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

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, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more