MacInnes, Martin
Entry updated 7 August 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1983- ) Scottish author whose first novel, Infinite Ground (2016), carries an unnamed Inspector from Dystopian daylight into the heart of darkness (see Joseph Conrad) at the interior of an unnamed South American country in search of one who has disappeared; the surreal mutability of the world being uncovered, which must all the same be taken literally or the tale becomes mechanically arbitrary, evokes a sense of Magic Realism, however dubious that descriptor may seem when exported. Hints of transmundane Biology infect the story. MacInnes's second novel, Gathering Evidence (2020), set in the very Near Future, also deals with invasive suffusions of the world, in this case all-knowing interactive algorithms known as Nests. The married protagonists, separated by thousands of miles, similarly experience a fogging over and diminishment of consensual reality, at the behest, they discover, of exploitative corporations. Nests turn out to be a kind of digital fungus. The old world is eaten.
MacInnes's third novel, In Ascension (2022), increases the intensity of his habitual narrations, which deludingly seem to marry disparate tales, but in fact terminate in abysms. Here, the lives of two sisters seem to intersect tellingly in a world riven by Climate Change: the active protagonist, Leigh, a marine Biologist on a deep sea mission, discovers a vast crater deeper than deemed possible in the depths of the Atlantic, which causes hallucinations of Transcendence; she then becomes involved in a space mission to investigate a vast gnomic ovoidal object, seemingly manufactured (echoes of Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama [1973] are clearly deliberate), but ultimately impenetrable. Leigh's long conversations with her homebody sister create a sense of the irrecoverable complexity of the universe that Homo sapiens attempts to devour. [JC]
Martin MacInnes
born Inverness, Scotland: 1983
works
- Infinite Ground (London: Atlantic Books, 2016) [hb/]
- Gathering Evidence (London: Atlantic Books, 2020) [hb/]
- In Ascension (London: Atlantic Books, 2023) [hb/Carmen R Balit]
links
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