LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
May 2012 eBook of the Month.
Philosophy and physics combine with imagination, wit, and clearly a lot of intellectual firepower, in this fictional account of an omnipotent being creating a universe. Suspend disbelief and you will learn a lot of what theoretical physicists (the author is one) think went into the universe as we see it now.
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Mr g: A Novel About the Creation Synopsis
With echoes of Calvino, Rushdie, and Saramago, this is a stunningly imaginative work that celebrates the tragic and joyous nature of existence on the grandest possible scale. As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe. So begins Alan Lightman's playful and profound new novel, Mr G , the story of Creation as narrated by God. Bored with living in the shimmering Void with his bickering Uncle Deva and Aunt Penelope, Mr g creates time, space, and matter - then moves on to stars, planets, consciousness, and finally intelligent beings with moral dilemmas. But even the best-laid plans can go awry, and Mr g discovers that with his creation of space and time come unforeseen consequences - especially in the form of the mysterious Belhor, a clever and devious rival. An intellectual equal to Mr g, Belhor delights in provocation: he demands an explanation for the inexplicable, requests that intelligent creatures not be subject to rational laws, and maintains the necessity of evil. As Mr g watches his favorite universe grow into maturity, he begins to understand how the act of creation can change the Creator himself.
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Press Reviews
Alan P. Lightman Press Reviews
'A soulful riff on the birth and eventual demise of our universe...Lightman the humanist allows room for the compatibility of rationality with spirituality and mystery, while Lightman the scientist plays devil's advocate with the partisans of Genesis, blinding them with logic.' - The New York Times Book Review
'Though Lightman's clever irreverence recalls Salman Rushdie and Kevin Brockmeier, his plainspoken style lends the book a fitting earnestness...Readers who don't mind the liberties the author takes with the sacred might enjoy this scienced fiction.' - Library Journal
'A scientific vision laced with the mirthful aura of divinity...aglow with wonder.' - Washington Post
'Just as he did with his incomparable Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman again surprises us with a work that is utterly original in both form and content. Mr g is a philosophical fable which is at turns hilarious and moving, rendered with a literary hand so deft that the weightiest metaphysical topics levitate into pure delight.' - Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
'It would not seem possible for Alan Lightman to match his earlier tour de force, Einstein's Dreams, but in Mr g he has done so--with wit, imagination, and transcendent beauty.' -Anita Desai
'Here is the creation of the Universe and the young Creator who grapples with what he has made--and ultimately with responsibility and loss...a gem of a novel that is strange witty erudite and alive with Lightman's playful genius.' - Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
'This delightful novel takes the reader on a light hearted romp through the development of the universe from the Big Bang to its cold dark end, addressing along the way some of the big questions that inevitably arise from the development of intelligent life.'- Jerome Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Author
About Alan P. Lightman
Alan Lightman is a novelist, essayist, physicist, and educator. Currently, he is Adjunct Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is married to Jean Greenblatt Lightman, a painter, and has two daughters, Elyse and Kara.
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