What do you think?
Rate this book
Emortality #5
Dark Ararat
Dark Ararat is the fifth novel in an overarching masterpiece. It extends into interstellar space Brian Stableford's ambitious ongoing future history series begun in Inherit the Earth and continued in The Architects of Emortality, The Fountains of Youth, and The Cassandra Complex.
Hundreds of years in our future, humanity is expanding out into the galaxy in gigantic colony ships. Slower than light speed, the ships are filled with long-lived people who are, nevertheless, in suspended animation for all or much of the voyage. One ship has reached a promising world and begun a colony, but not everyone has yet been awakened.
Matthew Fleury is shocked to learn that he has been revived from suspended animation to replace a colleague who has been murdered.
Is the planet still inhabited by the alien race that left ancient ruins of great cities? And who killed the eminent scientist leading the investigation of the ruins? If the aliens survive, then the planet becomes off limits to humans, and the ship must find another planet to colonize. There are some colonists who would kill to leave. And some who would kill to stay.
Hundreds of years in our future, humanity is expanding out into the galaxy in gigantic colony ships. Slower than light speed, the ships are filled with long-lived people who are, nevertheless, in suspended animation for all or much of the voyage. One ship has reached a promising world and begun a colony, but not everyone has yet been awakened.
Matthew Fleury is shocked to learn that he has been revived from suspended animation to replace a colleague who has been murdered.
Is the planet still inhabited by the alien race that left ancient ruins of great cities? And who killed the eminent scientist leading the investigation of the ruins? If the aliens survive, then the planet becomes off limits to humans, and the ship must find another planet to colonize. There are some colonists who would kill to leave. And some who would kill to stay.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Brian M. Stableford
882 books137 followersBrian Michael Stableford was a British science fiction writer who published more than 70 novels. His earlier books were published under the name Brian M. Stableford, but more recent ones have dropped the middle initial and appeared under the name Brian Stableford. He also used the pseudonym Brian Craig for a couple of very early works, and again for a few more recent works. The pseudonym derives from the first names of himself and of a school friend from the 1960s, Craig A. Mackintosh, with whom he jointly published some very early work.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 20, 2024
Matthew Fleury, an ecologist wakes up from cryostasis finding the ship he's on has successfully made it to a new world. The good news is, Earth barely survived the catastrophe he long predicated. The bad news is, a lot of the first wave colonists on the ship, who've been awake longer than him, want to turn around and go back, humanity can survive on the new planet, but it's unsettling, and there are too many unsolved mysteries, including whether there is existing intelligent life. Unfortunately the crew of the ship, descendants of the original crew who weren't frozen, aren't willing to take them back or stay very long to support them, and it's leading to a lot of tension. And if that's not bad enough, there appears to be a murder on the planet's surface... one of Matthew's old colleagues.
I picked this up after hearing of the author's death earlier this year... some of his early books remain absolute personal favorites, and I although I solidly liked some of his more recent books, including the other books set in this same universe, I'd never gotten around to reading this one. A memorial read seemed like a perfect opportunity to correct it.
Indeed, the book started out harkening back to exactly the types of stories of Stableford that are my favorite... a scientist investigating the biological mysteries of a particular planet, while dealing with social issues of the humans there, and usually in a non-violent way. And indeed, the biological angle was quite interesting, overall. It's just the story left me a little wanting, and it felt like the climax of the book took a swerve, where the "what's going on with the planet" got quickly wrapped up and tossed aside in favor of a "power of the media!" message which felt out of place in a number of ways (not in the least because the book failed to consider advances even a few years ahead of publication, as 'video cameras' were still considered bulky objects rather than built into every communication device). The murder mystery angle was resolved more or less to my satisfaction, though, in an understated way that reminded me why I like Stableford, but that was only one of the three plots I was interested in, and the others didn't.
As a side note, while I was reading this I was also reading an advance ebook copy of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay, and it struck me that the particular ecologies of both world complemented each other. Similar in some ways, opposites in others, and telling very different stories, but both interesting enough that if you were fascinated by the biological angle of this story, it might be worth checking out the other.
Overall, I liked the book, but it wasn't one of my favorites from this author, and the ending fell flat... not in a way that ruined everything that came before it, but just leaving me unsatisfied, almost as though the author reached a quota of words and once he'd done that wrapped things up quickly.
I picked this up after hearing of the author's death earlier this year... some of his early books remain absolute personal favorites, and I although I solidly liked some of his more recent books, including the other books set in this same universe, I'd never gotten around to reading this one. A memorial read seemed like a perfect opportunity to correct it.
Indeed, the book started out harkening back to exactly the types of stories of Stableford that are my favorite... a scientist investigating the biological mysteries of a particular planet, while dealing with social issues of the humans there, and usually in a non-violent way. And indeed, the biological angle was quite interesting, overall. It's just the story left me a little wanting, and it felt like the climax of the book took a swerve, where the "what's going on with the planet" got quickly wrapped up and tossed aside in favor of a "power of the media!" message which felt out of place in a number of ways (not in the least because the book failed to consider advances even a few years ahead of publication, as 'video cameras' were still considered bulky objects rather than built into every communication device). The murder mystery angle was resolved more or less to my satisfaction, though, in an understated way that reminded me why I like Stableford, but that was only one of the three plots I was interested in, and the others didn't.
As a side note, while I was reading this I was also reading an advance ebook copy of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay, and it struck me that the particular ecologies of both world complemented each other. Similar in some ways, opposites in others, and telling very different stories, but both interesting enough that if you were fascinated by the biological angle of this story, it might be worth checking out the other.
Overall, I liked the book, but it wasn't one of my favorites from this author, and the ending fell flat... not in a way that ruined everything that came before it, but just leaving me unsatisfied, almost as though the author reached a quota of words and once he'd done that wrapped things up quickly.
December 3, 2023
Stableford does another deep dive into hard Science Fiction. Another of his planetary whodunits like the whole Daedalus Landfall series that he started in 1976. Stableford, being knowledgeable about biology, uses that lens, rather than Physics and Engineering, to explore his Science Fiction narratives.
This is the the third in his Emortality series. Although it is #5 in the published sequence, it is #3 in the internal history sequence of that series. This story doesn't explore the Emortality theme directly, it just uses the threat of why that science was developed to play out in this story. This story takes place with humans who did not receive the gift of the technology that enabled Emortality.
In this novel, the Earth seems doomed, and so humanity's best and last hope to survive seems to be the stars - to find Earth-like planets to colonize. Meanwhile, on Earth, according to the series, managed to avoid eco-catastrophe, extinction, and overpopulation by the science that granted humanity Emortality and, with it, induced natural sterility and artificial external womb-like devices to enable reproduction.
The book is a brilliant exploration of the theme of first contact with a new planet's ecosystem. Stableford's science background truly explores the alienness of this world. With a deep diving into technobabble insight into alien biology of plants and animals.
The puzzle of the biology and workings of the ecosystem is the real focus, with a MacGuffin of a murder of one of the scientists as a subplot.
You best be up for a slow reveal and be interested in imaginative genetics and speculations about a truly alien ecosystem. This sort of hard science is the true reason for the story. A fascinating tale of science fiction and an exploration of what humanity would face when it encounters an alien planet. Things are not what we expect them to be because it is not Earth and our evolution is based on how our world worked out the problem of life.
This is the the third in his Emortality series. Although it is #5 in the published sequence, it is #3 in the internal history sequence of that series. This story doesn't explore the Emortality theme directly, it just uses the threat of why that science was developed to play out in this story. This story takes place with humans who did not receive the gift of the technology that enabled Emortality.
In this novel, the Earth seems doomed, and so humanity's best and last hope to survive seems to be the stars - to find Earth-like planets to colonize. Meanwhile, on Earth, according to the series, managed to avoid eco-catastrophe, extinction, and overpopulation by the science that granted humanity Emortality and, with it, induced natural sterility and artificial external womb-like devices to enable reproduction.
The book is a brilliant exploration of the theme of first contact with a new planet's ecosystem. Stableford's science background truly explores the alienness of this world. With a deep diving into technobabble insight into alien biology of plants and animals.
The puzzle of the biology and workings of the ecosystem is the real focus, with a MacGuffin of a murder of one of the scientists as a subplot.
You best be up for a slow reveal and be interested in imaginative genetics and speculations about a truly alien ecosystem. This sort of hard science is the true reason for the story. A fascinating tale of science fiction and an exploration of what humanity would face when it encounters an alien planet. Things are not what we expect them to be because it is not Earth and our evolution is based on how our world worked out the problem of life.
July 28, 2022
This returns to something like the style of The Cassandra Complex and Inherit the Earth (also Architects of Emortality). Suspenseful and fairly fast-paced.
Set on the colony world Ararat (or Tyre). There is a murder to be solved, but that isn't really the focus of the plot so much as the mystery of the weird biology of Tyre. I found the speculation about alien biology pretty interesting.
Set on the colony world Ararat (or Tyre). There is a murder to be solved, but that isn't really the focus of the plot so much as the mystery of the weird biology of Tyre. I found the speculation about alien biology pretty interesting.
March 4, 2024
Writing SF and that relies heavily on science can be dangerous for the longetivy of your works. Brian Stableford’s novel is set in the 29th century, which is far enough advanced that predictive glitches should be at a minimum. Yet in Dark Ararat there are strange anachronisms--no cell phones which can capture video, the crew using flame throwers with fuel tanks attached, and a TV (!) personality needing heavy recording equipment sent down to a new planet to broadcast. It’s a bit jarring. The rather lame murder mystery in the novel seems a red herring for what Stableford really wants to talk about (how life might develop on another planet without DNA) and his detective vanishes from the book half-way through. There is a lot of science ‘splanning that goes on for too long and is repeated too frequently to make the book a smooth read. Overall, a disappointment from an author that I usually enjoy.
February 7, 2013
Originally published on my blog here in November 2003.
Like its predecessor, The Cassandra Complex, Dark Ararat fills in something of a gap in Stableford's future history, lying between Inherit the Earth and Architects of Emortality. Each of the novels in the series (except the last, which I have yet to read) is a self-contained look at some aspects of the quest to bring immortality to the human race. Despite being part of this series, Dark Ararat is more tangential to this quest, and actually marks a return to one of the staple plots of (post-Campbell) science fiction - the adventures of the early pioneers to descent to the surface of an alien world, one which is considered a possibility for human colonisation. It is about genetics, and mortality, but is more concerned with setting up a plausible scenario in which the DNA molecule isn't the replicator at the centre of living organisms.
A book I have recently read is the cleverly argued Evolving the Alien by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. It deals with what we might be able to expect to find in terms of life on other planets; speculation about what properties would be universals (true of life anywhere) and what would be parochials (true only of life on Earth). It is a book which makes it hard to read any science fiction dealing with aliens subsequently without starting to judge the biology according to its arguments.
Many older science fiction depictions of alien environments fail the tests by making their backgrounds too earthlike - grass like plants might be a universal, or at least commonplace, but the word "like" in that statement is very important. The plant may fill a similar ecological niche to grass on Earth, but only those aspects of its appearance and life history implied by that niche will be identical to those of real grass. Because writers are interested in other things (communication with intelligent aliens, or the technicalities of space flight and planetary colonisation, for example), they often haven't spent so much time thinking about just how different things might be.
It seems to me, on reading Dark Ararat, that I am not alone in having been impressed by Evolving the Alien. The alien planet, whose name has not been finalised but could be Ararat or Tyre, seems to have been constructed with Cohen and Stewart's ideas firmly in mind. The whole series of novels has already demonstrated Stableford's interest in the biological sciences, and here he has thought through an entire planet of ecologies based on a system of replicator molecules which are different from earthly DNA - replication via an encoded genome taken to be a universal, DNA a parochial.
The problem which many meticulously worked out science fiction stories have, and it is one which makes many people dislike the genre as a whole, is that the background takes over the story, pushing character and plot into minor roles. Stableford avoids this pitfall by making his plot melodramatic and organising it so that exposition of the background becomes a natural consequence of its outworking. This plot is partly a murder mystery, and partly a tale of political manoeuvring.
Not all the colonists have been thawed from the cryogenic suspension in which they travelled from Earth over seven hundred years, and the story starts when two men are woken, one to replace a murder victim, an ecologist, and the other a policeman to investigate the killing. Conflicts have arisen between the colonists and the ship's crew (who are descendants of the original crew and want to drop the colonists off and move on elsewhere) about the suitability of Ararat for colonisation, and these tensions are heightened by the possibility that there is intelligent life on the planet - stone tools have been found, and the victim was killed with a replica of one of them.
Dark Ararat is just the kind of clever, thoughtful and well written science fiction that readers have come to expect from Stableford; it keeps up the standard of one of the genre's best series in recent years.
Like its predecessor, The Cassandra Complex, Dark Ararat fills in something of a gap in Stableford's future history, lying between Inherit the Earth and Architects of Emortality. Each of the novels in the series (except the last, which I have yet to read) is a self-contained look at some aspects of the quest to bring immortality to the human race. Despite being part of this series, Dark Ararat is more tangential to this quest, and actually marks a return to one of the staple plots of (post-Campbell) science fiction - the adventures of the early pioneers to descent to the surface of an alien world, one which is considered a possibility for human colonisation. It is about genetics, and mortality, but is more concerned with setting up a plausible scenario in which the DNA molecule isn't the replicator at the centre of living organisms.
A book I have recently read is the cleverly argued Evolving the Alien by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. It deals with what we might be able to expect to find in terms of life on other planets; speculation about what properties would be universals (true of life anywhere) and what would be parochials (true only of life on Earth). It is a book which makes it hard to read any science fiction dealing with aliens subsequently without starting to judge the biology according to its arguments.
Many older science fiction depictions of alien environments fail the tests by making their backgrounds too earthlike - grass like plants might be a universal, or at least commonplace, but the word "like" in that statement is very important. The plant may fill a similar ecological niche to grass on Earth, but only those aspects of its appearance and life history implied by that niche will be identical to those of real grass. Because writers are interested in other things (communication with intelligent aliens, or the technicalities of space flight and planetary colonisation, for example), they often haven't spent so much time thinking about just how different things might be.
It seems to me, on reading Dark Ararat, that I am not alone in having been impressed by Evolving the Alien. The alien planet, whose name has not been finalised but could be Ararat or Tyre, seems to have been constructed with Cohen and Stewart's ideas firmly in mind. The whole series of novels has already demonstrated Stableford's interest in the biological sciences, and here he has thought through an entire planet of ecologies based on a system of replicator molecules which are different from earthly DNA - replication via an encoded genome taken to be a universal, DNA a parochial.
The problem which many meticulously worked out science fiction stories have, and it is one which makes many people dislike the genre as a whole, is that the background takes over the story, pushing character and plot into minor roles. Stableford avoids this pitfall by making his plot melodramatic and organising it so that exposition of the background becomes a natural consequence of its outworking. This plot is partly a murder mystery, and partly a tale of political manoeuvring.
Not all the colonists have been thawed from the cryogenic suspension in which they travelled from Earth over seven hundred years, and the story starts when two men are woken, one to replace a murder victim, an ecologist, and the other a policeman to investigate the killing. Conflicts have arisen between the colonists and the ship's crew (who are descendants of the original crew and want to drop the colonists off and move on elsewhere) about the suitability of Ararat for colonisation, and these tensions are heightened by the possibility that there is intelligent life on the planet - stone tools have been found, and the victim was killed with a replica of one of them.
Dark Ararat is just the kind of clever, thoughtful and well written science fiction that readers have come to expect from Stableford; it keeps up the standard of one of the genre's best series in recent years.
September 27, 2010
Because several readers said positive things about the book, I read it all the way through even though I could not care for any of the characters. I assumed that my not having read all of the previous books put me at a disadvantage, because presumably they did something earlier which made readers care about them. Our protagonist, for example, does nothing significant but spill some food for 3/4 of the novel. This very much colored (a shade of purple, I'm sure ) my feeling about the story, but I found other problems, as well.
The story is interesting as hell (how could interstellar colonization, civil war, alien-world exploration, and first contact not be?), and the science is exciting. However, I felt several times that I was reading the same description or hypothesis that I'd just read a chapter or three before, and that these unsympathetic characters were telling me everything rather than letting me discover it as they did. And the story was so slow... I had the feeling that this novel in novella form would be just right - strip out the hundred or so pages at the start, compress the repeated descriptions, and revise the micro-writing to convert the passive voice to active, and this would be a contender for a short-fiction award. I just can't get excited about this as a stand-alone novel, and there's little to inspire me to read the final book in the series.
It was frustrating to have this experience, because everything about this book would normally really draw me in; but the pace, language, and unsympathetic characters kept pulling me out. I just kept feeling like I was missing something, and I attribute that to my lack of reading the prior novels. Or am I way off base here?
The story is interesting as hell (how could interstellar colonization, civil war, alien-world exploration, and first contact not be?), and the science is exciting. However, I felt several times that I was reading the same description or hypothesis that I'd just read a chapter or three before, and that these unsympathetic characters were telling me everything rather than letting me discover it as they did. And the story was so slow... I had the feeling that this novel in novella form would be just right - strip out the hundred or so pages at the start, compress the repeated descriptions, and revise the micro-writing to convert the passive voice to active, and this would be a contender for a short-fiction award. I just can't get excited about this as a stand-alone novel, and there's little to inspire me to read the final book in the series.
It was frustrating to have this experience, because everything about this book would normally really draw me in; but the pace, language, and unsympathetic characters kept pulling me out. I just kept feeling like I was missing something, and I attribute that to my lack of reading the prior novels. Or am I way off base here?
April 4, 2012
The generation ship Hope arrives in orbit around the planet Ararat (or possibly Tyre) with its cargo of deep-frozen humans; the last generation of humans doomed to die of old age. As conflicts intensify between the crew and the cargo, TV scientist and prophet Matthew Fleury has to solve three puzzles: who murdered his predecessor, how to resolve the issues between the various factions before they destroy the nascent colony, and the deep biological secret that drives all life on the planet.
This is classic Stableford: a solid, scientifically thoughtful tour of a deeply weird world. The best comparison is against Gred Egan, except that while Egan focuses on philosophy and mathematics, Stableford focuses on biochemistry. I don't know my biochemistry well enough to know whether he knows what he's talking about, but at the very least he fakes it well: Tyre is a place where the very axioms of life, death and sex work utterly differently to Earth --- and it makes all the difference.
As with most science-heavy literature, the characterisation suffers because the plot is story-led and not characterisation-led. But it's by no means absent here: the various main characters are vivid and well drawn, even if the main character does have an awfully convenient tendency to infodump (brought on by his previous career as a TV personality).
This is apparently book 3 of his 'emortality' series, a study of humankind's eradication of death by old age. I haven't read any of the others, but will certainly be looking out for them.
This is classic Stableford: a solid, scientifically thoughtful tour of a deeply weird world. The best comparison is against Gred Egan, except that while Egan focuses on philosophy and mathematics, Stableford focuses on biochemistry. I don't know my biochemistry well enough to know whether he knows what he's talking about, but at the very least he fakes it well: Tyre is a place where the very axioms of life, death and sex work utterly differently to Earth --- and it makes all the difference.
As with most science-heavy literature, the characterisation suffers because the plot is story-led and not characterisation-led. But it's by no means absent here: the various main characters are vivid and well drawn, even if the main character does have an awfully convenient tendency to infodump (brought on by his previous career as a TV personality).
This is apparently book 3 of his 'emortality' series, a study of humankind's eradication of death by old age. I haven't read any of the others, but will certainly be looking out for them.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews