Book cover of "The End of Mr. Y" by Scarlett Thomas

A while ago, I read PopCo, also by Scarlett Thomas, and I found it a fantastic read. It had a compelling and believable story and it gave me lots to think about, which is basically all I need from a book. I was therefore looking forward to reading The End of Mr. Y. I’m afraid I didn’t quite like it as much.

Partly that is because the story doesn’t really make a lot of sense, avoids  interesting questions and answers others the wrong way. The book is about a place, called the Troposhere or Mindspace, which is generated by the shared subconsciousnesses of all animals, or at least all mammals. Whether fish/bacteria are included as well isn’t mentioned. The space is entered via a homoeopathic concoction that was first discovered by the writer of a fictional book with the same title as this book.

The Troposhere looks different for anyone who enters it, and anyone who does can use it to infiltrate the minds of people or animals without their victims knowing it. Once a mind is entered, the minds of beings close to that person or animal can be entered as well, and by close we mean all kinds of close. This way, even dead relatives’ minds can be entered and time travel is also possible. Several time travel paradoxes are created but remain unresolved with phrases like “time doesn’t work that way”. I find that disappointing.

The main character, Ariel Manto, reads the book, brews the potion and enters the Troposphere. She meets a mouse god, a being who is generated by the combined praying of a small sect somewhere in the U.S. Later in the book, we find that the Christian god is created the same way, but he is a lot more powerful since power is determined by the number of people doing the praying. The mouse god protects her from two renegade American secret agents who need a monopoly on the Troposphere’s usage to use it as a weapon and therefore try to kill her. When she learns how to, she simply changes their minds, while she take refuge in a church. The agents can’t enter the church, but it remains unclear why. In fact: as commenter Sabina explains, there is an explanation as to why they can’t enter the church. I seem to have missed it.

In the first half of the book, there is a scene in which Ariel needs to access files on a computer that she can’t login to because she doesn’t have the password. This computer is going into storage within ten minutes, but she doesn’t know what she is looking for on it. The solution to this problem is easy, if you know what’s going on. Just take out the hard drive and put it in your own computer so you can access it from there. Instead, she asks someone from the computer department to reset the password, puts the My Documents folder on her iPod and hopes she has the files that she needs.

This is not terribly important, but illustrative as the same thing happens to the supposedly interesting discussions that follow on more substantial subjects. At some point in the story, Ariel makes a case that either God has triggered the universe or there must be multiple universes. She derives this from the fact that the original Big Bang-particle must have been a normal particle to which quantum physics applied. It didn’t. Basically, quantum physics only applies to small things, while Einstein’s relativity only applies to big things. The Big Bang particle is where both theories must come together (small particle, big mass) so both theories break down. The same happens in black holes. The entire discussion that proceeds from this point ignores that and is therefore useless.

There is also a discussion between a geneticist and a theologian about science (evolution, Big Bang)  versus myth (creationism, I.D.) which ends in the theologian claiming that you can’t really prove anything, so scientific theories are just as meaningless as myths. This is presented as a proper philosophic stand point, but is in fact nothing more than a cheap creationists’ trick known as solipsism. What the theologian basically says is this: my world view and my observation do not correspond, so I adapt my observation. The geneticist should have seen through this.

Subjects are discussed and dropped without reaching a satisfying conclusion. Characters in the book theorise about machine code, which exists more or less in the way they describe it, but I can’t determine if Thomas knows that, because she makes mistakes. She makes the age-old mistake that the most basic form of information in computers is ones and zeros. It’s not, it’s electrical currents that are interpreted as ones and zeros. Since in the same discussion electrons play a different role from the binary digits, the discussion is flawed.  I could go on. There are many examples in the book that sound smart but really aren’t.

Ariel goes back in time to free the first generation of lab mice and in the end prohibits the book from being written in the first place. By then she has a companion, Adam, who has already died by staying too long in Ariel’s head and starving, but he is still alive in the generated shared consciousness. This is neither logical nor explained.

In the end Ariel and Adam travel throughout the Troposhere, get to the end and enter a nice garden with a tree and a river. Then the books ends with Ariel saying “And then I understand”. Understand what, exactly? At the end of consciousness there is Eden? What does it mean?

Not very good.

I never shared the Martin Bril’s predelection for France, or his interest in Napoleon, but the fact that the emperor started the ninetheenth century by sweeping away most of the decadent European aristocracy must mean that he had some kind of vision. In some ways sadly, this was as definite as a wednesday security patch for a bad American operating system, because his version of the new century didn’t last very long.

Martin Bril’s book is a collection of columns about Napolean that he wrote for various news papers. He calls the subject his passion, which is made evident by the way he writes about him, but I can’t figure out why exactly Bril holds Napoleon in such high regard. Bril mostly lists Napoleon’s deficiencies and forgets to write about his allegedly brillant strategic insights and barely describes the way he introduced standards in Europe that still hold today.

The book is easily readable (except for a couple of untranslated citations in French) and Bril tells a couple of illustrative anecdotes, but I fail to see the point of this book. If Napoleon is not your cup of tea, the book is uninteresting, and if he is, you probably know already anything that’s in there.

Forward the Foundation is the last  book Asimov wrote for his Robot/Foundation metaseries. It is the second book about Seldon’s efforts to develop his psychohistory science, a way of predicting the future using statistics. The events in the book take place after Prelude to Foundation and before the first book of the original Foundation trilogy. Like Prelude to Foundation, the book is mainly about the difficulties Seldon has in his research. He has enemies and opponents who make life difficult for him, and friends who can do little to help him. All this is set against a backdrop of a decaying empire.

It is an odd book, mainly because its just not a very good story. In fact, it is several stories in a row, each with the psychohistory development as their background thread, Seldon and a few others as main characters, and a continuing trend towards making Seldon’s goals seem more hopeless with each passing page. Seldon is able to overcome every hurdle through coincidences, which is also what brings the book to  a happy end in which he can set up things so that humanity is spared a thirty thousand year long Middle Ages.

Apart from the fact that this unlikely rescue seems to contradict the very idea of psychohistory, it also makes for an unsatisfying book. Except for Prelude, Asimov’s characters usually solve their problems using logic and ingenuity, which is what makes them so incredibly fun to read. Also very unsatisfying is the sudden disappearance of a few main characters without any kind of explanation or closure. If Asimov wanted the reader to feel Seldon’s loss, that is not the way to do it.

The story centres around Hari Seldon, who proposes a statistical way to predict the future of humanity, during a talk at a conference on Trantor, the Galactic Empire’s capital planet. The Empire’s aide Eto Demerzel, as well as the Emperor’s main challenger, the Mayor of Wye, both want to make use of this new tool to increase their power. Seldon convinces both that his proposal has a long way to go before becoming useful, but both insist that that isn’t necessary to make the common man believe that Seldon is some sort of oracle. Seldon meets a man, Chetter Hummin, who tells him that, rather than allowing him to fall in their opponent’s hands, Demerzel and Wye would rather kill him. Seldon, protected by historian Dors Venabili (female), in an attempt to escape them, starts travelling around Trantor, while trying to find out if his science can be made practical.

An an Asimov-story, this book contains logical discussions and unexpected plot-twists. However, they are too late, too little, and too predictable. The biggest problem with this book however is that it lacks direction. While looking for ways to develop his science, Seldon goes through a couple of episodes that make little sense. Venabili’s tenacity in protecting Seldon from any and all danger seems without reason either. She seems to have abandoned a successful career and a rich social life with far too little justification. And even though Seldon and she share many dangerous and intimate situations, there is no relational development between them at all.

As always with Asimov, all the answers come at the very end, but he gives us nothing during the rest of the book. In his other novels, false explanations that are nonetheless just as probable, are offered all the time, and it is this constant turning up-side-down of things that makes these stories compelling. It is a pity this book has almost none of that. With the badly worked-out characters of Seldon and Venabili, and an R. Daneel Olivaw who is a mere shadow of his former self, what remains is a book that leaves the reader with an unsatisfied sense of ‘who cares’, and which serves no purpose for itself. Instead this novel seems to be written only to fill in some story gaps and make Seldon aware of the events in the Robot novels.