With Ascension – published by Harper Voyager – Nicholas Binge has gone big and delivered an epic, cinematic experience, a speculative thriller blending big ideas and intense personal stakes. Told in epistolary format by way of somewhat disjointed letters written by the protagonist – Harold Tunmore – to his niece Harriet, it’s the tale of a man both losing his mind and finding himself. A renowned physicist, among other things, Harold is recruited by a shadowy organisation to assist with a secretive scientific project: a vast, impossible mountain has appeared out of nowhere and a group of brilliant minds are tasked with understanding what it is, how it can possibly exist, and what its implications might be. As they scale its towering sides in search of answers, it exerts an inexorable pull on each of them, testing them in ways they couldn’t expect and placing them in danger they couldn’t imagine.

Along the way Binge tackles everything from the perception of time and history to the question destiny versus free will, but crucially spends just as much time digging into Harold’s past and his (intentionally or otherwise, quite clearly neurodivergent) personality, as his experiences on the mountain force him to come to terms with his mistakes and the pain they caused him. This combination of big themes and personal stakes with a thriller’s pacing means it’s both a darkly gripping page-turner and a thought-provoking head-scratcher, but whether you label it as speculative fiction, literary science fiction or just ‘mad but brilliant’, this is one of those books that really blends genres in its own unique fashion. There are some bold choices in both the narrative (especially towards the end) and the structure, epistolary novels not being to everyone’s taste, but this really is a must-read for those who enjoy bold, contemporary and adventurous science fiction.

Read the full review at https://www.trackofwords.com/2023/04/12/ascension-nicholas-binge/