The Circumference of the World

by Lavie Tidhar

Tidhar’s Circumference of the World (2023) is a genre-splitting poetic expression that pays homage to classic science fiction with call-outs and appearances by Campbell, Heinlein, and others. There are several rather loosely-connected sections to the book, which is actually a book about a book, a book that disappears as it is read and which few even believe ever existed. For those who believe in its existence, finding it is fraught with many kinds of peril, not the least of which is loosening one’s grounding in what appears to be this reality. Lode Stars was written by the infamous Eugene Charles Hartley, legendary pulp science-fiction writer and founder of the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes. In Hartley’s novel, a doppelganger of Delia searches for her missing father in a strange star. On the way, we question the nature of reality and the nature of what it means to be human. Perhaps in the end, it is merely our consciousness that really exists and the rest is just a dream, a fantasy, an artificial construct. Perhaps we have yet to find our way out of the matrix. “There were men – they were always men- who dreamed of understanding God. Einstein, Hawking, or that evolutionary biology guy.” “‘But maybe humans are not capable of fully understanding the universe'” and “maybe its hubris to think that we can.'”