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The Thing Itself Paperback – 13 December 2016

by Adam Roberts (Author)

77 ratings

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Adam Roberts turns his attention to answering the Fermi Paradox with a taut and claustrophobic tale that echoes John Carpenter's The Thing.

Two men while away the days in an Antarctic research station. Tensions between them build as they argue over a love-letter one of them has received. One is practical and open. The other surly, superior and obsessed with reading one book - by the philosopher Kant.

As a storm brews and they lose contact with the outside world they debate Kant, reality and the emptiness of the universe. They come to hate each other, and they learn that they are not alone.

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Product details

Publisher : Gollancz; 1st edition (13 December 2016)
Language: : English
Paperback : 384 pages
ISBN-10 : 0575127732
ISBN-13 : 978-0575127739
Dimensions : 13.02 x 2.54 x 17.46 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 469,925 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 4,823 in Magical Realism
- 28,659 in Military Fantasy (Books)
- 41,219 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
77 ratings

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Review

A remarkable novel: both gripping and intellectually exciting., George Monbiot

A time-travelling nerd applies Kant with lethal results in this dazzling philosophical adventure...this is really walking the literary high wire, and Roberts not only keeps his balance, he makes the spectacle compelling, The Guardian

using lit-fic techniques and by not playing by the genre rules, [Roberts] rises to the challenge that Mitchell sets down, SFX

The Thing Itself is evidence of Adam Roberts' inimitable brilliance., Tor.com

I can't think of another such ostentatiously clever novel that is so dramatically successful., Julian Baggini

I do appreciate a novel that makes me think while also entertaining me. The Thing Itself marries the two to perfection. There is so much packed within these pages and, without doubt, it's one of those memorable novels that will stand to repeated readings over the passing of time. A book of the year for me, for sure., For Winter's Nights

Personally, I found it deeply fascinating...The closest reference point for me was Philip K. Dick's VALIS trilogy which fits in the same general literary area but "The Thing Itself" is definitely much more fun., Upcoming 4 Me

Review

A time-travelling nerd applies Kant with lethal results in this dazzling philosophical adventure...this is really walking the literary high wire, and Roberts not only keeps his balance, he makes the spectacle compelling - The Guardian

using lit-fic techniques and by not playing by the genre rules, [Roberts] rises to the challenge that Mitchell sets down - SFX

The Thing Itself is evidence of Adam Roberts' inimitable brilliance. - Tor.com

I do appreciate a novel that makes me think while also entertaining me. The Thing Itself marries the two to perfection. There is so much packed within these pages and, without doubt, it's one of those memorable novels that will stand to repeated readings over the passing of time. A book of the year for me, for sure. - For Winter's Nights

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Customer reviews

5 star		66%
4 star		15%
3 star		11%
2 star		8%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

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Top reviews from Australia

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Richard

What if AI allowed us to see reality without the filter of our consciousness?

Reviewed in Australia on 24 January 2020

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Enjoyed the discussion of our perception vs the reality of “reality”. Not sure whether it finished as well as it started.

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Adam Browne

Read it

Reviewed in Australia on 5 April 2020

Such a memorable book, epic, original, tough - he writes about ugly lives.

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Robert G. Cook

Mind-expanding, heart-embiggening

Reviewed in Australia on 30 September 2018

If anyone ever tries to tell you that Science Fiction isn’t Literature (and yes I am capitalising deliberately), this book is the perfect riposte.

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nevillek

Great book - clever, fast-paced, and well written

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 July 2017

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Adam Roberts writes clever books. This one is amazing - it takes a concept from philosophy and explores it in story form. The main character is not particularly likeable or admirable; his journey is one of disappointment and doesn't really resolve itself. And yet - you want to know more, you want to know if he's right, if he works it out. The Kantian philosophy is explored very cleverly, and I found myself pondering the use of AI for hours.

I read the book, and immediately wanted to go back to see what I had missed first time round.

7 people found this helpful

MR GWJ BROMPTON

4 stars only for the fact that I am simply ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 April 2017

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4 stars only for the fact that I am simply not educated to a standard which would lead me to the ability to understand and appreciate this to its fullness. Plenty of thought provocation and moments of dictionary referrals were not in lacking number.

That said from what I pieced together and what I learned along the way, this book was well worth it.

The chapter "a solid gold penny" could have been a book in itself.

Essentially an exploration into perceived reality, religion and fact. Is what we see and measure just a manifestation of our own minds built to protect us from reality (the thing itself)

6 people found this helpful

gladfly

Misunderstands Kant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 July 2020

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I read the novel because I am interested in Kant, but if you understand Kant fairly well, the central idea of the novel becomes very frustrating. Let me explain: Roberts presents the Kantian Thing in Itself as a purely objective reality inaccessible to human minds but accessible via technology. The Thing is thus portrayed as the cosmological centre of all human and nonhuman reality. This is not Kant's meaning. Rather, the Thing itself, or object x, is a formally necessary designation of the object in general when speaking of experience in terms of appearances, in the way Kant does. In other words, to talk about subjective experience, we need some concept of the object in general to which a subject is oriented. Without the subject, the Thing doesn't exist; the two are a pair. The Thing is not the really real inaccessible core reality governing the rest of reality, something you could investigate or hack into using tech as if it were some mysterious planet, but a formal requirement of Kant's way of approaching subjectivity. If the novelist, who is not philosophically trained, had read Kant's work beyond the Critique of Pure Reason, or indeed anything in the vast post-Kantian corpus, he would have perhaps realised his mistake. My sense though is that he read the first part of a Kant For Dummies book and took things from there. I don't mean to sound harsh, but we expect SF authors to know science. If they're going to put philosophy at the heart of their fiction, they should also know philosophy. Can you imagine Arthur C. Clarke not really understanding gravity but going ahead and writing 2001 anyway? There were some memorable surrealistic passages here, and I liked the Antarctic stuff, but unfortunately I
found the book frustrating more than anything else. I'll give another one of his novels a go, though.

One person found this helpful

Poindexter

Kitsch en Sync (Mitchell variation)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 July 2016

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Once again Mr Roberts proves himself the master of creative fiction. A multi-strand (or not, maybe) rumination on the reality (or not, maybe) of the work of Immanel Kant (or not ...). Although the action doesn't leave the planet it does hop around it spatially and temporally with AI, shadowy agencies and a mad genius thrown in to the mix. The result may be reminiscent of the work of David Mitchell or Wim Wenders but eventually and only in the respect the reader/viewer is part of the work in hand, not an isolated bystander. The work delivers a complex and stimulating riff on the nature of reality.
Wearing my pedant's/proofreader's hat - p284 of the trade paperback: Adonais orders a new tablet device for delivery by 5pm the same day and though we stay with that character through the expected delivery time and place nothing arrives. In that single respect the work fails to deliver.

4 people found this helpful

Ransen Owen

Interesting and odd gripping page turner

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 June 2020

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This is an interesting and odd gripping page turner. A well deserved 5 stars.

The time travel chapter is a bit weak in my humble opinion. Up until then I could believe in the novel, but the time travel chapter is like the end of the film "Alien". You see that the alien is really a man in a monster suit. It would have been more effective to leave something less explicit.

But still, 5 full stars from me.

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