A steaming pile of shit.

A challenging book quite entertaining in parts and thought provoking. One of my favourite quotes from the book:

"Mathematics is what the world is when we subtract our own perceptions."

I, LOGICON

Billy who is fourteen going on four.

He was native to a permanent inner environment
just as certain fish as a species never
stray from costal waters.

His shape was carved in the very air—
body and mind forever.

One zero one:

Not only the lowest three-digit prime but the smallest three-digit palindrome. Not only reads the same forward and back but rightside up and upside down. And not only when looked at directly but also when reflected in a mirror. Continues to yield palindromes not only when squared and cubed but when raised to even higher powers.

People wait at the places of their dreaming. Time is pure and all place is birthplace, the dreamtime site.

We have X-Ray silhouettes and stereoscopic photographs to prove it. The heart of an astronaut actually shrinks. So do his limbs and torso. Nothing tugs at the man in space. There is no want. None of that universal suck and gulp. His muscles lose tone. His blood accumulates in the wrong places. Chemicals in his body become deranged. In short there is none of the poetry of falling matter. Want is everything. Everything wants. Without want, the bones lose calcium. Without want, potassium vanishes. It used to be thought that matter was falling. In the beginning matter fell. It fell uniformly. It was in the nature of matter to fall. The uniform motion of falling matter meant there was no interaction between particles. No force intervened to disrupt the uniform and utterly beautiful matter-fall of all things everywhere. But then there was a swerve, it was thought. Something, or everything, was nudged into the most imperceptible of swerves. Two particles lightly touched, adhering for the most imperceptible of seconds. This random interaction was the origin of the universe as we know it and fear it today. Units glided into place, every level of descent opening to the fall of the toy-bright object. Shadows of departed figures themselves departed. To fall in this way, uniformly, equal to but never influenced by other falling things, seemed almost to dispel the sorrow of ponderous being. Free, unswerving and independent of friction, the plunge was like a childhood sigh, devoid of obedience and rote, never evolving, nowhere close to the boned-out howl of those voices departed to the edge of the pure word…

You went up to twelve
and then from thirteen down the other side
to twenty-four (a ladder,
he’d one day reflect
—or a stellated twilligon)
and it was easy to see that
every corresponding set of numerals
added up to twenty-five
—the number twenty-five
also possessed a certain immovability
refusing to disappear or even change places
when raised to the second, third, fourth
or higher powers.

LANGUAGE INVIOLATE
FORGIVE US OUR STAMMER

The feeling is that an answer at this point would only beg the question.

Existenz. Oblivio obliviorum. Nihil ex nihilo. Nada de nadiensis. Pythagoras.

She didn’t believe the book she was determined to write would include a great many of her own past experiences, at least not as they occurred in the special trembling weather in which she’d stood. Still, memory might yield the nuance and bone earth necessary to make fictional people. Having herself been a character in someone else’s novel, she tried to anticipate the nature of successive reflections she might eventually have to confront. She sat on the bed, playfully mingling the words “fear itself fear itself fear itself” into the instructions she mumbled concerning needles and threads and a different line of thinking.

La traducción no le hace justicia. Cuenta con varios pasajes (e ideas) satíricos memorables, pero el absurdo se agota muy pronto; el ritmo se disgrega; al igual que sucede con los objetivos de los experimentos, la historia va perdiendo en interés y, paralelamente, en propósito (el sin sentido es simplemente demasiado--y pertenece en exceso a su tiempo--1976-, en el que este tipo de experimentación resultaba novedoso); aunque, eso sí, las últimas cien páginas son verdaderamente buenas, trepidantes y guardan (¡bravo!) un eco innegable con el final de Teorema, de Pasolini (1968), en el que el ser humano simplemente da un grito de desesperación que, a la vez, tiene mucho de rebeldía, de humanismo y de afirmación.

The most important thing you need to know about this book is that 101 is the first three digit prime. If you think about it, it all falls into place.

Delillo's fourth novel is mystery for those who have read it closely. I just borrowed an audio e-copy out of curiosity, because it was available*. And I probably only kept listening because I really liked the reader, Jacques Roy, who is challenged here to come up a zillion different male and female voices. It was always curious but in very odd ways, and I found my attention sometimes engaged, but often less than perfectly attentive. Maybe it was more of an audio skim.

This is basically a philosophically playful novel that has some issues with science, math and logic. Billy Twillig is a 14-yr-old winner of the Nobel Prize for obscure work in mathematics (There is no Pulitzer Prize in math, he was apparently given a special addition). He takes on a position in secret research group staffed full of exceptional scientists from a variety of different fields, many of them very strange and well outside stem-stuff, who are working to figure out an extraterrestrial message that came from an object known as Ratner's Star.

There are numerous characters and most of them make single appearances. Each one has a philosophy that he or she tells Billy about, and each philosophy is very carefully thought out from their specialty and then extends from there, and, as we soon discover, each one eventually reaches a very weird point. The idea is that these are serious (and seriously odd) individuals who have pressed into their ideas as deeply as they could go and tried to push further and get something more. The last part of the book has Billy involved with a group trying to come up with a perfectly logical language that any being could understand simply by following the logic. The name Gödel doesn't come up, but if I understand correctly, he more or less proved this was impossible long before all this. This group doesn't seem to aware of this, but so they go. It's, of course, all fruitless, but in some mind-bending and fun ways.

Wikipedia tells me "The novel develops the idea that science, mathematics, and logic—in parting from mysticism—do not contain the fear of death, and therefore offer no respite."

-----------------------------------------------

14. Ratner's Star (audio) by Don DeLillo
reader: Jacques Roy
published: 1976
format: 16:04 overdrive audiobook (~446 pages, 448 pages in paperback)
acquired: Library
listened: Feb 22 – Mar 16
rating: 3½

*I'm not sure, but I think this audio version was only released in December

Man, woman or child:

Do not be alarmed. Ratner’s Star is complete bullshit. Your assessment within the first few pages will prove to be correct. This is a powerful study on the the excesses, the triumphs and failures of the human mind. Bruce Allen from the Chicago Tribune sums it up best. Ratner’s Star is a prodigious satire on those pioneers who journey beyond the frontiers of knowledge and end up more ignorant than they were when they set forth.

Billy, our Nobel Prize winning mathematical genius, is but a mere pup catapulted into an arena of world renown crazies and fellow mathematicians on a scary hyper-genius level. A radio signal is captured from the outer reaches of space (presumed to be shot off from or around Ratner’s Star, which may or may not be binary, which may or may not even be real). Billy's impossible role is to decode the message itself among other mental hybrids.

What we know about Billy, what we need to know, is that Billy is essentially a non-character just like every other person or thing he meets in the story; he didn't speak out loud until he was three years old, etc. doesn’t matter in the end. Billy is an outsider, and takes over as a proxy for the reader's inquisitive mind. And what he witnesses on every page is fevered with eccentrics that blur the line between genius and insanity. They are contained and straight-jacketed by their own ploys to outdo one another; is it no wonder that the title of the book is in the possessive case? Mathematics made sense, bi-level coding, the mysteries of the Space Brain, Field Experiment Number One, the strange elusive semblance of the self when staring up at the mirroring black sky. This is the lost chapter of Infinite Jest written two decades before Infinite Jest with all the hilarity and absurdity, all of its special effects and technical wizardry kept intact.

“Consider the fact that, relative to their respective diameters, the average distance between stars is roughly the same as the average distance between atomic particles in interstellar space. Is this mere ‘coincidence’?” One of many questions not offered to us as a challenge, but as a matter of reverence to the very real existing unknown out there. Even our current powers of scientific deduction will look at such a profound question with another question; every answer once began as a theory inside someone's head; everything is susceptible to a transformation, whether remarkable or deranged; ”Why sad?” Bill said. “The birth of a baby equals the death of a fetus. This experience recreates itself throughout our lives.” Billy asks a relatively mundane question like where the bathroom is, and is given a two page expose on seemingly unrelated topics, breaking news hits that Ratner’s Star is in fact a binary star, oh, wait, it isn't, then several paragraphs later the mutant responds, “Upstairs and to the left.”

Little Billy Twillig stepped aboard a Sony 747 bound for a distant land. This much is known for certain are the opening lines to the book. DeLillo does his part keeping us in the know that we’re under the derangement of bullshit. Even when there is no resounding purpose other than to bludgeon you over the head with the fact that what you’re reading is characterless and pointless. This is the slick meditation of a mathematical know-it-all recounting Pi just to show you that he can. The book as a whole does not exist. Readers decide if it has to.

But "We’re talking around it. We’re making sounds to comfort ourselves. We’re trying to peel skin off a rock. But this, according to Mainwaring, quoting Mohole, is simply what we do to keep from going mad.”

Just when the book becomes fascinating, when we delve deeper into the mystery of the message sent to them from space, a character goes on a psycho babble rampage, and they dismiss the importance of said mystery outright. They're right, though. There exists no mystery in plot here. You are to be entertained by the wild imaginative things people say and then move on. The Post-Modern jibber-jabber exists to tell you that the Post-Modern jibber-jabber exists. Its purpose is to enlighten you on how to unravel your very own ego via a Socratic mantra. The important thing is the language, not the machine. In this way, DeLillo has created a means of bombarding you with so much bullshit, it elevates you to a level of understanding with our own destructive genius. "Our knowledge of the world. The world itself. Each, the other and both. They’re one and the same, after all. It’s been said that philosophy teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth about all things and to make ourselves admired by the less learned. There’s one branch of philosophy this definition doesn’t cover. Bi-Levelism. Bi-Levelism teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth and falsity about all things to make ourselves admired by the more learned.”

The secret task of logic may be the rediscovery of play. There’s no doubt that DeLillo is a genius. He’s a threat to the general popcorn-munching Pepsi-guzzling populace. Often times Ratner's Star jumps around incoherently just to show us the inevitable failure within us all. And because of this, if Ratner’s Star wasn’t continuously jarring in its cold brilliance, it would have easily gotten one regular old nameless star.

"Alternate physics, if it teaches us anything,” Speidell said, “it teaches us that once you go across the line, once you’re over the line and left without your classical sources, your rational explanations, the whole of your scientific ethos, once this happens you have to pause. You have to pause as we may have to pause someday in the future. You’re over the line, sure, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep going or hurl yourself into the uncharted void. This is nonsense. You pause. You reflect.

DeLillo leaves the reflecting up to the reader. But just as the Mainwaring whispered: ”Things are interesting up to a point. Then they aren’t interesting anymore.” The inevitable screw loose in our perfected armor, DeLillo proposes that we are the smartest creatures in the universe, that is, until we meet someone or something that is smarter. He also proposes, at least to me, that we have no evidence to deny the fact that a rainbow-colored space whale lives in the center of the universe. Where he fails, though, is that he prematurely assumes that our patience is ready for this haul of bullshit and hilarity and profundity as well.

As to the mystery of the space message? If you actually reach the end of the book, it's assumed that it was sent from Earth many millions (?) of years ago. If so, this is probably the most eye-opening part of the book, because would not then Billy and his freak show friends be the future of ourselves? Could it be that the people who sent that message out into space was us to begin with, as in you and I? If so, doesn't Ratner's Star, the book, its language, actually become the code or cipher itself? Are we all internalizing DeLillo's words and propelling them out into space? Is the rainbow-colored space whale that sits and waits in the center of the universe just hungry for our interpretations and inner reflections? Is there an even greater kind of intelligence that thrives on chaos and seemingly random ideas? What if that rainbow-colored space whale is actually turquoise? What if you and me are actually right?

Did you ever read any of Johnathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels? Well if you haven't, or don't remember it very well, or got bored with it before you could reach the third book, go Google 'Laputa' and read the summary on Wikipedia. I'll see you again in just a few minutes.

Laputa is mainly a satire of the Royal Society, populated by absurd characters afflicted by by strange physical deformities and weilding whimsical inventions of dubious practicality that reflect a blindness induced by too much idle speculation and theorizing. Ratner's Star is an entire novel dedicated to applying a similar concoction of satire directed towards a more grand target: modern scientific pursuits. Instead of Gulliver, the thinly veiled author-insert observer character is Billy Twillig, a bronx raised pubescent who has won the Nobel Prize in mathematics for his work on numbers he calls Zorgs. He is ferried off to an isolated desert research facility in order to decipher a message that is, at least at the start of the novel, understood to be from an extra-terrestrial civilization who live on a planet in orbit around a celestial gas body of the book's title.

The first half of the book is a parade of bizarre characters whose scientific pursuits have either been stymied by the adoption of strange behaviors and mental breakdowns or are all too parallel to fanciful mystic practices. A few personal favorites include a Jesuit Priest whose study of red ant secretions informs his odd beliefs about how human semen must be handled, a pair of thuggish cartel members who want to hook Billy's brain up to a computer (called the Logicon) for profit, and Billy's personal mentor Elux Troxyl (yes, that's his name) whose work on decoding the same message as Billy has driven him to live in a hole in the ground, drinking mud and eating insects. Very little in terms of plot advancement occurs in the first part of the book, which is told in a more conventional narrative style and takes up two-thirds of the page-length. The second part of the book is where the majority of the plot develops. It takes on an unconventional and extremely challenging narrative style which merges numerous, nearly stream of consciousness narratives into something approaching a singular one, broken up only occasionally by Billy's thoughts before they themselves are merged into it.

Ratner's Star questions the overall reliability of the 'hard' academic practices, like math and science, in comparison to 'less substantial' practices like art and language. Many works have attempted this only to find themselves mired in untenable, dismissive nihilism towards scientific pursuits that one could argue Ratner's Star is far from immune to. However, what redeems this book from others is how DeLillo's prose unites brackish superstition and insane mysticism with the modern tenants of scientific understanding in each character's mind. Beliefs about the universe we now dismiss, like homunculi in sperm or karma, were once studied with the same amount of fervor as physics and genetics. The novel stands as an amusing omen, reminding us that our minds which understand the heavens through astronomy are still the same which understand it through astrology, and that the present models of human understanding we adhere to now are never immune to impending obsolescence as more accurate models of human knowledge loom out of reach.

I recommend it with a caveat: unless you are a serious Don DeLillo junkie, you will probably hate this book.

DeLillo is an unbelievably skillful writer. Just on a sentence by sentence level, the man's ability to put words together is a marvel. Which is really the only saving grace of this early work. The whole book is written in a self-assured post-modern prose familiar to any reader of DeLillo (and to any reader of Pynchon, DFW, etc.) There are intermittent flashes of brilliant and hilarious dialogue peppered throughout. The book is full of manic ranting and cosmic mumbo-jumbo on science and the nature of the universe, and certain passages are beautifully written, self-consciously artificial and stilted, and thrumming with esoteric paranoia. In short, DeLillan through and through. But ultimately, it fell flat for me. This is a shaggy dog of a book, written broadly as satire of a certain kind of discourse prevalent in academia and industrial science, but without any plot, character, or emotional hooks.

This is a book where every character is consumed by intellectual pursuits, and the themes of mysticism and its relation to mathematics are examined with the fervor and jumpiness of a cokehead's monologue. But, for all its intellectual themes, it doesn't feel like an intelligent book to me. It rings quite hollow, as though we're listening a student trying out the language but without a deep understanding of the material. I wasn't really convinced DeLillo had anything of note to say about his themes.

It's ostensibly a story about a child prodigy joining a secret Big Science facility to work on deciphering a message from the titular star. However, the plot clearly holds only glancing interest for DeLillo, and most of the book is a flimsy excuse to get the protagonist Billy into conversation with various eccentrics. Several of those conversations are hysterically funny, including the Crown Heights Jewish patter of Pitkin, the paranoid and mystical exhortations of Endor, and the pervy, pompous boasts of Mohole. Pitkin's oaths for if he's lying, which are a building series of misfortunes that puzzlingly fall upon his interlocutor, had me rolling. ("If I'm lying, may you inherit a hotel with ten thousand rooms and be found dead in every room.") DeLillo is definitely a skilled comic writer. However, none of those conversations really feel like they're between real individuals. Rather, DeLillo stands up each of these characters as comic archetypes or mouthpieces for certain aspects of his own point of view, provided in more or less manic fashion.

Further, what minor charms and tenuous plot the book holds unravel in the second half, where the text breaks down into a postmodernist soup of indeterminate subjects and stream of consciousness reveries that is, I think, intended to mimic and play upon the theme of periodic devolution that is bandied about in the text. The structure is a sort of metatextual pun on the mathematical tension between the many and the one. But golly gee, is it a chore to read! It robs the book of any forward momentum it had built up to that point, and unfortunately, the joke's on the reader.

Overall, this book reminds me of a lot of 70's sci-fi satire films like "A Boy and His Dog" -- it's scathing, bitterly funny stuff, but it feels kind of dated in approach, never grants its characters any independent existence, and feels very minor as criticism. I'm left somewhat befuddled by DeLillo's elevation of this work in his own personal canon. While I admire aspects of it, I didn't really enjoy it, and I don't think it deserves consideration as one of his better books. I'd give it 2.5/5 (Ratner's) stars.

A really creative story about a bunch of lunatics living together to answer the big questions. Kind of like Galt’s gulch written from a different perspective. They get a message in sequence 14-28-57 from space near Ratner’s star and recruit Billy to help decode it. First they think it’s a planet in Ratner’s solar system, then uncover that it’s a two-star system and there could be no planet there, then use moholes as a way to explain how the signal could be coming from somewhere else, then conclude it actually is a signal sent from earth millions of years ago. All this in a period of days to weeks with a silly sense of urgency. Billy is taken to a subterranean lair where an inner circle of other scientists work frantically to create the logically perfect language (Logicon) to send a message to space. Everyone (except Billy) is very narrowly intelligent and otherwise completely ridiculous. Halfway through the book multiple people tell Billy to stop working on the decoding, that isn’t not relevant until they sort out more details about where the message came from, but still Billy eventually decides it’s a time, 14:28:57. Billy kind of loses his mind by the end in a way that was similar to Infinite Jest. I was tracing along the plot of what the signal means and wanting Billy to be on to something, which is probably the opposite of the point. I didn’t follow the end with the time on the clock in Endor’s room and the solar eclipse and Softly going to Endor’s hole. What was it? Billy was right?

———

Billy spent a year and a half at Bronx High School of Science. The daily journey wasn't easy, two long bus rides each way, and most of the ground covered was part of a landscape renowned for incidental violence. Gangs often made raids on the bus. In the afternoon they came out of the sun like Kiowa braves, nine or ten teenage boys, riding the rear bumper, pounding on windows, forcing the back door and improvising scenes of flash-terror. He liked Bronx Science but was glad when the Center offered him a place.
"This isn't an ordinary dog," Babe [pb: his dad] said. "It's an attack dog. I say the word, this dog lunges. I say the word, everybody better beware.
This is a highly trained attack guard dog. With this dog at my side I can go into any neighborhood in the city."
"K.b.i.s.f.b.," Faye [pb: his mom] said.
"What's that mean?"
"Keep believing it, shit-for-brains."
"Nice talk in front of the kid," he said. "Where'd you hear that?"
"The kid brought it back from Connecticut."
Many times Faye and Billy stayed up until two or three in the morning, drinking coffee and watching old movies on TV. Across the airshaft a crazy old woman screamed and cursed. He could never make out what she was saying. Some nights he came close to understanding the sense of a particular shriek or the last several words in a long medley of invective. But it always eluded him. Although at times she seemed to be arguing with someone, there was never any voice besides her own. Most of the time she simply screamed a lot of fabricated words. People called her the scream lady. He was afraid of her but wanted to know what she was saying.
Faye took him to a department store on Fordham Road for a new suit to wear when he entered the School of Mathematics at the Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures. The University of Chicago wanted him. Caltech wanted him. Princeton was eager to get him. He was even offered a research post in Akademgorodok in the Soviet Union. The final bid came from the Institut für mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung in Münster. The name of the place scared him so much he never even replied. In the end he decided in favor of the Center, one of the best places in the world to do work in pure mathematics.

——-

Endor crawled into the second hole, returning moments later.
"Science requires us to deny the evidence of the senses," he said. "We see the sun moving across the sky and we say no, no, no, the sun is not moving, it's we who move, we move, we. Science teaches us this. The earth moves around the sun, we say. Nevertheless every morning we open our eyes and there's the sun moving across the sky, east to west every single day. It moves. We see it. I'm tired of denying such evidence. The earth doesn't move. It's the sun that moves around the earth. It's maggots that are generated spontaneously in rotten meat. It's the wind that causes tides. If the earth moved we'd get dizzy and fall off. If the moon and sun cause tides in oceans, why don't they cause tides in swimming pools and glasses of water? There's no variation in the microwave background. Why is this? Because we're at the center of the universe, that's why this is. Don't forget maggots. Whenever you see rotten meat you see maggots. In the meat. In and of the meat. Born of meat. Meat-engendered. Maggots come spontaneously from meat. If not, from where?"
"Flies lay eggs," Billy said.
"Flies lay eggs."
"Flies land on the meat and lay eggs. Isn't the maggot just an early stage in the fly cycle or whatever it's called? Flies lay eggs."
"Flies lay eggs," Endor said.

———-

"We meet at last."
"Who?" Billy said.
"Timur Nút's his name."
"You in your area of mathematics. I in mine. The two colossi. You with your loyal supporters. I with my own fervent assemblage. We bestride the mathematical firmament like colossi. Each with his own fol-lowing. Each able to refute the accepted formulations of the past with laughable ease, no? Keen sense of competition to be sure. But we are never less than gentlemen. Mutual respect. The true beneficiary is mathematics itself. You with your pure preoccupations. I with mine. Our combined genius beggars everything, including description."
Billy had never heard of Timur Nüt. He didn't know how to respond. Almost anything he said might be taken the wrong way. The man seemed very sure of his position. Someone this seedy and foreign, smiling ironically, couldn't be taken lightly. There were two possible ways to proceed. One was to say little or nothing. The second was to attempt a systematic destruction of the man's imagined stature. He felt two things could happen if he took the second approach. His devastating arguments would cause Nüt to break down completely, leading to one of two responses. Either an embarrassing plea for mercy or an episode of semiphysical retaliation. This latter possibility might include recriminating looks, one, and maybe abusive gestures, secondarily. But an attempt at systematic destruction could have an alternate effect, one much more likely than a breakdown and very terrible to contemplate. Timur Nüt by logical means would prove he was indeed a renowned mathematician, the equal of any. Using both inductive and deductive reasoning he would demonstrate an astounding verity, the kind of undislodgeable truth that would render absurd everything Billy had previously believed to be true. He had the seediness to do it.

——-

[At the underground torch ceremony with Nobel laureates and Ratner, who lives in an iron-lung type thing with a biomembrane that keeps him alive. Ratner wishes to talk to Billy, who occasionally relays the gist of the silly message to the others in the place]

Billy reported to the others: "Telescope in a dome in the backyard. Marriage to the man's daughter owning the house. Science pays off. He gazes between shifts."
The metallic lilt of Ratner's voice, when again he spoke, seemed to possess an extra shading, a suggestion of querulous tremor.
"You know what you remind me of?"
"What?"
"Somebody who's giving only one side of the story," the old man said. "Don't think I can't hear that you're reporting only science, leaving out the mystical content, which they could use a little exposure to, those laureates with their half a million Swedish kronor. It was less in my day. And don't think I didn't notice all that shrugging when I was saying black-white, male-female, a little bit of everything present in its opposite. Because I noticed."
"Some things are hard to summarize."
"Give the whole picture," Ratner said.
"I'll do better."
"If you want to repeat, repeat both sides."
"From now on you'll see improvement."
…
He [Billy] realized he had no torch. No one had given him a torch. Nevertheless he walked over to Pitkin [Ratner’s assistant], not knowing what else to do and finding it a reasonably easy procedure. To counteract an intangible threat to one's sense of existence it may be necessary only to take a step from here to there. He looked up into the long coarse beard, feeling the sense of constriction begin to leave his body. Pitkin remained motionless, the candle burning at eye level.
"I have no torch."
"Well put," the advisor said. "You could make a care uttering truths."
"What happens next?"
"The old gentleman told me to tell you something even though you were in such a hurry you couldn't take time to pay a visit before the face collapsed and they had to inject. It was so serious they filled the needle right in front of him. That serious I never saw it. But he took time to give me a message, face or no face, even though a certain person I'm looking at was too much of a, smarty pants to climb inside. He told me whisper to the golem in his ear."
After a pause, Pitkin's lips began to move. However, no sound emerged.
"What did he tell you to whisper?"
The lips paused a second time. When they moved now, however, words were soon to follow.
"The universe is the name of G-dash-d. All of us. Everything. Here, there, everywhere. Time and space. The whole universe. It all adds up to the true name of G-dash-d."

———

He watched Softly approach the metal grating located near the base of the wall. This, of course, was the emergency exit point for the whole sector. Softly unclasped the grating and set it on the floor.
"We can't go in there except for man-made or natural disaster," Billy said. "They told me that. I nodded my head to show them I understood their statement. Floods, fires, wars, earthquakes."
"Do I get to pick one?"
"I don't like going down there for no reason."
"There's an emergency all right. I thought all along this would happen and it has. Cable traffic is heavy beyond belief."
"So what is it, some kind of alternate physics situation or the bottom is falling out of space or water doesn't boil at the boiling point anymore? Because around here that's the kind of emergency you get."
"Tensions," Softly said.
"What kind?"
"The worst kind. International tensions. Mounting international tensions. First there were states of precautionary alert. Then there were enhanced readiness contours. This was followed by maximum are situation preparedness. We can measure the gravity of events by tracing the increasingly abstract nature of the terminology. One more level of vagueness and that could be it. It's not just a localized thing either. We're dealing with global euphemisms now. Exactly how soon it'll break out depends on when x, representing the hostile will of one set of nations, and y, the opposing block, slip out of equilibrium in terms of capability and restraint coefficients. We could frame any number of cutie-pie equations but we've got more important work to do."

——-

"At any rate," Bolin said, "he explained that Mohole's model of the universe is a stellated twilligon with an n-bottomed hole."
"I see."
"This is also called a terminal mohole."
"Sounds ridiculous to me."
"I didn't want to say anything to him."
"Childlike."
"That's what I thought," he said, "That precise idea occurred to me."
"Which isn't to say it's not valid."
"Right-o."
"I suppose metamathematics would sound just as childlike to Mainwaring," she said. "And we both know nothing is more valid."
"Better keep your voice down, Edna."
"So go on."
"At any rate," Bolin said, "the whole thing apparently springs from forces that were created in the first split second after the big bang."
"The big bang," she said.
"Because Ratner's star lies within a suspected mohole, which is a tractional part, as I understand it, of the value-dark dimension, meaning no spatial area and no time, it was thought the signal picked up by the synthesis telescope was originating from Ratner's star. But it wasn't."
"This part I already know."
"It was just that the mohole had trapped the signal and sent it our way. Ratner's star is a binary dwarf. Couldn't possibly sustain a planet of any size."
"A binary dwarf," she said.
"Mainwaring and his people are trying to identify an actual mohole at the same time that they attempt to trace the signal to its real source."
"Yes."
"Unpredictable cosmic events are implicit in Moholean relativity."
"Yes," she said.
"If there are moholes, the physical laws in a mohole probably change, depending on the observer, where he is, whether he is moving or at rest, his rate of speed if he is moving."
"I see."
"A mohole has little or nothing in common with a black hole. A mohole is part of the innate texture of space. It is not a singularity, a collapsed object, a gravity pit. It is simply what is out there, numbering n.”
"A black hole," she said.
"In the last analysis, moholes are impossible to talk about. What we are really doing is imposing our own conceptual limitations on a subject that defies inclusion within the borders of our present knowledge. We're talking around it. We're making sounds to comfort ourselves. We're trying to peel skin off a rock. But this, according to Mainwaring, quoting Mohole, is simply what we do to keep from going mad."

——

"I mention the uranium business," Wu said, "only to suggest the possibility that our original evolutionary thrust was followed by a period of degeneration that might have been connected to radiation diseases and such. Then, at a crude toolmaking level, things swung upward once again, taking us to the point we now occupy. The answer we've arrived at here is probably the answer we've known, at some dim level of awareness, since the beginning. We've used a prescribed form, a rite of science it could almost be called, and it's included more thrills and chills than even the strata probably contains."
Mainwaring looked up from his notes.
"To summarize," he said.
They all looked at Mainwaring.
"In the untold past on this planet a group of humans transmitted a radio message into space. We don't know whether these people were directing their signals toward a particular solar system, toward a huge cluster of nearby stars, toward the center of our galaxy, toward another galaxy; or whether they knew of the existence and nature of the mohole totality and were perfectly aware that their message would return to planet Earth at a specific time in the future— a message, moreover, that was more likely to be preserved and detected, when we consider earthquakes, erosion and continental drift, in the form of a radio transmission than in a time capsule or other kind of sealed device."
"Applause," Bolin said.
"Now all we need to finish up the exercise," Softly said, "is Logicon on a platter, served up by Edna and Les. It's important we know how to reply to the message, regardless of content either way."
"We get back only what we ourselves give," Mainwaring said. "We've reconstructed the ARS extant and it turns out to be us."

——-

"I have deciphered the message," he [Billy] said.
"What a charming announcement," Softly said. "I didn't know you could even get the elevator to move. You have, I assume, been doing some wandering."
"I went to a few places up there but got lost a lot too, especially coming back."
"We're glad to see you, really and truly, but no announcements please. I think we've had enough of those."
"Something may happen at a certain time."
"Not interested."
"The pulses are meant to be seen as time on a clock. When it gets that time, I don't know but something may be meant to take place."
"Look, mister, the message is indecipherable. The only value the signals have is that they got us going on the Logicon project. The message was sent from this part of the galaxy, this solar system, this planet, and it was sent 'millions' and 'millions' and 'millions' of years ago. That's all we have to know about the message. Our remaining task is to frame a reply in a universal cosmic language. It doesn't matter what the reply is. Content is not the issue. So don't go around telling people you broke the code. There is no code worth breaking. If, by some accident, you have happened upon an interpretation that appears to make a moderate amount of sense from a mathematical viewpoint, we don't want to hear it."

This is a load of bat guano.

“His most spectacularly inventive novel” according to the New York Times. This I fear wasn’t really to my taste at all. I like plot and there wasn’t much plot here to like.

The book is in two parts: “Adventures” and “Reflections”, it is set in a near future where the protagonist, Billy Twerlliger, is an underdevelopped teenager who is a maths prodigy, he has won a new Nobel Prize for Mathematics.

Mathematics and fiction, what could go wrong…?

Billy is called, somewhat reluctantly, to a remote laboratory (named Field Experiment Number One) to decipher a string of code believed to have come from a newly discovered planet orbiting Ratner’s Star. The code consists of fourteen pulses, a gap, twenty eight pulses, a gap and fifty seven pulses. Nobel laureates from across the World have been drawn to the laboratory to decipher the code. Some of those working on the code go crazy, one called Endor ends up in a hole eating larvae and other creepy crawlies he finds in the ground.

Much is made of base sixty, could the signal be just a reference to the time (fifty seven seconds past 14.28)?

Billy is rather detached from the events and reminds me of another Billy, Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse Five.

The second half of the book, judders with different monologues, some interesting others not.

A sample of the text:

“Coming towards him was a woman wheeling a small carriage. She wore a long crystal-pleated sepia dress and was almost unendurably lovely, her face uncovered from some lost medallion, an ancient oval coin dug up and rubbed alive.”

Some parts are interesting like when one of the scientists, Maurice Wu, is crawling in a bat cave and his light goes out and he tries to remain calm despite the fear engulfing him.

Taste differs, I much prefer the Rolling Stones to The Beatles. Someone with a taste for postmodernism might love this novel, but it leaves me cold and unwilling to seek out any further works of Don DeLillo.

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. Delillo edition.