Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar

The Circumference of the World, Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon 978-1-61696-362-0, $17.95, 256pp, tp) September 2023. Cover by Elizabeth Story.

For an author who I think can lay a reason­able claim to being one of the most innova­tive voices in modern science fiction, Lavie Tidhar never tires of displaying his affection for some of the older classics of the field. His new novel The Circumference of the World man­ages in a single sentence to call out (though not quite by name) Asimov, Heinlein, Le Guin, Blish, Herbert, Niven, Cordwainer Smith, and even the relatively obscure George Tucker, and later fea­tures fictional correspondence from Campbell, Heinlein, de Camp, Bester, and Merril. Merril and J.G. Ballard show up at a party at Michael Moorcock’s, as well as “some sort of self-styled critic,” “Clute, I think his name was.” None of this is entirely gratuitous (though no doubt Tid­har is having fun), and none is surprising once it becomes apparent that The Circumference of the World is Tidhar’s most direct tribute – and most direct critique – of what is sometimes still called SF’s “golden age.” At the same time, it’s one of his most formally complex novels, featuring stories nested within stories, stories that fold back on themselves, questionable nar­rators, and some narrators who don’t even seem to know whether they’re reliable or not. All of which seems entirely appropriate in a tale whose pivotal figure is clearly based on the career, and general weirdness, of L. Ron Hubbard.

The novel begins with the childhood of the gifted mathematician Delia Welegtabit on the Pacific island Vanua Lava, during which she discovers an obscure 1962 SF novel, Lode Stars by Eugene Charles Hartley. Years later, as a math professor in London, Delia learns that, while most book dealers claim the novel is apocryphal, it nevertheless has gained a kind of cult follow­ing who sees it as some sort of code or secret system. When Delia’s boyfriend Levi Armstrong disappears trying to track it down, she hires rare book dealer Daniel Chase to find both the book and Levi. Despite Chase’s protestations that, with his prosopagnosia, he’s hardly a good can­didate for a private eye (even though he sounds a lot like one in the chapters he narrates), he takes on the case. The trail leads to the Russian mobster Oskar Lens, whose extensive pulp art collection includes all the covers of Hartley’s novels, and then shifts to Lens’s own memories of being imprisoned in Siberia before settling in London, where he attended monthly SF pub meetings with Clarke, Pohl, Amis, Moorcock – and Levi Armstrong, who apparently shared his obsession with Hartley.

The novel then navigates a couple of sharp turns, taking us deeper into the world of 20th century SF. We are shown some actual chapters from Lode Stars (one of which is titled “Ten Thousand Light Years from Home”), in which we learn that “lode stars” are Hartley’s term for black holes, that the central character of the novel is named Delia (who we first meet walking “the circumference of the world” in a radically re-engineered far-future solar system), and that Delia’s quest involves something called the Oc­clude, which somehow protects individuals from the dark forces of the universe. This is followed by a biographical sketch of Hartley, partly in his own words and partly through those letters from Heinlein, Campbell, et al., detailing Hartley’s early involvement with the Astounding crew and the later growth of the Church of the All-Seeing Eye, though in this telling it’s Heinlein who advises Hartley, “if you really want to make a millions bucks, Gene, you should start your own religion.” (It’s fascinating to view these chapters in light of Alec Nevala-Lee’s non-fiction account of the same period in his group biog­raphy Astounding). Eventually, the stories of Hartley, Daniel Chase, and Delia weave together in ingenious and oddly touching ways, and even the self-proclaimed prophet and cynical conman Hartley turns out to be more complex than we’d suspected. While much of the resonance of The Circumference of the World demands at least some familiarity with the SF communities of the 1940s and 1950s – one particularly funny scene involves Campbell trying to sell Hartley on his various screwball theories, then proclaiming Hartley a “complete lunatic” when he mentions his own – Tidhar makes clear that SF has never entirely left behind the questions it raised about imagination, belief, science, and pure bunkum, and figures like Hartley have never entirely disappeared. But if Hartley represents a colorful but problematical part of SF’s past, sharp read­ers like Delia seem to represent a promise of a more inclusive and multicultural future. It’s not a bad tradeoff.

This review and more like it in the September 2023 issue of Locus.

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