The End of Mr. Y

Post-structuralist physics with a plot, which is how it ought to be since even an equation is really just a love story told by someone with Aspergers. Come to think of it, there are autistic kids, or more accurately, KIDS in the plot and they come to a bad end with the help of the CIA, but if you're worried about spoilers, we could just go back to before that happened, only we'd better do it before the end of The End of Mr. Y.

Personally, I'm post-Post-structualism, but I still enjoy a romp through the existential questions that need to be resolved before the end of the story which luckily is not the end of our personal story. Like the main character, I too want to know everything but unlike a fictional character, I don't get to find out. Books are subject to intelligent design and its characters are created by an author outside the story though they usually are unaware of this (though T. E. Lumas knows he's really Mr. Y). Characters' worlds are created by language, and to some extent, we create ours with language as well. We spend much time in the Lacanian Symbolic register, but there's also a real register even if we can't really talk about it because talking is symbolic. Still, it's there, though I'll bet many of us readers feel like Ariel, preferring books to embodied existence. We're all connected through ancestry, proximity, language, and empathy and posting on Goodreads and destroying the troposphere can't disconnect us. What passes for a resolution at the end is insufficiently satisfying but when you're out to explain everything, this is to be expected.

I enjoyed the extra edges everything has when their fourth dimensionality is limited to three since I've seen the diagrams of tesseracts (aka hypercubes), the videogame interface to reality, and Ariel social-engineering the password to Saul's computer, (but does she ever make use of what she downloads from it?) And what of the diseases that would never have been cured without experiments on mice? Maybe one of those now incurable illnesses would kill Hitler and prevent the holocaust.

Reading others' reviews of this book makes me see the difficult position the author finds herself in. She wants to engage with the thoughts of various philosophers and theorists, but she can't just explain them from scratch. So some readers felt she under-explained, others felt she over-explained. Some felt threatened by the ideas being there at all, and blamed Ms. Thomas of pretension. In my opinion, she did reasonable well with this insoluble problem. She might understand Dasein better than I do, but I don't think she fully grasps that the zeros and ones of machine code is just another metaphor. To be fair, most computer scientists don't either.