The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

“Like Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Simon Ings’s remarkable new work delivers nothing less than a secret key, a counter-history, of the last sixty years.”—Mark Costello, author of Big IfThe Weight of Numbers describes the metamorphosis of three Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love. All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a malevolent curse of a man who seems to be everywhere at once. As a grid of connections emerge between a dusty philosophical society in London and an African revolution, between international container shipping and celebrity-hosted exposés on the problems of the Third World—this novel sends the specters of the Baby Boom’s liberal revolutions floating into the unreal estate of globalization and media overload—with a deadly payoff.The Weight of Numbers is an artful and deadly novel that traces the secret histories and paranoid fantasies of our culture into a future globalized in ways both liberating and hideous, full of information and empty of meaning. Simon Ings has delivered a storytelling tour de force that will alter some of your most cherished beliefs.“[A] Pynchon-on-speed romp . . . Ings’s mad, mad world is held together to the very last page by humor, vivid depictions and a deeply compelling emotional core.”—Publishers Weekly“A Scheherazade of a novel, executed with scope, daring, and humor. The Weight of Numbers is unerringly well written, and engrossing to the last page.”—Lionel Shriver, bestselling author of We Need to Talk About Kevin

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction

440 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

I began by writing science fiction stories, novels and films, before disappearing down various rabbit-holes: perception (The Eye: A Natural History), 20th-century radical politics (The Weight of Numbers), the shipping system (Dead Water) and augmented reality (Wolves). I co-founded and edited Arc magazine, a digital publication about the future, before joining New Scientist magazine as its arts editor. Now I eke out a freelance living in possibly the coldest flat in London, writing arts reviews for the newspapers. My latest non-fiction is Stalin and the Scientists, a history of Soviet science. My latest novel is The Smoke.

Reviews

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Weight of Numbers is a wonderful tapestry novel that works unexpectedly well. Not really sf as it takes place from the 1930's to the 00's and from England, to Mozambique to the Apollo missions, though infused with sfnal musings.

Following a diverse cast of characters who are related sometimes in obvious, sometimes in strange ways, Weight of Numbers is threaded together by the author into a coherent whole that is very satisfying.

The novel moves non-linearly in time, space and character arcs so it rewards careful reading and I actually reread the first 200 pages once I got there as quite a few early scenes take added significance later, but the pages turn by themselves and the author keeps it absorbing all the way.

I do not want to rehash the story arcs especially that discovering the connections between them is part of the novel's power, but I would like to make some comparisons.

For example you can look at Weight of Numbers vs Cryptonomicon as in Adam Roberts' Stone vs IM Banks Culture; in other words a darker, more "realistic" and with somewhat different conclusions take on similar themes.

In this view both Cryptonomicon and Culture are the typical sf books where things make sense, societies evolve and stuff has meaning (mostly), while Weight of Numbers and Stone form the more "literary" approach where stuff happens, there is no master plan, people live and die while life goes on...

Or you can look at Weight of Numbers in comparison to the recent Gods without Men and note that while the H. Kunzru book is indeed a more "literary" offering as prose goes (say China Mieville vs Leviathan Wakes to add more sf comparisons of recent significance), it is also ultimately less interesting as it piles stuff upon stuff and essentially leaves it there, while Weight of numbers actually concludes storylines and arcs and in very rounded and satisfying ways.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can definitely understand why a lot of people disliked this book. The blurb describing it's synopsis makes it sound like a mystery-esque thriller with a simple plot and a clear antagonist. Thats what I thought when I picked it up.
Upon finishing it, however, I realized that the theme and message of the book go much deeper than they are made to sound on the back, and that many people who are looking for simpler, more topical reads may be put off by the story for either lack of understanding or lack of interest.
The theme, as far as I can tell, deals with the fact that the human race as a whole is much too concerned with all of the things that make life emotional and dramatic (the "colours of the world," as Ings puts it in the epilogue). That looking at the earth from space puts into perspective just how inconsequential all of our lives really are and that we must learn to look past the colours, whether those include eating disorders, war, love affairs, etc., and look to the black and white, the world of perfect connectedness and rigid formula that Anthony Burden envisions. That, Ings concludes in the epilogue, is where the future lies. Once we realize that the colours only seem important when we are in the middle of them, and that in space (the larger picture) they dont exist at all, will we find order in this world where none seems to exist.
Thats what I took the book to mean, and for that I enjoyed it.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Events counterpoised with the moon landing are a central set piece of this novel, which is appropriate since every scene in this novel is as pitiless and barren as the face of the moon. This bleakness permeates whether appropriate or not as Ings twists and turns through events and characters spread over the last half of the 20th century. The right tone for Mozambique in the grips of the genocidal civil war between FRELIMO and the South Africa (and Rhodesia) supported contras RENAMO or London during the blitz, but for swinging 60’s London is more disconcerting, though I much prefer it to a nostalgic sentimental view. Like a more organic David Mitchell, Ings creates a canvas filled with interacting characters from a sixties radical turned human smuggler, a child star turned to a suicidal anorexic performance artist, astronauts, Turing styled math genius who envisions the internet in the 50’s and is disturbed on actually seeing it completed, anti-castro activist turned marijuana smuggler and in settings from Chicago, London, Florida, Mozambique through 70 or so years. As the character descriptions indicate the unreliability of human dreams and the danger of them is a major theme.

[Jayne Charles · Rating 1 out of 5]

Given the numerical theme of this book I'm tempted to contribute a few numbers of my own. It's got 420 pages, of which about 400 left me baffled. I speed-read a good 50 towards the end, desperate to have the thing finished. It made me laugh precisely twice.

It's probably my fault. The whole thing is written with the confidence of someone who knows stuff, and who could probably teach you stuff if you could figure out what any of it meant. It's probably best enjoyed by people who read slowly and are comfortable puzzling over every last sentence. People who excel at cryptic crosswords. I am certain that had I read it in this way, the last section would have bloomed into three-dimensional technicolour clarity. But for for readers like me, perhaps lacking in the patience and I daresay intelligence needed, the experience was like chasing a bus, desperate to get on board before it disappears round the next corner, whilst not totally sure it's even the right bus. My mental notes were reduced to staccato non-sequiturs (Anthony loses his trousers...ends up on Kibbutz). Need to practice those cryptic crosswords.

[Jerico · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is rough. Not unpolished (the prose is quite smooth, as if worn but quite a few revisions) but hard to finish. It reminds me a little of something by Pynchon: its scientific in elements of narration and description, its networked and scattered and very post modern (blah, blah, blah). Its a lot colder than Pynchon and stays far away from resolution. I thought it might be a message novel at first, something oblique on its moral but I think this might be the bleakest book I've read in a while.

[Florita]

I'm a bit fed up with all these postmodern novels that take a disparate bunch of usually thoroughly unsympathetic characters and bring them all together over some random connection, like they are all distant cousins of Benny Hill or all use the same haemorrhoid ointment or something. So what?

[Flo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this much. Simon Ings writes very nicely, so no stylistic issue, but I'm still not sure what the point of the book was. The novel was also rather well built, I could see the connections between seemingly unrelated characters and events build up gradually, with the last 100 pages really weaving everything together well.
But his characters have few redeeming qualities and I couldn't relate or emphasize with them. I often found myself wondering "Why should I care?" "What's the point?" "Should I just put this down and move on?" etc as I trudged along. Between some of the events of life in London under WWII, the story of an anorexic, the civil war in Mozambique in the 80s and other bleak events and anecdotes, this is a very dark story. The only light in the book comes from the space that is devoted to the Moon missions in the 60s.
Maybe it would get better on a second read - I just thought of a connection that I'd missed as I typed this review eg. and familiar characters now may become a bit more relatable - but I can't imagine putting myself through this again.

[Hugh Mullany · Rating 2 out of 5]

Superbly written, just didn't speak to me.

There wasn't a word put wrong on the page; but for a story covering so many lives, I was looking for a little gap of joy - somewhere - to differentiate the lives described. There was a monotonic trudge in my own reading experience despite the excellence of the writing. It made the reveals of the interwoven plot less exciting and found me reaching for pen and paper to sketch out where I was in the inter-generational schema, rather than "I remember them, and that revealed relationship rings true".

As an aside, you wouldn't want to be a woman in this book. Really.

[Jody Lan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for books that weave together disparate stories and this one is a doozy. It switches back and forth a lot, and at first you think there can be no connection between the strands but by the end the whole thing pulls together wondefully.

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok it’s a convoluted, interconnected story which is well written and engaging but the positives end there. There is no light at the end of this tunnel. Not a single character is likeable or happy, such a depressing read.

[Kat Walter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much work…little reward.

[fonz · Rating 2 out of 5]

No me ha gustado. Vaya, no es que sea una mala novela, todo lo contrario, que Ings se ha metido aquí una currada importante de personajes y estructura, sencillamente es que las historias de la gente que componen este relato fractal no me han interesado en absoluto, a excepción del Mozambique colonial-postcolonial, la descarnada visión de la relación Primer-Tercer Mundo y el tráfico de personas. El trasfondo de la novela explicado a través de su estructura, es decir, la historia del siglo XX como una red tejida por los seres humanos, similar a un sistema fractal caótico gobernado por microacontecimientos al azar, es interesante a priori pero en mi opinión no está bien aprovechado, no impacta ni resulta sugerente, queda como un fuego de artificio estructural perdido en la hojarasca de la novela, excesivamente prolija en personajes interactuando y detalles que no aportan demasiado a la narración y que, en muchos casos, quedan como cabos sueltos, aunque imagino que esa es la intención.

El estilo es muy bueno, pero a veces se le va la pinza sobreescribiendo o rizando el rizo con las figuras literarias, por ejemplo hay un pequeño parráfo comparándo el sonido del rotor de unos helicópteros con la humedad de la saliva de Jobim interpretando Garota de Ipanema que me ha parecido la metáfora más rebuscada de la historia. También me chirría a veces, cuando parece querer asegurarse de que entendemos lo que está contando y se dirige al lector a través de escenas o capítulos en apariencia banales, como el encuentro sexual fortuito entre dos personajes en el que uno de ellos le cuenta a otro que está trabajando en un proyecto sobre seres humanos entretejiendo redes y generando arquitecturas, en resumen, lo que vamos a leer durante las próximas cuatrocientas páginas. Me pareció descolocante como mínimo, una especie de "guiño, guiño, codazo, codazo", del autor hacia los lectores la mar de raro.

[Michel · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the style is smooth and polished, the plot is rough, ambiguous and unfinished, or so it seems. Not to be recommended for amateurs of mystery and suspense —well, not quite true, I am an amateur of mystery and suspense— let's just say it isn't at all what you'd expect from the blurb.
This a cold, deliberate, unemotional vivisection of the 60s, when the counter-culture was the culture; when we rejected the mechanical morality of the past —Good was obeying the Law (and Traditions and Customs), Evil was breaking the Law— and replacing it with sentimental morality —Good was what felt good, Evil was what felt bad— and not a small dose of morbid fascination for outliers and outlaws...
The legacy of that decade is impressive, don't get me wrong: men are now allowed to feel, women to conduct the Foreign policy of the strongest Nation in history, blacks to preside over said Nation, we've come a long way, babe — it's just that we all at once chose to leave our thinking hats on the coat-hanger; becoming pacifists in the middle of a vicious cold war; chanting flower-power while withholding condemnation of Manson, Sla, Ira, Plo, Baader-Meinhof, Red Brigades, Ccc, &c…; as well as "generously" granting independence to countries we never invested a red cent to prepare for self-rule, and then superbly ignoring the consequences.
I'm rambling.
This is a welcome "sit up and take stock" novel about fascinating, if unsavory, characters, written by an obsessive re-writer, always finding "mot juste" and "sentence juste".

[Lucy Furr · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, I initially picked up The Weight of Numbers from the used bookstore because I liked the cover. Seriously, that's the reason. Sometimes I have good luck with that sort of thing, sometimes I don't. I'd say that this time was a pretty good success.

Quite honestly, I was expecting something a bit different based on the blurb on the inside, but I have to say, I think it turned out much better than what I was expecting. This book moves sporadically through time (the last 60 or so years) and (outer) space to bring you snippets of the lives of a plethora of characters, who are all, in the end, connected to each other, sometimes in ways they don't even realize. Even towards the end, new characters are being introduced and fitted into this web of a story. Poorly executed, this could have been a train wreck of a novel, but Simon Ings pulls it off wonderfully and brings it all together for a conclusion that may not be as cut and dried as you'd like, but certainly does make you think. Nowhere else will you find a book where astronauts, outer space, mathematicians, professional wrestlers, rats, war torn London, the invention of the internet, people smuggling, eating disorders and electroshock therapy come together in such a fashion (or even at all!).

A very enjoyable read, one that take a bit of effort, but is well worth it in the end.

[Carl Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

As disjointed as life, which is not at all. this is a superb scan of what seem to be random events, but which aren't. The effect is exactly like life - you can't see what it's about at the time, it only makes sense in retrospect, then you can see why things happened, not just that they did.

There are some similarities in this book to my own life, but thankfully not everything in the text has happened to me. I liked this book from the start, from the first line. I bought it for £1 in a discount shop because I wanted something to read. I don't understand most of the other reviews here. It's simply disturbingly superb. No slashings. no introspective musings, no Ithankfully) magic realism, not a single talking leopard anywhere. Just a book dealing with the oddities and accepted things of our times. I'd recommend this book to anyone. Try Poundland. Why they have it I don't know but I'm glad they did.

[jenn · Rating 1 out of 5]

okay so, i put this book down. i read maybe 200 pages of it and absolutely hated it. it's a great concept- all of these people in different times and different places are connected to one man.

it has a slow start that never really picked up speed, in my opinion. i finally put it down because i found most of the content to be boring (at least to me) and some what filthy.

that said, maybe it's just not my style. simon ings has written a number of science fiction works, a few novels and one non-fiction book called "the eye: a natural history." so, if you're into that sort of thing... science... you might dig it.

[severyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not so great a novel. I think he was trying to write something epic about the way people became more and more connected by technology and history and thought during the 20th century, but the language isn't quite up to it and the book ends up sounding overwritten and implausible.
Mixing the characters up with the moon landings and the atrocities of post-colonial Mozambique comes across as a slightly clumsy trick, rather than the serious framing that I think it was intended to be.
The last 100 or so pages are a little better and tighter, on the other hand, so maybe the book just needed stricter editing for its first three quarters.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know what to make of this book. It was lovely to read and I really wanted to learn about the stories of all the characters. But after reading through nearly three quarters of the book I was still being introduced to new characters and the plot was not yet linking up in any meaningful way. So I quit. But I still kind of wonder how it ended and it it all came together at the last minute? Each chapter seemed to start to new storyline, but the previous chapters remained unresolved. I understand that is a strategy to build tension, but I'd just had enough of the lack of resolution when I put the book down for the final time and sent it back to the library.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

The weight of numbers starts off fairly slow and sort of confusing. Somewhere in the middle of the first chapter I was wondering if the entire novel was about a middle aged astronaut and his issues with his wife... But whoa... keep reading.
I really enjoyed the authors style and each chapter is exciting and well executed.
good book

[Kristie · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the characters seemed interesting and well-written, I was unable to keep track of time and the correlations between them all. I ultimately had to put this book down. I got about halfway through before I realized new characters were still being introduced, and I still couldn't keep track of the ones I'd already met. Well done, but not for me.

[Mandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book made no sense. I was sick most of the time I was reading it, but I don't think it would have made much more sense if my head was clear. I feel like it would be better the 2nd time through, but there are too many other books I'd rather read than read this twice.

[Sammy]

I'm not really that into this book, but I've only just started... I'm hoping I'll change my mind soon.

I have one serious gripe, but we'll see if it's still a big impasse as I get farther into reading...

I really wanted to like this book.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that requires a reread. The first go was enjoyable, though a bit disjointed -- despite its length, it's something you need to read all at once. That, or keep a character map -- people keep showing up out of supposedly nowhere, but things do come together at the end.

[Peter Gasston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a second read to start seeing the connections between the time periods, which I didn't really get first time through. It's a clever book, an ambitious one, but not one that's easy to empathise with. I liked it, but I don't think it will be one I'll remember forever.

[Alex Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another bizarre Ings book - quite disturbing, obsessive attention to detail, amazing characters and sense of place - and I'm never quite sure that I understand it or really get what he's doing. Fascinating, very readable, very impressive.

[jeramy · Rating 3 out of 5]

so far so good...

[Ginette · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was really bizarre and disjointed.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book reads like a poor attempt to imitate Richard Powers. I won't be finishing it, and that almost never happens with me.

[Jude · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good friend gave me this book and thought I would enjoy it, but I just couldn't get into the plot.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book. Learned alot about Mozambique too :-)