Wow, well I’ll try and do The Thing Itself justice, but you’re better off just reading it and marvelling in its mind-blowing awesomeness. The blurb would have you think it’s a version of John Carpenter’s The Thing (a film I love) but really only the first part deals with the isolation and ensuing madness of Antarctica. There’s philosophy, a shady organisation, artificial intelligence, a shoeless man on the run and whole raft of stories throughout time.

At the heart of the book is the theme of how humans perceive reality. We can only experience things in a human way, describe things in a human way. The concepts of time and space are human constructs even if we perceive that we are measuring them scientifically.

Roy is obsessed with the works of Immanuel Kant, an 18th Century German philosopher, so much so that Charles blames Kant for driving his fellow researcher mad. Yet Roy is convinced the answers of the Fermi paradox can be explained by Kant, and perhaps so much more.

The Fermi paradox deals with the argument for the existence of extra-terrestrial life and the fact that there is no proof of said life. The chances of us being the only beings in the universe are slim but, if so, then where are they? Perhaps it’s because we are looking for them in human terms, within the constraints of our perception of reality. Maybe aliens exist outside of what we can perceive, and taken further, this argument can give credence to the existence of a deity without proof too.

You would be mistaken in thinking this is going to be a hard read when in fact, despite all the philosophy, it was a surprisingly fast-paced page-turner, with a dash of humour and plenty of style. It just also happens to be a work out for the brain cells too. The book partly follows Charles in the modern day but it also has pieces from the past and future, a little bit reminiscent of Cloud Atlas, but unlike Mitchell’s book, the connections of the different time periods all came together in the end.

Review copy provided by publisher.