Although her marriage, to a man she still loves, is ending, something in Emma Watson’s life is going right – she’s finally going to participate in a NASA mission. Both she and Jack McCallum are physicians who’ve dedicated most of their lives to the pursuit of space travel, at least until a medical condition grounded Jack, and Emma’s excited that her team are finally scheduled to launch. When something goes dreadfully wrong on the international space station Emma’s selected to fly up early and, despite Jack’s misgivings, she agrees. By the time she arrives half the crew are dead or dying, from a mysterious contagion that has never been seen on earth before, and that potentially threatens the whole planet.
We meet a plethora of characters – from a deep-sea submersible diver in the opening scene through a marine biologist desperate to reveal the truth to two whole space station crews and the ground staff. The characters have a semblance of three dimensions, but on closer examination this is a trompe l’oeil crafted to disguise cardboard representations of characters. For example, no explanation is given for why Emma and Jack are at the divorce-paper-signing stage when both of them want to stay married. A better example might be Jared Profitt, a NASA White House Security council science adviser (I don’t know why “council” isn’t capitalised): we get a paragraph on how he doesn’t feel the heat of a Washington summer but is highly sensitive to cold, and the rest of the page covers his love of routine, from where he eats lunch to what he eats. “In many ways he was like those ancient ascetics, a man who ate only to fuel his body and dressed in suits only because it was required of him. A man for whom wealth meant nothing.” Why? We don’t know, but we did learn that his wife died – from pneumococcal pneumonia. Although, just one page later, we learn that he was unable to make it to an airport in time, as “necrotizing streptococcus has its own agenda, its own timetable for killing.”
Well, no. Streptococcus, necrotizing or not), is a microbe and thus has no agenda or timetable. This overwriting (do we really need both of these?) is typical of the prose, and mildly annoying. In another place, for example, a microbiologist is explaining to Jack (who is a physician, a researcher and a former NASA trainee astronaut) that microscopic means “not visible to the naked eye.” Thanks for that. The tautological descriptions, though, are not as annoying, however, as the sloppiness – was it pneumonia or a strep infection? Because they’re different bugs, and although she might have got one as a result of being immunocompromised by the other, either one killed her or they both did, and in either case you can’t list one in one place and another on the following page. If it doesn’t matter then don’t go in to detail and if it does matter get the detail right.
According to Tami Hoag (on the back blurb) Gravity is “deep, dark and very disturbing.” I, on the other hand, found it somewhat formulaic, diverting enough, but really predictable. All the check list elements are present – strong female protagonist in peril; a couple drifting apart but still in love; a plucky independent company struggling against the might of large corporations; the scientist who can’t face success and self-destructs; the Brit whose icy demeanour hides a passionate side; an isolated, mysterious scientist with a tragic past; a brave individual prepared to sacrifice herself for the greater good; scientists committed to the pursuit of knowledge and international cooperation; covert government agencies with hidden agendas and nondisclosure policies; technical scientific language to demonstrate the author’s commitment to research; unnecessary medical detail (ditto); a mysterious killer microorganism, loosed by science tampering with the unknown; an unstoppable highly contagious plague that culminates in an agonising and bloody death...
There were certainly a couple of interesting things (I’d never previously thought about the fact that, with no gravity to alert you, in microgravity if you drift off you stay asleep), but all in all this was disappointing and uninspired. – Alex
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