The End of Mr. Y - Scarlett Thomas

After Our Tragic Universe made such an impression on me, I had to go back for more. In some ways this is very similar (an ideas-driven book with lots of intelligent dialogue and an interest in the relationship between narrative and reality) but the plot structure is very different: although the topic is loosely "thought experiments", this is a fast-paced thriller which is very far from 'storyless'. I wasn't entirely comfortable with the fact that I found this filed under science fiction in my local library, although on reflection I have to agree that some of its contents (time travel, mindreading, alternative universes) were very much at home there, even if the time travel was into the past and achieved via antiquarian bookshops and homeopathy rather than shiny futuristic machines. Once again, I found this very enjoyable and also challenging (it made me want to read up on some of the references - Heidegger, Derrida, Baudrillard, "Erewhon", "Zoonomia" etc - to get a bit more context for the ideas presented). I particularly liked the idea that if thought and matter are fundamentally the same ("because it is happening in a closed system, in which everything is made from matter"), then special types of thoughts - such as Einstein's relativity theories - could rewrite the structure of the universe. (The application of this idea to quantum physics - "No one had ever said what this tiny stuff should be doing ... So when they looked at it, they found it was doing whatever the fuck it liked" - made me laugh out loud.) Some of the passages where the heroine travels through time and space via others' minds provided opportunities for some powerful empathic writing, for example a section on the experiences of laboratory mice, and another on the private anxieties of teenage girls.