Secure Your Copy Self-Reference ENGINE Envisioned By Toh EnJoe Compiled As Multimedia Book

daría,estrellas. Esperaba una prosa mucho más elaborada, eso me ha desilusionado un poco, pero en líneas genrales me ha gustado, No me atrevería a recomendarlo: no es un libro para todo el mundo, ni siquiera para todos los fans de CF, Recoge veinte historias muy desiguales: hay CF hard, relatos absurdos, surrealismo, y Weird doméstico Apto para el que busque un texto que se salga de los cánones, y que explore conceptos filosóficos, culturales y científicos.
A very different kind of book, Completely non linear and fragmented, It is kind of surreal, So you don't know what is real, what is imagined, There is a main thread of the paradoxes of going back in time and altering events, That is the self reference, Every chapter seems like an independent vignette and it kind of ties in at the end, At a broad level, it is the story of war between humans and computers, But then you are not really sure who is fighting who, The book is quite philosophical in a mathematical sense in the tradition of the Greek philosophers, You know trying to put investigations into purpose of life as Mathematical postulations and trying to solve for it, This is not really a story, It is more of an experience, I guess I need to read it again sometime to fully appreciate it Interesting read, Can be difficult to follow at times, but I enjoyed it thoroughly through and for all it's quirks, Toh EnJoes prizewinning fiction is wellknown in Japan for crossing the streamsfrom hardcore science fiction to bizarre surrealismand has found an audience across the genre divide.
SelfReference ENGINE is a puzzle of a book, where vignette and story and philosophy combine to create a novel designed like a concept album, I read this book in Marchand the experienced stopped me in my tracks at Goodreads as I wasn't ready to write a review for it yet and I kept postponing.
I wanted it to be a thorough review, because it's such a fantastic book, I've recommended it widely to people, especially if they're interested in innovative SF that experiments with form, is something unique, So, I'm going to let go of my great review plans and just say it's absolutely fantastic, People should really read this one, if any one, It's a classic. I really enjoyed this one as it "warns" in its cover blurb, it's neither a novel with a straightforward narrative, nor an anthology of selfcontained short stories.
It's more of a series of interconnected vignettes set at various points following some kind of event that shattered time and space, and often involving powerful AIs.
Not easy to describe, but just the kind of experimental weirdness that works well for me, and a lot of really neat concepts dealing with time, artificial intelligence, consciousness, and more.
My first fourstar rating from this year's P, K. Dick nominees. . 読み中
時間や空間の定義の仕方というか
考え方が非常にユニークであり古典的な面もあり楽しい
終わったら評価含めて再度更新 Division of fractions escape by eraser befuddlement of symbiotic intelligences this book romps through the broken shards of time/space which have been fractured irrevocably by the 'Event'.
A warped imagination underpins this mathematical fairy tale and creates delightful rabbit holes to stumble down into,

An alternative narrative, loosely based on many different characters works admirably because of the unusual setting: a universe that has been shattered into countless other universes of variable time/space dimensions.
. . with the ultimate goal of most of the characters being to try and restore the universe's time/space coordination to its normal working order,

A very good book: clever, mindbending, and irreverent, DNF.
It seems like this book was designed to be as incomprehensible as possible, The lack of any sort of continuity or common thread killed it for me,
Some of the stories were really compelling, but then they just ended abruptly with no attempt at resolution of any kind, Good concepts dropped like a hot potato as soon as they got near comprehensibility,
I liked the one about the Japanese language, and the one about the selfreplicating town, and thedead Freuds, Of course, as soon as those got interesting, we moved on to dry theoretical physics again, Maybe I don't have the science background to enjoy this book fully, but I think even if I was well up on current academics, I would dislike the strange plotting and abrupt tonal shifts.
Not really a novel, not really a short story collection, but something in between, A mosaic novel, maybe It doesn't really matter, the point is that Self Reference Engine is this heady mix of hard SF and surrealism, It takes the notion of the multiverse and pokes and prods at it until the very concept becomes both unremarkable and nonsensical, Its also very funny. A series of mindexpanding lectures on the philosophy of mathematics, in the guise of a science fiction book of sorts, While it recalls a great number of things to mind the films of Christopher Nolan, the stories of Ted Chiang, the Core in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos, early AIfocused writings of Scott Alexander, Greg Egan's Permutation City, Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, among several others, it remains unlike anything I have ever read.
I strongly suspect I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come, What an interesting and strange book! It is a good reminder of the innumerable possibilities and complexities of science and philosophy, even if a principle in itself is quite simple, and in that sense reminds me of the works of sitelinkStanislaw Lem.
I have a soft spot for this kind of sf,
I really cannot imagine how the author went about writing this novel, if it was a lot of thinking and coordinating work, or if it came about quite intuitively.
I would also love to be able to read this in its original language, It's difficult to write a review for this book, especially given this is the first book review I've ever written, My taste, before this book, mostly laid in fantasy and YA lit, and any more contemplative hardscifi type things were limited to short stories, To be fair, maybe that made this a good transition,

SelfReference ENGINE is less a straightforward novel and more a series of loosely connected stories framed mostly around an Event which is not clearly established, but seems to involve the straight timeline of the universe splintering into a nearinfinite quantity, for reasons that may or may not be related to a massive leap in ability and awareness by computers/AItech.
The first half of the stories focus on a variety of people dealing with the Event and its aftermath, while the second half focus on the "giant corpus of knowledge", which appear to be highly advanced computers that mostly run the world for human benefit.


There are a number of really fantastic concepts in this book, many of which could carry a traditional novel alone, Without going into too much detail, there's the girl who was shot by a bullet from the future which was interrupted on the way back, the village with multiple parallel villages trying to grow through it, the sentient socks, and the mystery of the basement full of Freuds, to name just a few.


The major complaints are twofold, First, the translation is difficult to parse at times, especially given the heady scientific concepts being translated, There are definitely parts which require rereading multiple times to follow, and it's hard to know if there's things that were just lost in translation.
The second is the aforementioned lack of a real throughline, despite many interconnected narratives and recurring themes, It leaves you wondering just how to interpret the book, either as a novel or as a collection of short stories,

Regardless though, these problems are relatively minor, and worth overlooking, SelfReference ENGINE will grab your attention, tickle your brain, and leave you thinking well after you put it down, This book may be brilliant but it was well over my head, Torturous and unpleasant to read though some of the themes are interesting, This is the sort

of the book that will either blow your mind or leave you confused and annoyed, Unfortunately, I fall into the latter category,

SelfReference ENGINE is "not a novel, not an anthology it is a SELFREFERENCE ENGINE, " What it is is very weird science fiction surrealism, with a thin thread of I won't call it a plot, more like a theme or some common ideas running through disjointed chapters that sometimes refer to one another and sometimes seem dropped in at random from some other book.


At the heart of the book is the "giant corpora of knowledge," collections of artificial intelligences that exist in the future but became extinct in the past, become quite upset to realize they don't actually exist, triggered an Event that split the universe into an infinite number of realities, and are visited by a starman named Alpha Centauri who tells them very politely that they are unfortunately a bit inconvenient and will need to be pushed out of the way.
I suspect that tones of Hitchhiker's Guide were not coincidental there are a lot of other injokes for serious literary and scifi geeks,

Originally written in Japanese by a theoretical physicist Toh EnJoe is a pen name and translated into English, I think much of my problem with this book was the translation.
The tone and cadence of language changes dramatically for example, the constant repetition of the phrase "giant corpora of knowledge" there are actually inbook explanations why they can't simply be referred to as "computers" or "AIs" but also the style does not flow in English.
I've read other Japanese books in translation and know that sometimes even the best translation can be a little choppy or odd Japanese literature is just different from Western writing but I didn't have this problem with Murakami or Abe or Kawabata.
Still, I suspect even if I read it in the original Japanese I'd have found this book hard to get through, despite being fairly short.


There are lots of very bizarre and interesting ideas, from quantum physics to alternate realities, Zeno's Paradox and time travel mechanics get passing mentions, but what will probably stick with you are the arguments with a sentient bobby sock, the girl who fires a bullet into the future, that one of the narrators worries will be aimed at one of his testicles, and the giant corpora of knowledge that are recursive and matrioshkalike, and sometimes take the form of old Japanese men in a traditional print shop, and sometimes are more like constructs out of the Matrix.


Reading this was an experience, I just can't call it a fun experience, It's worth looking at, because it's probably unlike anything you've read before, but it seems like one of those books destined to become a cult favorite by the elitist of nerds who will look down their noses at you if you claim you like Japanese science fiction.
"Oh yeah" they'll sneer. "I'll bet you mean weaboo shit like Gundam and Battle Royale, " And of course Haruki Murakami is for hipsters, But read some Toh EnJoe, man, that's real Nipponophile cred,

I wish I'd liked this book more, It's of those books that leaves you with the disquieting feeling that maybe you just weren't smart enough to appreciate it, A complex story or really a series of stories tied together, There are some funny bits but it is disjointed, This deserves a reread. The stories in this experimental scifi book may include talking socks, disappearing text on a catfish statue, an inexplicable joystick, and no less thaninert Freuds Sigmund how ever did Grandma collect so many of him.


If that paragraph made you think, oh this is full of nonsequitors like sitelinkHitchhikers, and I love Hitchhikers, just stop, This book is sometimes poignant, existential, thoughtprovoking and above all, rigorous, My brain is exhausted.

Read the sitelinkfull review on sitelinkGeekyLibrary, Wow, this is a book that demands a lot from the reader, But there are some rewards for sticking with it, It's not a traditional narrative, at all, It's more like a series of short stories that have a narrative connection, It's quite a mindbender, and it's not like anything you've read before,

If you want straight character and plot, this is not the right book, However, if you want strange and new ideas, this is a masterpiece, The author clearly knows his science and infuses each chapter with interesting ideas and twists on our existing scientific knowledge, So even though the story wasn't strong or was nearly nonexistent, depending on how you look at it, the ideas were mesmerizing, I found myself excited for each new chapter, wondering which new concept would be introduced and explored,

To be clear, this book is a slog, There is no way to skim, and I had to reread entire pages three and four times to understand, But it sure was fun to decipher the ideas behind it all, Interesting book, although some parts are very difficult to understand, "The genre of ideas. "
How often have we heard science fiction, fantasy, ampc, described as such Isn't that the great justification for volunteering ourselves to the genre ghetto, for ignoring the Booker Prize winners and Nobel Laureates to focus on the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winners instead
But it's frustrating for all this talk about science fiction being a genre of ideas, there don't seem to be a whole lot of ideas going around.

Enter Toh EnJoe. A physicist. A novelist. And not simply a sciencefiction novelist, either, Toh EnJoe has won accolades not only for his theoretically informed and highly imaginative takes on the sciencefiction genre, but also for his work in what genre detractors and defenders alike describe as the literary.
His debut novel, SelfReference ENGINE puts on display his knowledge as a physicist, his imagination as a storyteller, and his skill as a writer, all of which exist in abundant quantities.

Unlike many more popularly palatable titles, this book has ideas, and they flow in abundance,
EnJoe has been compared favourably to many of the literary surrealists Borges and Schultz come up frequently, But there's more to EnJoe than tricks of whimsy and gimmicks of style, The most captivating and inspirational part of SelfReference ENGINE isn't just that EnJoe treats the reader to mindbending stories that makes one question the fabric of reality, but that his tales are based solidly on scientific understanding.
When EnJoe's characters ruminate on the possibility of whether there is almost surely an infinite number of their duplicates, or when godlike computer systems find themselves struggling against one another to make spacetime move the right direction, the firm grounding of mathematical and physicsbased theory permeates.
Causality, quantum uncertainty, infinity, string theory and the multiverse: popular topics in science fiction, all, but rarely have they been considered with such depth and imagination.
EnJoe's displays his comfort with advanced physics, but he does not weigh his work down with it, He melds his knowledge with his imagination to create stories that broaden horizons and work out the brain,
A sense of wonder pervades SelfReference ENGINE, Perhaps even a sense joyfulness, The strangeness of the characters, the incidences, the events and the Event celebrates the wonder of both the universe and the human predicament within it.
At times EnJoe does veer towards being perhaps too clever, as not all of the parts of this book match each other in terms of humour, accessibility and creativity, but even at his weakest, EnJoe shows himself more than capable of challenging and engaging the reader.

SelfReference ENGINE perhaps defies convention too much many readers approach it expecting science fiction and finding instead both science and fiction, not a hyphenated and rigid boundary set by publishing marketers and niche enthusiasts, but two entities, married in a strange and wondrous way that could be disappointing if one comes with preconceived expectations and narrow horizons.
SelfReference ENGINE deserves to be celebrated, however, by those who love the wonder of the natural world and the strangeness of living within it, and for the discerning reader, there are delights and challenges that make this novel worth reading, relishing, and reading again.
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