Your Humble Blogger is tempted to just use this note to talk about how nice it is that Tor finally—finally—has a decent website, so I can link directly to their books. Thank you, Tor! No more mockery from me! In fact, I am half-tempted to go back to all the old book reports and link to their actual pages. Only that would involve work.
Anyway, it would be wrong to just talk about the publisher’s website, because Mathematicians in Love is an interesting book, and quite good as well. I think it’s only the second Rudy Rucker book I’ve read, and I didn’t like the first one. Or else it’s the third, and I’ve forgotten one. Anyway, I picked up this one with low expectations. In fact, it was both fun and interesting. And it was fun that the scientists—this is the kind of science fiction that has scientists as its main characters—are theoretical mathematicians. They manage somehow to make an Ultimate Model of Everything, which allows them to make predictions about, well, Everything. From the stock market to coin flips. Which causes trouble.
There are some flaws in the book. Some of the humor is a bit heavy, which didn’t bother me at all, but could easily put people off. And there’s some political stuff which is very heavy, which was annoying, but not so annoying that I couldn’t enjoy the rest of it. Oh, and the plot falls apart at the end, which kinda has to happen when it gets put in the hand of an omnipotent jellyfish. Plus, there are the drugs; I find it off-putting when my main characters get high, or stoned, or shit-faced, and do stupid things. It’s a personal taste. I know people in real life actually do stuff like that, and in fact the drug story is a popular and growing subset of mainstream literature and film, but still. Not for me.
By the way, this book has the most convincing high math that I’ve ever read. Not that the math itself is convincing; it’s utter gibberish. But the experience of working on math at that level was totally convincing. Now, I never did math at that level, but I was in upper-level undergraduate math classes with people who did, and I watched them at the board with three colors of chalk, and sometimes I could follow it. In other words, I’ve watched higher math, and what is in the book is consistent with that experience, even though the math itself is total rubbish. Which, by the way, is one of the interesting things: math that is provable is one universe is provably false in another, superficially similar one. That means that the universes are fundamentally different (in ways alluded to but not laid out more than philosophically) while being similar on the surface. It’s a hard concept to think about.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.