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

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

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, ...

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