Your review actually makes me more curious about the book.
Looks like I did a bad job then 😂. I’m interested as to why? If it’s the physics bit, it’s 2 pages out of a thousand pages book and then basically not mentioned again.
I never heard of the book before, so I’m starting from a baseline of zero curiosity prior to this review. :-)
But also, I’m curious about how all the pieces fit together, and what else might be banging around in those almost 1000 pages. I’m wondering if “the signal” is a callback to the metavirus from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and to William Burroughs’s “language is a virus from outer space” (which Stephenson was undoubtedly referencing too). I don’t quite trust your grounds for dismissing various concepts mentioned as impossible, and (as you say) concepts in SF can have other kinds of value even if they are literally impossible. Finally, whatever else it is, it is clearly a work of imagination, and such works can say something about their zeitgeist, or can be weird untimely works that stand alone.
Christoph Wetterich tried to make a shrinking universe work, though it seems to me it should result in the energy levels in atoms changing.
Your review actually makes me more curious about the book.
Looks like I did a bad job then 😂. I’m interested as to why? If it’s the physics bit, it’s 2 pages out of a thousand pages book and then basically not mentioned again.
I never heard of the book before, so I’m starting from a baseline of zero curiosity prior to this review. :-)
But also, I’m curious about how all the pieces fit together, and what else might be banging around in those almost 1000 pages. I’m wondering if “the signal” is a callback to the metavirus from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and to William Burroughs’s “language is a virus from outer space” (which Stephenson was undoubtedly referencing too). I don’t quite trust your grounds for dismissing various concepts mentioned as impossible, and (as you say) concepts in SF can have other kinds of value even if they are literally impossible. Finally, whatever else it is, it is clearly a work of imagination, and such works can say something about their zeitgeist, or can be weird untimely works that stand alone.