The Thing Itself, by Adam Roberts

I read this after reading his later philosophical SF novel, "The This". I think The This is better, but The Thing Itself is absolutely worth reading. The blurb does it no justice at all, it must have been written by someone who had the book described to them third-hand.

In both The This and The Thing Itself Adam Roberts tries to bring philosophical concepts in by way of physical instantiations. So in The This there's a Dialectic trying to bring itself into being. In The Thing Itself we get to meet, well, the thing itself--Kant's "Ding An Sich". Because we perceive the world through our senses, what we know of things is what our senses report to us. This much was understood by Plato, and elucidated in his Cave analogy. Kant goes further in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics to argue that our ways of moving in the world and categorizing it, like space and time, are also constructions out of our mental nature, and that the world does not necessarily work that way at all. Certainly advanced physics from Einstein through Feynman makes this clear--the world is stranger than we can imagine.

What I can't quite get past with this one is that, in order to drive a plot, our protagonist and his nemesis get to SEE and interact with The Thing Itself, by way of an AI that can get past categories. This seems to me like any other advanced scientific instrument, like a particle accelerator or the James Webb Space Telescope. These tools are designed to go beyond our sensory and mental categories.

But in order to interpret the output of these tools we have to bring it back to where our senses can apprehend it--false color, loose analogies, etc. There is, as Kant says, no way for us to "see" The Thing Itself. And our instruments don't really do that either, they are just built to examine things from different perspectives.

So my philosophical hangup kept me from the thorough suspension of disbelief that you need in order to enjoy a novel. But I still loved it. No other SF novels have made me think so hard. Kudos to Adam Roberts for having the guts to write novels like this.

My Goodreads Review