While not sf and not a novel - though it is full of sfnal references including penning a kind of sf short story inside to make some points and explain some stuff , i have just finished David's Deutsch The Beginning of Infinity, a masterpiece tour de force of natural philosophy as it stands today - while I still do not fully buy the multiverse arguments for which the author (a celebrated physicist specializing in quantum compunction) is quite famous - most of the book holds perfect with what i strongly believe.
Cannot recommend this one enough highly enough for any sf lover - or anyone interested in the "big things" - and I loved especially the demolishing of the Copernican mediocrity arguments, of the 'space ship Earth" speciousness (as rightly pointed out by the author, the biosphere of Earth still actively tries to kill us as spending several days without clothes in the cold will surely prove it so having some primitive technology like animal clothes and having the advanced tech of today is again philosophically identical, the difference being in the scope of action and enrichment of lives allowed by the later) and of the madness of 'sustainable development" (another myth that is thoroughly demolished), though of course empiricism and its many guises get a powerful beating too (what is the difference between seeing the stars with the naked eye or as wiggles on a screen from a radio-telescope - as the author points out there is none from a philosophical point of view since both are mediated by quite a few intermediary steps end results of a lot of applied knowledge, just that the naked eye comes from millions of years of slow evolution, the radio telescope and the screen from more concentrated knowledge created in the recent 2-3 centuries)
Also the book is very accessible and the author ended each chapter with a glossary of terms and a recap of arguments - I guess to try it to make even more accessible
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Originally Posted by Hobbit
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