The Circumference of the World (SF)

The Circumference of the World (SF) - Lavie Tidhar *****

You know you've discovered something special when immediately after reading a book you start looking for other titles by the same author. I came across Lavie Tidhar in a passing reference on TwitterX (though I had unwittingly read a short story by him recently) from someone whose opinion trusted, took the plunge and bought this book - to be captivated.

Tidhar does here for science fiction what Gene Wolfe did in his fantasy novel peak with the likes of Castleview, Free Live Free, There are Doors, Pandora by Holly Hollander and The Sorceror's House. We get something set in what appears to be our everyday world, but where something is at a slant to that world. Here the 'something' is a book, that some say was never written, but if it does exist is hugely desirable for obscure reasons. This is just one part of multipart novel, each section of which seems to add another layer of complexity and fascination.

Where's the science fiction? In once sense it's a meta-content - because this is also a book about a fictional science fiction writer, Gene Hartley, who is set in the real world of the science fiction authors and editors of the 'golden age' - so we get the likes of Asimov, Heinlein, Campbell and more making appearances. To anyone who is steeped in this period's fiction there is a delight in mentions of characters, concepts and the whole workings of pulp science fiction writing. Hartley is a not particularly brilliant writer, but determined to make his fortune. He takes up Heinlein's suggestion of founding his own religion, with a key involvement of aliens and ends up living mostly at sea. Not, of course, based on any real person.

The other way science fiction is involved is that Hartley (probably) believes that the world as we know it isn't real, in a setting that involved black holes and aliens and more. This aspect reminded me a little of Christopher Priest's The Affirmation where everything involved could simply be due to mental illness on the part of a character.

Throw in settings from Vanuatu to London, letters between SF writers, people going missing mysteriously, a Russian gangster and more and you end up with a fantastic melange of a book. Each section is portrayed from a different viewpoint, which I found a little disorienting to start with - and I wanted to find out more particularly about the character Delia - but again like when reading Wolfe, if you stick with it in a state of 'not quite sure what's going on', eventually most of the puzzle pieces come together to make a magnificent whole.

Paperback:
Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...

The Random Universe - Andrew Jaffe *****

This is an absolutely fascinating book for anyone interested in the way that science really works, bearing in mind the difficulties of having to base our models and theories on induction. Andrew Jaffe introduces the difficulties we face when trying to take a scientific view because largely we are dependent on induction: predicting the future from what has previously been observed. He explores what probability is, the two key ways of looking at it (frequentist and Bayesian) and how scientists use (or misuse it) to work out the implications of their experiments for hypotheses. This is then expanded into looking at the nature of scientific models and the philosophy of science before heading out to entropy, quantum randomness and attempting to achieve meaningful cosmology with its potential dearth of evidence. The topic might sound a little dry, but in fact Jaffe does it with good humour and a very readable style. For example, he uses measuring his daughter's height by making marks on...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

Search This Blog