Skip to main content

The This (SF) - Adam Roberts ****

Adam Roberts is easily the most interesting active science fiction author. He is the 21st century's equivalent of John Brunner – endlessly innovative. Though Roberts is more intellectual in style and sophisticated in approach than Brunner was, both have come up with a mix of novels of brilliance and others that push the boundaries so much that they make it difficult to truly engage with them as storytelling. On this spectrum, The This is Roberts’ equivalent of Stand on Zanzibar or The Sheep Look Up – at the boundary-pushing end of the spectrum. 

We begin with a chapter located in the Buddhist inter-life concept of the Bardo (I had to look that up), then get a chapter that’s half made up of footnotes that form a kind of electronic stream of consciousness, before getting into intertwined storylines from the near and more distant future. Linking all this (sort of) is what first seems to be a next-step social media system, called The This, but which increasingly facilitates humans becoming part of a hive mind - the Borg without the nasty bolt-on bits. As if all this isn’t enough for one relatively short novel, we also get one of Roberts’ favourite conceits, a riff on a classic SF book - I won't reveal which one, but this fits wonderfully with what has come before.

Underpinning all this is apparently the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Roberts has form on this approach - his wonderful The Thing Itself makes use of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant - but there is a big difference in the way it is done here. I learned all I knew about Kant and Hegel before reading Roberts' books from Monty Python's Philosopher's Song, but in The Thing Itself, some of Kant's ideas are expounded by the characters, so the reader knows what's going on. Here, no one ever mentions Hegel and so concepts of subject and object equivalence, absolute idealism and Spirit are flung about without knowing what to do with them. 

I think it is excellent when fiction incorporates cultural references that are only picked up by those who are in the know. A recent episode of the fluffy daytime detective TV show Shakespeare and Hathaway began with a body being found in a near perfect reproduction of Millais' Ophelia painting - and if you knew the painting it provided a little thrill - an Easter egg in gaming terms. But the trouble here is that Hegel's ideas aren't just a little bonus for the cognoscenti, they are essential to pull the threads of the book together. I'd also say that where Kant's philosophy could be seen as fairly scientific, Hegel's seems more of a theological schema - and as such is perhaps not quite as good a fit with science fiction.

This is all intensely clever: I kept pausing to admire what Roberts was doing. But both the fragmented nature of the storytelling and the absence of likeable characters make it a book that’s difficult to truly enjoy. I am very glad I did read it - there’s so much in there – but I prefer a little more of a conventional structure (just as I far prefer Brunner’s Shockwave Rider to either Stand or Sheep). Even so, The This can't be faulted on either in its deluge of ideas or Roberts' bravura: it is a significant achievement. 

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more