It is an incredibly slow burn with major emphasis on the main character's internal relationship with themself as well as their external relationships with family and the people they meet along the way.
My biggest gripe about this book was simply that I am not someone with a very science-y brain, nor do I care much about topics in science, especially biology. With much of this book being filled with conversation about science related topics, it was easy to find myself zoning out or bored. I do not feel like this is necessarily a flaw, but I do think it is something that will deter certain readers. This is not an action packed book filled with super entertaining adventures or crazy events that will keep you on your toes, but it is an incredibly thought provoking and moving piece of writing that I would genuinely encourage the right reader to consume.

I'll be thinking about this one for a very long time.
( )

I had high hopes for this novel primarily because it was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Yet, I found it to be a disappointingly complex sci-fi story that just didn’t seem to fit smoothly with a family drama or a story about a woman’s scientific ambitions. Notwithstanding his efforts to tackle big questions about the interconnectedness of humans the natural world and the universe, MacInnes’ ideas remained obscure. His settings in oceans, deserts, space, and the industrial city of Rotterdam were indeed evocative. His protagonist, however, was more nebulous. Clearly, Leigh was highly motivated by her science, yet her familial relationships, especially with her abusive father, don’t seem to be well explored or fit well with the overarching theme of the novel. ( )

Leigh, the heroine of In Ascension, is a marine biologist whose undersea research leads her on an unlikely route to an expedition to the edges of the solar system. This would be a decent premise for a story by Arthur C. Clarke, Peter Watts, or Kim Stanley Robinson. Instead, it is in the hands of Martin MacInnes, who gives it enough literary flourish to earn a longlist nomination to the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction. I have seldom seen a book whose ratings oscillate so consistently between two and five stars. Like many slipstream novels, it struggles to meet its conflicting genre requirements. Characters in stories by Clarke, Watts, and Robinson may have faults, but they tend to attack problems in engineering and science rationally. MacInnes’s characters treat such issues as symbols of their own character: “So many times I had identified errors—in my work and in my relationships—stemming the original mistake of too many assumptions, of predicting rather than perceiving the world and seeing something that wasn’t really there.” They are not so much interested in the world through which they travel as they are in the weaknesses that they assume define their character. Is such stuff good enough to win a Hugo or a Booker? Not for me. ( )