Non-Fiction Reviews
Time and Propinquity
An Anthology of Fiction and Philosophy(2024) edited by Mike Sauve and David Matthew, ghosTTruth, £19.99, pbk, 342pp, ISBN 978-1-95-701035-9
The stated intention of this loose assortment of essays, poems and stories is ‘to be a robust and imaginative book to read’ (p. 6). Some of the entries are certainly ‘robust’, to the point of being all but impenetrable, such as ‘Chalice of Eternity: An Orthodox Theory of Time’ by Brandon Gallaher, a noted Professor of Systematic Theology and Orthodox Christian priest. Others, however, like Gabriel Chad Boyer’s ‘Some Thoughts on Dimensions and Dimensionality’, with its hierarchy of dimensions, including the ‘Anomalous’ and ‘Interstitial’, take ‘imaginative’ to a whole new level. The suggestion here that in the absence of the graviton we should regard planets and stars as the particles that ‘carry’ the gravitational force (as if elementary particles that possess mass don’t interact gravitationally) prompted one of several ‘face-palm’ moments.
This was the point at which I found myself desperately wishing that either a physicist or philosopher of physics had been included among the contributors. Jetse de Vries does have a background in science at least, as well as in science-fiction, and his ‘Time, Life, Consciousness: An Emergent Symbiotic Interaction’ is both accessible and one of the more well-grounded of the non-fiction pieces. Likewise, Joshua Hansen’s ‘Academia and Apocalypse’, an extended meditation on tech-driven ‘temporal compression’, offers some interesting insights, drawn heavily from the work of cultural theorist Paul Virilio but, perhaps as a result, unfortunately wrapped in the language of academia.
Eamon Macdougall’s ‘A Solution to Zeno’s Paradox as a Derivative for the Ontological Proof of Panpsychism’ similarly occupies more of an academic niche, constructing a tenuous argument as it does for the claim that everything is conscious to some degree from the premise of Zeno’s famous paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: the former, although faster, can never overtake the latter, because to do so requires an infinite number of finite catch-ups which can never be completed. Here an essay by the internationally respected philosopher of physics Nick Huggett is cited (from the excellent Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy), without, it seems, realising that it actually undermines the argument by rejecting the premise: as Huggett points out, the ‘paradox’ dissolves once we couch it within the framework of modern mathematics.
Scattered between these abstruse speculations are a number of short stories of varying quality. ‘Somebody to Love’ by Gary Couzens is very much in the mode of The Time Traveller’s Wife and, like the latter, is quite sweet but also, rather slight. Similarly, Jonathan Oliver’s ‘Another Go’ is an easy read, although in its tale of Craig, who gets to live his mundane life over and over again, it offers little that is new, apart from a faint Blattarian echo of Kafka. More unsettling is ‘The Masculine Birth of Time’ by John Wojewoda with its Ickean suggestion of lizard overlords, whereas ‘Erosion Erosion’ by Cassandra Passarelli, presents by contrast a calming set of Buddhist reflections. As for the poems, ‘At Patmos’ by Jin Choi is a powerful and resonant piece but the ‘blackout’ pieces by Andrew Brenda, constructed by redacting swathes of some given text, tend to slide into little more than word salad.
In the call for contributions, writers were encouraged to interpret issues regarding temporality in any way they’d like. However, the problem with exercising such a light editorial touch is that what might have been intended as diverse and eclectic can all too readily turn out to be eccentric and disparate.
Steven French
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