Alan Lightman

Alan Lightman, physicist, penned this work of fiction as an imagining of the month of dreams Albert Einstein might have had prior to completing his Special Theory of Relativity. Einstein is working as a patent clerk in Berne, Switzerland, while calculating his theory on the side. The 30 chapters relate the various ways time can be perceived from a repetitious circle to a flowing stream, a three pronged option at every decision to a life lived in a day, a life with no future to one reliving the past. The vignettes show what he envisions people would do each context. Interspersed in 3 interludes are Einstein's conversations with his best friend Besso, his sounding board. Interesting imagining.… (more)

The narrator lives in the void with his aunt and uncle, and the void is without dimension or time until the narrator, Mr g, imagines these things. This sets off a series of events where the narrator creates a number of universes and experiments with their various properties. He eventually creates a universe with a simple but distinct set of rules that is able to exist for a while. Those rules lead to matter, to galaxies, and planets. Some of the planets bear autonomous life. Mr g and his aunt and uncle, and an adversary, debate on how or whether he should interact with the residents of those planets, and Mr g focuses on a couple of poignant cases of autonomous beings pleading with him.

All the processes described in the book, including the creation of the universes and the simple rules the apply, and their consequences are in accord with current theory, and Lightman does a great job of presenting them all clearly and dramatically through Mr g's perspective. His interactions with the adversary and his minions are fascinating and also poignant; Mr g needs the adversary to learn and follow the consequences of his actions.

This is a short, very readable and fascinating book. Its theme is how creating and interacting with the universe(s) changes its creator, and Mr g is an engaging character (though the adversary is a fascinating character too).

For me a failing of the book is that it is not really strange enough. The autonomous beings in the created universe all seem to be stand-ins for humans, even when they are on the surface very different. Mr g himself, though he is fascinating does not break through to the truly alien or dare I say god-like. It's maybe expecting too much for fiction to present us with the truly alien, but that still seems to me where the author fails.

That said, this thin book packs a lot; I read it on a long plane ride, and it stayed with me for not a few days afterwards.… (more)

I bought this book from a charity shop because it looks adorable. The irregular page lengths give it a pseudo-vintage look, although in fact the binding is glued not sewn. It’s also small enough to be convenient as a backup book on train journeys, for occasions when you finish the first book you brought with you. Given the frequency of train delays (thanks, Abellio Greater Anglia!) it is important to always have such a backup.

This book is short and consists of vignettes, so I got through it quickly. The conceit is that Einstein is writing up his theory of time and dreaming of many different ways in which time might operate. For instance, a world of erratic cause and effect, one of locally varied time, and one in which time cannot be measured. I found these charming and they reminded me of Italo Calvino, possibly even slightly of Borges. The vignettes are pretty but quite slight, though, with none of the layers and mysteries that Borges includes. Overall I was left with a positive but not terribly profound impression. I enjoyed the book as a set of thought experiments, but it isn’t really a novel. There is only the barest plot and Einstein, whose dreams the reader is nominally inhabiting, remains utterly enigmatic.… (more)