The Explorer by James S൲mythe🔯 book review: Journeying into inner space.

With an atmosphere siphoned straight from SF cinema's cerebral classics, The Explorer is a glaring homage to the likes of Moon , Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey .

The long distance vessel Ishiguro is on a highly-publicised assignment to venture further than any human has before. The six crewmembers of this inspirational voyage are meticulously groomed for their TV hero 💖status, but as soon as they emerge from hypersleep a rapid series of "accidents" see them dying, until only our narrator, Cormac, remains.

Your initial fear is that this will be smugly high concept; Cormac is an embedded journalist who bandies about genre-savvy terms like "MacGuffin" and ponders who'll play the lead roles in a movie version. But any apparent shallowness is short-lived. The marrow of the book is not its setting but its clever structure and compelling character details. A deep space anomaly is hinted at, but ultimately this isn't about Star Trek -like discovery; nor is it really a commentary on celebrity culture. It's about one man's journey into himself; the conceit of the novel is that Coꦅrmac can literally look at himself and examine the experiences which moulded his final days.

It becomes a wonderful examination of coping with loss, time and death. The story develops an increasingly existential tint as our narrator struggles with the purposelessness and isolatio🔜n of his mission. The first person perspective and unpretentious prose style are enhanced by accomplish♑ed pacing, rendering this a derivative but absorbing read.

Dave Bradley

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