The Hair-Carpet Weavers (SF) - Andreas Eschbach *****

Penguin has decided to bring back some 'science fiction classics', in a handsome new series (if rather oddly formatted - they're unusually small books, perhaps to make them fatter, as we're less used to the sensible length books were in the past). While this title is stretching that 'classics' label a tad (the book only dates back to 1995, and this translation is from 2005), The Hair-Carpet Weavers was certainly a great addition to the collection.

Andreas Eschbach builds a fascinatingly weird set up in an interplanetary empire that has lasted tens of thousands of years. On the featured planet, each craftsman spend his entire life weaving a single carpet from the hair of his wives and daughters. The book consists of 18 linked stories, which gradually fill in the big picture of what is, to begin with, a baffling and unlikely society. We start on that single planet, but by the end have take in the whole Empire and how and why it is changing.

The stories are beautifully written - although to begin with the way that each story is centred on a separate character makes the whole thing feel rather episodic, as the different aspects begin to tie together to form a whole new patterns emerge in what is a satisfying (if highly unlikely) conclusion.

There were a couple of issues. Ever since the days of Asimov there has been an awareness that an Empire stretching across vast distances and hundreds of planets would not be sensibly manageable - it seems very doubtful that it would survive as long as it has. And the handling of economics could be better - the decision the hair-carpet maker makes in the first story, dependent on the idea that he can only have one living son, who will get all the money from the father's carpet to start his own, doesn't really make any sense as the older son could simply leave and do something else, as there is clearly a much wider economy on the planet. But these are picky details.

I'm not sure why, but I expected to be underwhelmed by this book - hair-carpet weaving seemed such a silly, knit-your-own-yoghurt idea. But actually The Hair Carpet Weavers is excellent, both in the writing and the clever structuring. If it is not yet strictly a classic, it is certainly a classic in the making.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Search This Blog