Teaser

A moon that shouldn’t be there. A wormhole connecting two universes. A crew of simulated human beings, and a species as old as the universe. What unites these things? A threat to all of creation, of course . . .

Review

My current reading project is to read through my TBR from most recent publication date to the oldest. I have an endpoint of 1972, but so far have only made it as far as 2023. The flipside of that id that I’m discovering some hidden gems from recent years, and they don’t come much more hidden than Ian Stewart. He’s probably best known for writing the Science of Discworld tie-ins to Terry Pratchett’s fantasy series. I had never heard of him until last year, when I found myself repeatedly drawn to his works in the dealers’ room at World FantasyCon. Loophole joins a few other books of Stewart’s in being published by Elsewhen Press, which is a very small UK publisher. If you haven’t heard of him, that’s probably why. But with a blurb from Stephen Baxter and a weighty scientific background of his own, I was always going to pick up something by Stewart, and Loophole is an excellent place to start.

That Stephen Baxter blurb is key to the book, because Baxter is the closest comparison to Stewart that I’ve found. Greg Egan’s head-scratching mathematics and Stewart Hotson’s love of quantum theory are also good comparisons, but for me Loophole feels like it could have been written in the early day’s of Baxter’s career. There’s a roughness to it, but the ideas are absolutely mind-blowing. This is what hard science fiction should feel like.

All the maths and science flying around does make it tricky to review a book like this. To boil it down, a crew of people who are actually simulations are investigating a moon when they find a wormhole to another universe. In that other universe, an alien species who have sworn never to use their godlike technology are facing the death of existence in the form of a star-consuming horde. The two sides come together to debate the issue. That’s a massive oversimplification, but if you want to fully understand it, you’ll learn why the book is over five hundred pages long. Stewart delights in throwing big new ideas onto the page, and there is easily enough to fill out a longer series than the standalone we have here.

This bombardment of ideas is what I love about the book, but also gets in its own way at times. I think that the best hard SF goes slightly over my head, but still leaves me feeling awed. I am definitely awed by Loophole. But it didn’t so much fly over my head as it did take off into orbit. Large chunks of the book made no sense to me at all. That’s fair, I’m not a scientist. But the impression I get is that Stewart doesn’t particularly care if I understand or not. Like a lot of great minds, he’s simply operating on a different level. But when the book enters its denouement and everything is being slowly explained, a lot of the explanations left me just as confused as I was before. It’s not that the book is bad, per se, just that I didn’t quite get my head around it. What I did understand, however, was definitely worth the ride. Confusing a sit was, I had a great time.

I’m hoping to find some more Ian Stewart books soon (possibly at this year’s FantasyCon) and look forward to seeing what other bizarre wonders his mad scientist’s mind can conjure.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• Published in 2023
• 546 Pages