The Circumference Of The World By Lavie Tidhar (book review).

‘The Circumference Of The World’ by Lavie Tidhar is a standalone Science Fiction novel that includes many sub-genres such as alternative history, space opera and hard Science Fiction to name but a few.

Delia is the granddaughter of an American soldier, Eugene Charles Hartley, stationed at Vanuatu during the war and a native woman. She is fascinated by mathematics and strange ideas and ends up teaching mathematics in London. She falls in love with Levi, a fellow mathematician who yearns to be one of the great mathematicians of all time. As time goes by, he becomes more desperate in his search, which becomes focussed on finding a Science Fiction book, ‘Lode Stars’ by Eugene Charles Hartley. It is the same book that made an impression on young Delia in Vanuatu, a book handed down through her mother’s family. However, people disappear when they finish reading the book.

Levi disappears. Delia hires a face-blind rare book agent, Daniel Chase, to find Levi. He, is turn, is kidnapped by a Russian gangster boss, Oskar Lens, who also wants to find the book.

This story is about our world, an alternative history to it. But there is another story threading through ‘The Circumference Of The World’. The world, as we know, is data spread out just inside the event horizon of an enormous black hole. We are data, acting out our history. The real world is in the far future outside the black hole. The story we are told is that in ‘Lode Stars’. It is of Delia searching for her dead father and having to fall into the black hole to find him. Meanwhile, in the data shell, Eugene Charles Hartley lives his existence, first becoming a Science Fiction writer and then a leader of the cult Church of God’s All-Seeing Eyes.

There is much to commend this novel. It has beautiful prose and the prose styles vary depending on viewpoint character. The details of real-world places give them an aura of realism. It pays homage to the great writers of Science Fiction’s Golden Age. It has a big idea: black holes are the eyes of God who sees what is happening through the universe via the data collected into them. But the novel has left me very unsatisfied. Where do I start with the issues I had with it?

There is Delia, who ‘walked along the circumference of the world and the dim red sun was far below her’. That world is a ‘mesh of interlocking rings rotated slowly around the sun at their core’. It makes me think of Larry Niven’s ‘Ringworld’. He received a lot of comments about how such a world could not be stable. To be fair to Niven, he did write a sequel, ‘Ringworld’s Engineers’ to deal with the issues. We have no such hint of how the World’s rings remain stable in orbit around the red sun.

The foreword, just before we dive into the first of six parts of the novel, ends with ‘Just remember: none of this is real.’ That is a put-off for starters. There are too many stories about it all being a dream. It gives a feel of cheapness for me.

Then there is the sudden appearance of the character Ledia in the sixth part. Is this deliberately an anagram of Delia? If so, many will have missed that point. But then Chase who was with her would have recognised who she was. So, she cannot be Delia. If not, where does come from and why? A lot of unanswered questions here.

Then we have a man who travels back in time to 1940 and the conversation strongly suggests this is Daniel Chase. But we never see how Daniel or, indeed, the other possible candidate, Oskar Lens do this or more importantly from when.

These are just examples of what bothered me. There are quite a few more issues. If here were not so many, I would say this novel was a literary attempt at demonstrating the shift of data on the inside of a black hole. As it stands, it comes across as series of beautiful snapshots that do not hang together to make an even half-way decent film.

Rosie Oliver

September 2023

(pub: Tachyon Publications LLC, 2023. 244 page enlarged paperback. Price: $17.95 (US), £14.60 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-61696-362-0)

check out website: www.tachyonpublictions.com