Now. The title of this book isn’t any kind of metaphor or symbolism. It’s actually asking you who built the moon. Which is, of course, completely bonkers. Nobody built the moon, it’s just there. But who cares about that? This book is actually a lovely, invigorating read. It’s best read in the shower or on the bus because the first 75% is actually perfectly sane, if (like the moon) not particularly bright. Enormous coincidences govern the earth’s relationship to the moon. If just a few of the peculiarities weren’t so, life on this planet wouldn’t exist. I could summarise the science here but I’ve forgotten a lot of it. It’s the last section of the book that’s stuck in my head. It involves time travel – and robots. The stuff that caffeine and Prozac dreams are made of. The claim is that we built the moon. Us: mankind. The human race. Not the human race that’s presently racing, but the human race from the future. Apparently, what happens is, realising that we couldn’t have evolved in the first place without the moon to realise that we couldn’t have evolved in the first place without the moon, we take a closer look at it and realise it’s actually artificial. Then we work out how to make it, and go back in time (or send robots back in time, it’s cheap labour and the working conditions 5 billion years ago were pretty horrible) and make it, in order that we evolve to the point that we can work out how to send robots back in time to make it, and so the whole crazy process begins again. If that isn’t the plot of a Hollywood movie in the next five years, I’ll eat a whole shelf of bonkers paperbacks: and believe me, there’s plenty more of them. End of part one.
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4 Comments
August 8, 2007 at 4:58 pm
More books like this need to be written. Get to it Jonny.
August 8, 2007 at 7:07 pm
That’s crazy. Everyone knows that Keith Moon invented the moon, shortly after the swimming pool incident, and named it after himself.
I like the new colour here, by the way, lad.
August 8, 2007 at 8:21 pm
I think Kurt Vonnegut would love it. I think Kurt Vonnegut may have written it. I think Kurt Vonnegut faked his own death, then sent himself back in time so he could pretend to be someone else, who writes a book asking who built the moon.
August 19, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Well, that’s an interesting premise. I keep wondering if, at the end of time, a super-evolved humanity (who have effectively merged into the substrate of space/time) doesn’t actually rejigger the laws of the universe and make it more friendly for intelligences.
Interestingly, the Tetragrammaton is translated by erudite scholars as ‘I Will Be what I Will Be’, so maybe what we call ‘God’ is actually that intelligence that shall be constructed.
In other words, the athiests are right: God doesn’t exist, but He will.