Ascension, by Nicholas Binge

[rachelmanija]

This pleasing novel about a doomed expedition to a bizarre mountain - Annihilation meets "Who Goes There"/The Thing - involves a number of my favorite tropes: survival, doomed expeditions, strange locations, non-Euclidian geometry, time weirdness, and the epistolatory form, complete with a frame story.

Despite its modern setting, it feels like a pulp adventure/horror/science fiction paperback from 1950, but with modern technology. I love pulp. It would be hard to screw this up to an extent that I wouldn't enjoy it, and I did enjoy it. It's not a great novel and the story is kind of ridiculous, but in an enjoyable way. It's a fun, engrossing read that provides everything you want from that premise. If you like those tropes, you will enjoy it too.

The protagonist is Harold Tunmore, physicist/medical doctor/explorer/rocket scientist/rock star. The framing device is a note by his brother Ben, explaining how Harold went missing after sending three extremely weird letters to Ben's fourteen-year-old daughter, Harriet. (WTF is going on here weird, not inappropriate weird.) He then disappeared for thirty years and was presumed dead, then reappeared in a mental hospital with a bundle of never-sent letters to Harriet. The bulk of the novel consists of those letters, which are the diary of the doomed expedition.

(Annoyingly, Harriet drops completely out of the narrative upon receiving the letters, even when it would make sense for her to be at least mentioned. She's basically just a "dear diary.")

Harold is contacted by mysterious agents and persuaded to go on a mysterious expedition when they tell him that there were only two survivors of the previous attempt (the other eight never returned), both dramatically fucked up by the experience, and one is his ex-wife Naoko, doctor and "the best field medic in the world." The other survivor appears to be precognitive and dies shortly after his return. Naoko is obsessed with time-keeping and mostly incoherent.

The expedition is to climb a mountain that is taller than Mount Everest and has suddenly appeared in the middle of the ocean. (No idea how the entire world hasn't noticed this.)

A team is assembled, consisting of three redshirt soldiers, an egomaniac mountaineer, two military contractors, Harold, a world-famous Russian biologist, an atheist chemist, a religious geologist, a weird anthropologist, and the raving mad Naoko. They have a brief window in which to climb the mountain before a giant storm will hit. This will definitely go well!

Like I said, if you like this sort of thing, it's a good example of it. (Annihilation is a great example of it.) Despite some lofty goals about God and free will and stuff, its heart clearly lies in its pulp origins, and more power to it. But I have to share one moment which is probably the most hilariously stupid thing I'll read all year, especially in the context of a book whose epigraph is from "The Myth of Sisyphus."



Harold realizes that an expedition member's name is I AM ALIEN spelled backward. Shock! Horror! LOLOLOLOLOL!



Content notes: Tragic child death backstory. Action-style violence.