Certainly, the most mathematical portion is A to Z Theory, which nearly does stand alone as a short story. [In fact, it was published separately in Strange Horizons March 2013, where it can be read for free.) In this part of the book, twenty-six famous mathematicians (whose last names just happen to each begin with a different one of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet) at the same moment have a realization about a brilliant but previously unnoticed result involving the binomial theorem. They separately write their discoveries up in research papers that they all submit to the same journal. Believe me, the author knows how unlikely that sounds, as does the journal editor he creates. An even less believable explanation (involving Sherlock Holmes) is offered, but I do not think we are expected to think about its likelihood very seriously. In fact, I found it difficult to take any of the ideas being discussed seriously.

The entire premise of the book is that spacetime has been thoroughly (and either intentionally or unintentionally) disrupted by the actions of sentient computers (a.k.a corpora of knowledge). In the new universe that results, it is difficult for the inhabitants to understand anything, and the reader is in much the same boat. The cover of the book compares this work to those of Lem and Borges. However, it seemed to me that it is more like Richard Brautigan's novels in which alternate worlds are described poetically, but without the focus and clarity necessary to muster the big ideas that Lem and Borges are able to address. And, although some might describe the writings of those authors as "weird", Self-Reference ENGINE get far weirder. For example, consider the talking sock named Bobby who is a relatively important character.

In another very mathematical part of the book, Rita attempts to answer her grandfather's challenging question of whether there is another girl "almost surely like" herself. The answer she develops is like a proof. We are asked to imagine a space whose dimensions are equal to the number of molecules in the universe. This somehow led to a discussion of a line segment where a each person was represented as a point, and since there are (apparently, in Rita's universe) infinitely many people, the conclusion was that they had to be grouped together in such a way that everyone almost certainly had a doppelgänger. Certainly, the feeling of this discussion was reminiscent of a mathematical proof. However, I didn't understand what this had to do with a space of the specified dimensions, I didn't understand why we were talking about a finite line segment (if it was an infinite line, then the infinitely many people could have been spread out equally spaced along the line without any of the "bunching up"), and I don't see how the conclusion reached was reasonable in any case. (All I can see one concluding is that there is at least one limit point, but this hardly suggests that nearly everyone has a double.) So, even though this story did remind me of The Library of Babel, it was nowhere near as meaningful.

I am always open to being corrected. The author has a Ph.D. in physics and presumably knows quite a bit about real math. Perhaps I missed a very deep and interesting idea or two here. Perhaps the depth was lost in translation. If so, please let me know. However, in the end I was left with the impression that this surrealistic work of fiction plays with ideas, but doesn't have much to say about them.

Frequent site contributor Vijay Fafat had these remarks to make about the "A to Z Theory" portion of the book: