tom yum (●'◡'●)’s Reviews > In Ascension > Status Update

Edge of fire wraps our capsule, a sun around our ship [...] metal peeling away, skin coming away, [...] a fireball hurtling, a shooting star, a light, oval in my father’s eyes, alarms screaming, smell of burning hair, flesh, bone to powder, must be my own or else helmet seal is broken, integrity gone, ocean veering, extinguishing the fire, [...]

They estimated 75,000 jellyfish slipping through the sluice, seizing up the whole tower, which engineers identified as an unusual natural phenomenon [...]
A toxic algal bloom,’ I told the others. ‘A red tide. It leaches oxygen and kills off sea life, but draws jellyfish towards it. Lots of them. They’re more common in the coasts off power stations because of chemical run-off.’

Life is not necessarily carried in a body. And what is a body, in the loosest terms, but a set of agreements among matter and energy that endures for a period and exhibits a metabolic response? The alien may be a particular way of calibrating energy, not constituted in any one of the properties that delivers the power, but in the act of delivery itself. A state and not a body, a pattern not a form.

20 pages ago she'd never heard about the fermi paradox and now you expect me to believe she's talking about heliopause and the oort cloud?

Martin this is an arrestingly beautiful book but i've gotta say your girl doesn't know about no oort cloud

There was no gap separating my body from the living world. [...] a vast patchwork supporting my body, streaming into my nostrils, my ears, the small breaks and crevices in my skin, swirling through my hair and entering the same eyes that observed it. [...] an almost infinite number of independent organisms among which I floated like a net, scooping up untold creatures with every minor shift and undulation of my body.

My bones lengthened in sudden, dramatic spurts. [...] I had nightmares of a miniature industry working beneath my skin. [...]

It was like my full adult shape had been prepared, condensed, knotted into a fine ball at birth and left to slowly open out.