Thursday, September 3, 2009

The Einstein Intersection (Delany, Samuel R.) 1967

[reading completed 8/25/9]

Delany is really hit-or-miss for me. I absolutely enjoyed the Neveryon books and Babel-17, but couldn't get more than 100 pages into Dhalgren and only finished the Einstein Intersection because it was so short. As always with Delany, there are good thoughts in here; I simply don't care for how he's set them down on paper. One particularly interesting bit is about the titular "Einstein Intersection" (though note that, according to Gaiman's introduction the original title was A Fabulous, Formless Darkness), where the effects of the theories of Goedel finally "catch up with" the effects of the theories of Einstein, and humanity enters a near-godlike state, and eventually leaves this universe for some other one. Sounds a bit like the technological singularity popularized by Vinge, though without any overt reference to, or need for, intelligent machines.

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