Robert Charles Wilson's The Chronoliths is a fun, fast-paced science-fiction novel with exceptionally good prose, decent characterization, and a provocative premise involving causality and paradox — definitely a worthwhile read.

Alas for nit-pickers: Chronoliths suffers from a flawed, deeply pre-Copernican worldview. Why should an object sent decades backward in time appear at precisely the same location — relative to a turning, precessing, revolving Earth — as the object was transmitted from? Perhaps a few sentences of pseudo-science could have dismissed or papered over this problem (e.g., "... nonlinear equations lock the body's location into a co-rotating coordinate system centered on the nearest mass greater than 10²⁵ grams...", etc.).

But apparently to the author (and editors, and reviewers, and readers) the Earth is still the static center of the universe. "Eppur si muove!" to quote Mr. Galileo ...

TopicLiterature - 2006-12-09

(correlates: BiosFear, OnCurvature, SmellOfGoodProse, ...)