Lavie Tidhar’s The Circumference of the World is the second 2023 book I have encountered that sets its plot in the postwar West Coast science fiction community of L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, and Robert Heinlein. Exadelic by Jon Evans uses an AI with suspicious motives to move characters to an alternate 1946 where the party at the Parsons estate is going full blast.
Tidhar employs a more complicated device. A mathematician is married to a physicist who becomes obsessed with a legendary book by Eugene Charles Hartley, a stand-in for Hubbard with a bit of Philip K. Dick for spice. When her husband goes missing, the mathematician hires a reclusive rare book dealer to investigate. In the book, we find that a double of the mathematician is a major character. (Add creepy sound effect here.) Along the way, we are given Hartley’s backstory with some amusing jibes about Heinlein’s fascination with nudism.
Now that all the Golden-Age pulpsters are dead, they seem to be fair game for the mythmakers. Tidhar offers a stylish example. ( )

A chase for a book that disappears on being read, in a world that may or may not be real… a vibrant, engaging premise - sadly let down by the book’s execution.

But first, the good. The premise really is something, and the book thoughtfully poses big questions about how we know that what we’re experiencing is real - questions it knows better than to take a firm stance on. The first perspective is genuinely fascinating too - it’s not difficult to believe that Lavie Tidhar has spent time in Vanuatu based on the detail and the warmth for the setting and characters.

But this short novel soon hops onto the next viewpoint around which the story spins, and the the next, and the next. There’s surprisingly little plot, and what there is is often doled out with brevity as well as a lack of depth and, ironically enough, realism. Five viewpoints spread across a modest 250 pages, all covering across loosely related events, doesn’t give the reader enough time or nuance to buy-in with many of the characters. The elements themselves are disparate in quality too: while Delia and Oskar’s tales are intriguing, the attempt to make Daniel’s vague comes across as amateurish and the epistolary component feels like a very light re-skin of certain real life events.

All in all… while this book promises much, I think the reality is that others have done it better. If you want a story-within-a-story, Rian Hughes’s XX pulls that off with more success. If you want delightfully weird and open, Phillip K Dick’s Ubik reigns supreme. And the book that doesn’t-exist-but-did-it? is handled with more skill by Jeremy Dronfield in The Alchemist’s Apprentice.

Ultimately this is a 3/5 for me. Thank you to Netgalley, Tachyon Publications and Lavie Tidhar for the opportunity to read an ARC of this upcoming book in exchange for an honest review.

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Lavie Tidhar's creativity astounds me. This novel is many things, and many genres including biography, mystery and of course science fiction. SF fans will appreciate the mentions of and allusions to many of the genre's authors, fans and critics. One major character is based on one later very famous pulp author. ( )

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got a copy of this as an ebook through NetGalley to review.

Thoughts: I liked this but didn't love it as much as some of Tidhar's other books. It gets pretty abstract at points and can be a bit hard to follow. It is interesting food for thought and beautifully written though.

The book is broken into different parts that follow different characters. At first we follow is Delia, a math professor whose husband, Levi, goes suddenly missing after obsessing over a book called Lode Stars. Then we follow Daniel Chase, a young book dealer that Delia comes to for help when her husband goes missing. Next we hear from Oskar Lens a mobster obsessed with finding Lode Stars. Then we also hear from Eugene Hartley himself as he writes Lode Stars and then back to Delia but this is Delia as shown in the book Lode Stars as she journeys back to Earth.

The theory that goes throughout the book is around a religion that was created from the Lode Stars book that speculates that everything in the world is a construct and nothing is really real anymore. There is some theory that the world is being recycled through black holes (I may have misunderstood this theory, it's a bit ambiguous). The story kind of twists around itself as we journey through space and time and reality to mostly end up back where we started.

I enjoyed the beautiful writing and found this very readable. However, it can be hard to follow at times and ends up being a bit ambiguous. It's one of those books that I think you have to read through a few times to really understand everything that is happening here. I enjoyed it but I didn't love it and I probably won't pick it up again.

My Summary (4/5): Overall this was interesting and provides some intriguing food for thought. However, it's also a bit twisty, turny...hard to follow...and ambiguous. Some of the theories explored here are unique and interesting, but it takes some effort to try and understand what happens in the end. This isn't my favorite Tidhar book, I liked "The Escapement" better. However, it did feed my itch for a unique and different read...which is something Tidhar excels at. ( )

If you love a novel of ideas, and are a fan of Mid-Century pulp science fiction, and are up for unconventional story telling, this inventive novel will knock your socks off.

An albino woman from a Pacific island is losing her husband to his obsession over a book, a book that can’t be found but is rumored to hold the answer to life’s biggest questions about the nature of reality.

The book is The Lode Star, written by Eugene Hartley, a pulp fiction sci-fi writer who turned his ideas into a religion. The book is about a woman named Delia who crosses the universe to find her missing father. Hartley believed that all of what we call real and reality are only reconstructed memories from matter swirling inside a black hole through which the eyes of God watches us.

It’s a story, everything is a story. Without stories we can’t really be human.
from Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar

Tidhar was inspired by golden age sci-fi writers and draws from esoteric scientific theories. This wildly inventive novel is quite a trip! From Delia’s early life on a South Seas island to searching for her missing husband, to the fictional Delia’s otherworldly journey, the novel proves again the power of story.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. ( )