A brilliant, yet closed-off female scientist with a philosophical interest in life and the borders between lifeforms travelling into the Weird unknown in search of cosmic truths? As someone whose favourite book is Annihilation, my hopes were high.

In Ascension contains a tragic look at parental abuse and dementia, and the complicated sister bond that arises from it. It contains cool ideas for space exploration like living ships you can eat off and that recycle your corpse after death which are "somewhere between cities and gods". It contains fun facts about the Netherlands' flood control systems and the time President Bush retroactively made new astronauts by lowering America's height limit. It imagines how manned space exploration might look in its near-future setting. The prose includes great phrases like "our only closeness was in the residue of violence", "the horror... at eating something... capable of drawing a route towards the nearest star" (talking about algae, not humans, sorry), and describing a drug that can recreate religious bliss as "revelation on tap".

It also contains twice as many words as I would have liked. MacInnes employs a conversational writing style so (interesting!) ideas are often restated as we get them. For example:

Sometimes it adds depth, sometimes it just adds reading time. I also struggled to understand what was physically happening in a few places - sometimes because of terms I should have looked up, but also sometimes because I didn't understand the (futuristic?) tools MacInnes invented, or the significance of an event in the mission. His decision to have some events I would have considered key - like the moment of take-off - happen off-page was also baffling. Finally, the memoir style of narrative made for too much 'telling' for my pacing tastes. The reliance on reported speech and paragraphs of Leigh's speculation to portray her crewmates' personalities in particular hampered me in getting invested in them; they were always most vibrant when we were hearing from them directly in a scene.

My favourite aspect of the novel was the extended exploration of the border - or lack thereof - between us and the oceanic soup we crawled out of. At a young age, Leigh

almost drowns,

only to find "fraternity" underwater, "pressed against a teeming immensity"; as a graduate, she insists the ocean "already contains everything... of every body, of every living thing - it's still there". Without getting into spoilers, the space portion of the book makes interesting observations of how that might scale from the ocean to the universe, and takes every opportunity to talk about organisms that operate en mass, beyond any one single identity. It's a beautiful counterweight to Leigh's perpetual struggle to connect to others and compelling food for thought. If the quote "you could describe us as both people, and as mobile assemblages of ocean" piques your interest, you should give this book a try.