Gnomon Is An Ireland

The horrible pun of the title comes from my high school classmate Steve Stansbury. The 1st book we read in AP English Senior year, Fall 1967, was James Joyce's "Dubliners". 1 of the stories used the word "gnomon" and Stansbury punned away. [Note that the title of Joyce's 1st novel "A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man" was the inspiration for the title of this blog.]

4 & 1/2 sci fi books to capture.

1st, "To Hold Up the Sky", by Cixin Liu, 2020, 421 pages, 114k words; a collection of 11 short stories. As with his "3 Body Problem" novels, Liu has a very different (Chinese) feel from most sci-fi I read. More energetic? More awe-filled? Very enjoyable stories.

2a, "Infinite Detail", by Tim Maughan, 2019, 296 pages, 80k words. I really did not care for this book. I think I gave it 2 stars, and I will not link to it, as I would recommend that you not buy it.

Post-apocalyptic - Internet bad, so destroy the internet. But maybe it will be replaced by a peer-to-peer system, incorruptible because ??? The author details why he thinks the Internet is so bad that it must be destroyed, but IMO he has completely misdiagnosed the problem. Capitalism is the problem, not the Internet.

One can even imagine a FaceBook that was not the current disaster of propaganda and misinformation if capitalism was removed from the picture. It can be done, look at Wikipedia. I was surprised recently to find out that Wikipedia is a European creation much more than a US one - 2/3 of the Wikipedia editors are European. Yet again the Old World socialists lead the way ...

2b, "Ghost Hardware", by Tim Maughan, 2020, 64 pages, 17k words. 3 short stories set in the "Infinite Detail" universe, providing backstories for the characters of the novel. The stories were even less likable than the novel. The 1 where teenagers playing a smash-and-grap online game trash a sporting goods store was totally mean-spirited and nihilistic. Ugh.

3rd, "The Hidden Girl and Other Stories", by Ken Liu, 2020, 470 pages, 127k words; a collection of 19 short stories. There is 1 3-parter. This is a fabulous collection, a lot of post-singularity stories, and some stories with humanity-at-the-end-of-time kind of cosmic themes. A really enjoyable read.

4th, "Gnomon", subtitled "A Novel", by Nick Harkaway, 2018, 875 pages, 238k words.

The reason for my opening pun reminiscence. This is a fabulous novel. 4 threads - no, 5 threads - no, ??? threads - that all come to overlap and flow together in a fascinating manner. A satisfying conclusion, and I was not surprised at all then the author violates the 4th wall at the end. The last 2 sentences in the book:

I am Gnomon.

From this moment, so are you.

Nice! This was the best sci-fi I have read in a good while. It reminded me a very little of maybe "Cloud Atlas" - but much more coherent and well-done. This novel probably could be considered literature rather than genre if you care about such things.

Looking up Harkaway on Wikipedia, his real name is Nicholas Cornwell, son of David John Moore Cornwell - pen name John le Carré. Le Carré died in 2020, hopefully he read it and was rightfully proud of son for this novel.