Review by Duncan Lunan.

First published in different form, ParSec # 9, 9^th February 2024.

In this novel, Lode Stars is the title of one written in the 1950s by an imaginary pulp-SF author called Eugene Charles Hartley, founder of the globally successful Church of the All-Seeing Eyes, based on his ideas.  Parallels with L. Ron Hubbard are not hard to see.  But the truth behind those ideas is so dangerous that people who read it disappear.  In that respect The Circumference of the World resembles ‘The Blast of the Book’, one of the better-known ‘Father Brown’ stories by G. K. Chesterton.  The supposed disappearances in that story are unreal, an elaborate cover for a planned real-life murder, but those in The Circumference of the World are actually happening, so much so that much of it is taken up with a search for a surviving copy of Lode Stars.

On first reading, at least, I have a few problems with consistency.  How was Hartley able to write it, if it’s as dangerous as that?  So dangerous, indeed, that its translation into Russian has to be done by forced labour, with each translator managing only a sentence before he disappears in turn.  Yet one of the major characters, a criminal called Oskar Lens, manages to read a samizdat copy in a Soviet Gulag, before escaping to the West and ultimately becoming a mobster in London.  I must admit to having read The Circumference of the World in difficult circumstances, so I can’t be certain I have all of this right – but then, this is a book in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Hartley tries to tone down the lethality of his ideas by publishing them as fiction, and a substantial part of The Circumference of the World, towards the end, consists of fictitious correspondence about it between the prominent SF figures of the day.  I’m on slightly stronger ground here – for example, I had an extended correspondence with John W. Campbell in the late 1960s, so I can testify that Lavie Tidhar captures the tone of his letters.  In my experience they were more idiosyncratic, not to say eccentric.  The only letter I had from Isaac Asimov was brief, giving me permission to quote him, so I can’t really say what his personal correspondence was like.  My correspondence with L. Sprague de Camp was also formal, and although Tidhar portrays him as sceptical about Hartley and his ideas, I think he probably would have been even more sceptical about them in real life.  (He put too much weight on Ronald Story’s The Space-Gods Revealed, which did a good job of exposing Erich von Däniken’s errors, but that was all it sought to do.  De Camp maintained that it proved Earth had never been visited.)  I met Frederik Pohl, and got on well with him, but we never exchanged letters.  However the episodes with John W. Campbell trying to convince his authors about Dianetics, described here by Alfred Bester, actually happened – I misremembered it as being in Fred Pohl’s autobiography The Way the Future Was, but he did have a similar experience.  Bester’s, Pohl’s and other examples are described by Alec Nevala-Lee in Astounding  (Fig. 2, Harper-Collins, 2018), and Lavie Tidhar has evidently done his homework on ‘The Golden Age of Science Fiction’, as that book calls it.

The big secret is that black holes (‘The Devourers’, aka ‘The Eyes’ and ‘the eaters’)  are sentient, and are watching people and events in our Universe, possibly on behalf of still more powerful entities in another reality, while reaching out to keep us from discovering too much.  As it happens, while reading The Circumference of the World I came across and reread a copy of Black Holes: the End of the Universe?  (Souvenir Press, 1973, Fig. 3)  by Prof. John Taylor of King’s College, London, which I last read when I reviewed it for the Glasgow Herald that year. 

Before reading it I met John Taylor at the ‘Beyond This Horizon’ festival in Sunderland, and when I asked him about the title, he earnestly explained that because gravity extends to infinity, it can be shown mathematically that if even one black hole exists, everything in the Universe must eventually fall into it.  In the book he expresses great concern about how this knowledge will affect humanity, and he wrote a play in which future humans end up worshipping them before they are consumed  (‘occluded’, in The Circumference of the World.)  There’s a similar feeling to the two books, in places.

At least one set of characters in The Circumference of the World believe that will happen.  ‘One day, many aeons from now, the Eyes will merge;  and sooner or later all the matter in the Universe will converge into a single all-seeing Eye’  (page 156).  The discovery of Hawking Radiation, and the increasing expansion of the Universe due to Dark Energy, both rule that out, for the Universe as a whole.  Isaac Asimov explained the discovery of what would happen instead, in his essay ‘And After Many a Summer Dies the Proton’, first published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1981, reprinted in his essay collection Counting the Eons, Doubleday, 1983  (Fig. 4). 

Current thinking is that the ‘heat death’ of the Universe, when all matter is converted to energy, is a certainty, but a very long time away, unless Dark Energy increases to the point of destroying the Universe in a ‘Big Rip’.  There are humorous SF references throughout The Circumference of the World, and it’s worth reading for them alone, but it encourages further reading beyond the fiction.