The Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar

I've enjoyed everything by Lavie Tidhar that I've read: he's an interesting, globalist writer with wide and deep influences and a quirky sensibility. But he's also yet another writer thrilled by the minutia of Golden Age SF, which I'm not as excited by - it's always felt like a hermetic dead end to me, the tedious smugness of an in-group that keeps curling further in.

The Circumference of the World was his new novel last year, a short book told in kaleidoscopic sections, and it is steeped in Golden Age SF. So there are a lot of things about it I loved and appreciated, but it also dives deeply into one of the things I wish modern SF could extricate itself from: the relentless return to the same few moments and ideas and people of the post-war era, and especially that core "atomic power proves we SF fans are right and the world will belong to us!" triumphalism.

You see, Eugene Charles Hartley wrote a novel called Lode Stars in 1961 - or maybe he did. The book has been suppressed since then, or maybe it was only a rumor to begin with. He almost immediately afterwards started a religion fairly closely based on the ideas in Lode Stars - yes, he is yet another Hubbard figure, down to nearly every detail - and became fabulously rich and fabulously detached from the world.

More interestingly, Hartley's religion - and the insights in Lode Stars - seems to be correct. It's a variation of the Simulation Hypothesis: that we are not living "now," in a real world, but are running in a far-future simulation, reliving our original lives for some obscure purpose. It also has a "God" that sits entirely outside the universe - accessible only via information leaked through black holes - and "eaters," which I don't think are the same as God, but also sit outside the universe, in this far-future setting, and consume the minds of those in the simulation.

You can protect yourself from the eaters. There's only one way. You have to read Lode Stars.

All that isn't entirely clear at the beginning of Circumference, which runs through the viewpoints of a young woman from the South Pacific - named after the main character of Lode Stars, but otherwise mostly just a way into the story - and then her mathematician boyfriend, a face-blind rare book dealer, a London-based ex-Russian gangster, the text of Lode Stars, and Hartley himself. It moves quickly, it's full of fine writing and interesting thoughts, it throws out random concepts along the way and has dozens of Easter eggs for fans of classic SF.

But it's a book that, in its essential conception, circles a black hole. That's the metaphor, that's the end of Lode Stars, that's the cosmology of Hartley's religion - that's the whole point. And this is a short book, with a lot of sections and things going on, so it does make the circling exciting and inventive and thrilling...but it's still circling.

I was hoping for a slingshot outward from that black hole, or a 2001-esque dive within it: Circumference doesn't want to do either of those things. It wants to circle; it will circle. It is defined, as the title says, by the circumference, and by that infinitely attractive point, the lode star, at the middle.

I'd recommend Tidhar books like the multifarious Central Station or the muscular Violent Century or the deeply weird Escapement before this one, unless you are a huge fan of Golden Age SF and changes rung on those ideas. But it's still Tidhar; it's still full of wonders and fascination.