What do you think?
Rate this book
El agujero en la nada
LOS PELIGROS DE LA NADA
Más allá del borde de la relidad, en la mismísima frontera entre el Universo y la nada, todo es posible y nada es seguro…ni siquiera la muerte.
Más allá del borde de la realidad, las matemáticas y la ley de probabilidades no tienen ninguna validez, y la existencia es regida por el azar.
Atrapadas en una porción de no-espacio, cuatro personas luchan por volver a la existencia real a través de un caos inimaginable de mundos alternos.
Más allá del borde de la relidad, en la mismísima frontera entre el Universo y la nada, todo es posible y nada es seguro…ni siquiera la muerte.
Más allá del borde de la realidad, las matemáticas y la ley de probabilidades no tienen ninguna validez, y la existencia es regida por el azar.
Atrapadas en una porción de no-espacio, cuatro personas luchan por volver a la existencia real a través de un caos inimaginable de mundos alternos.
160 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1969
7 people are currently reading
747 people want to read
About the author
M.K. Joseph
15 books3 followersMichael Kennedy Joseph (9 July 1914 – 4 October 1981) was a poet and novelist of the 1950s–70s, one of the most important writers of that period, best known subsequently for his science fiction and the novel A Soldier’s Tale (1976). Diverse in subject and genre, his work combines intellectual with populist elements, international with local interests, and experimentalism of form with a more traditional moral and metaphysical enquiry. His work ranged from I'll Soldier No More, A Pound of Saffron and A Soldier's Tale to the science fiction works The Hole in the Zero and The Time of Achamoth to a historical novel Kaspar's Journey based on the medieval Children's Crusade. The Hole in the Zero includes the first known use of the word "hoverboard".
Joseph was also a Professor of English at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. In 1969, he edited the 1831 text of Frankenstein for Oxford University Press; in 1980 the text was reissued in the World's Classics series.
http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers...
Joseph was also a Professor of English at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. In 1969, he edited the 1831 text of Frankenstein for Oxford University Press; in 1980 the text was reissued in the World's Classics series.
http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 27, 2022
The Hole in the Zero is M.K. Joseph’s 1967 new wave science fiction exploration of identity, possibility, and archetypal mythology. The frame is that three space tourists and their pilot get dumped into “unspace,” a region where the rules of our universe break down and where anything is possible. But it’s perhaps better to think of this framing as a way to link a series of short stories with repeating archetypal characters: the power-seeker, the pleasure-seeker, the knowledge-seeker, and in dated 60’s fashion, the woman-as-object-and-mother. The stories examine alternate realities generated by choice, the battle between different viewpoints as represented by different imagined worlds, and the search for truth within paradigmatic parables. It's interesting, surreal, and often lyrical, but to me, didn’t fully hang together to create the epiphany it seemed to be striving for. Definitely a striking curiosity.
February 23, 2011
trippiest book i've ever read
November 25, 2024
Check out a discussion on this novel with Chris from Liminal Spaces HERE.
I loved the setup of this one but started to get lost and confused as the novel went on. I didn’t put in the time or effort to fully understand what was going on, thinking the author would explain more as we got deeper into the story, which he didn’t. This one is a challenging read. Chris, who I buddy read this one with, put in the effort and loved it, you can also see his deep read HERE. So I will definitely reread this one at some point, hoping to get more enjoyment out of it.
I loved the setup of this one but started to get lost and confused as the novel went on. I didn’t put in the time or effort to fully understand what was going on, thinking the author would explain more as we got deeper into the story, which he didn’t. This one is a challenging read. Chris, who I buddy read this one with, put in the effort and loved it, you can also see his deep read HERE. So I will definitely reread this one at some point, hoping to get more enjoyment out of it.
July 30, 2020
The Hole in the Zero reads like an sf anthology with a framing device. A spaceship containing four people becomes lost in unstable "un-space" where the rules of the universe are in flux and the four characters experience many different realities, realities influenced by the personalities and wills of the characters. The different realities are interesting in their own right, but tie together through the relationships of the characters to one another--the book, published in 1967, has echos of Cloud Atlas.
May 13, 2012
I enjoyed the metal ride this book took me on, but many things left me unsatisfied and confused. Took me forever to finish, but all in all, it was a pleasure to meet you.
June 22, 2012
Read and am about to read again, for the first time in 40 years....
June 29, 2017
A very imaginative sci-fi novel that I thoroughly enjoyed reading.
March 19, 2025
“I go and I return: I would I were
The pilot of the darkness and the dream”
Chaos is hell
Hell is dull
A magnate his bored daughter and his heir-executive visit the house of a warden of the edge un space. Where the universe ceases to be. Logic and reason become unlogic and antireason. They voyage into the void/all and their ship breaks down.
Improbability becomes probability and all become one as the idea of self is lost. I am I and I am Me they chant recollections of the conditioning room breaking through sensorydeformation. A skimmer rider falls from above the clouds. A rock eater returns to sand and fire in the watery desert. A soldier. A depot man lives in limbo between the draftees and the damned. The boot camp and the front. A dendroid, last of a dying breed fed on by steam engines and coal burners who in turn are fed on by streamlined predators is finally burned up with blazing earth.
A possibility most improbable in select version of all possible least probable versions of paradine becomes heir to Kraag marries Helena and is cuckolded by merganser. Alternative time lines formed with every decision and eventually one of his myriad offspring discovers and markets the elixir of everlasting life. Diverging timelines pass into endless poly dimensional sub universes leading to a cumulative overload on an infinite number of time paths. Building up to a breaking point blowing out timeline after timeline. Converging universes blow time-nodes fuse or short out arcing chronokinetic energy. Doppelgängers run down all possible time paths and choice patterns until the entire matrix collapses and settles; mono linear and rigid.
The pilot of the darkness and the dream”
Chaos is hell
Hell is dull
A magnate his bored daughter and his heir-executive visit the house of a warden of the edge un space. Where the universe ceases to be. Logic and reason become unlogic and antireason. They voyage into the void/all and their ship breaks down.
Improbability becomes probability and all become one as the idea of self is lost. I am I and I am Me they chant recollections of the conditioning room breaking through sensorydeformation. A skimmer rider falls from above the clouds. A rock eater returns to sand and fire in the watery desert. A soldier. A depot man lives in limbo between the draftees and the damned. The boot camp and the front. A dendroid, last of a dying breed fed on by steam engines and coal burners who in turn are fed on by streamlined predators is finally burned up with blazing earth.
A possibility most improbable in select version of all possible least probable versions of paradine becomes heir to Kraag marries Helena and is cuckolded by merganser. Alternative time lines formed with every decision and eventually one of his myriad offspring discovers and markets the elixir of everlasting life. Diverging timelines pass into endless poly dimensional sub universes leading to a cumulative overload on an infinite number of time paths. Building up to a breaking point blowing out timeline after timeline. Converging universes blow time-nodes fuse or short out arcing chronokinetic energy. Doppelgängers run down all possible time paths and choice patterns until the entire matrix collapses and settles; mono linear and rigid.
April 3, 2020
Corona book diary book 18 -
A guy named Seth Palandine is named warden over a section of something called no-space, a kind of black hole thing where anything and everything can happen. A ruthless tycoon named Kraag, his cold daughter Helena and his albino protégé whose name I’ve already forgotten crash Palandine’s planetoid and convince him to travel to no-space for kicks, man. Then seemingly random surreal bonkers nonsense happens for the remaining 150 pages of this 190 page book.
It is trippy. It is bananas. I hated almost every page of it. It is the new waveist new wavey new wave sf book that ever new waved. Sometimes the literary experimentation of New Wave excites me, sometimes I’m confused and bored. This is just boring. I’d recommend it to people who hate plot, surrealists, and elderly hippies whose tastes never left the sixties.
Didn’t grok it, didn’t dig it, a real bad trip, man.
A guy named Seth Palandine is named warden over a section of something called no-space, a kind of black hole thing where anything and everything can happen. A ruthless tycoon named Kraag, his cold daughter Helena and his albino protégé whose name I’ve already forgotten crash Palandine’s planetoid and convince him to travel to no-space for kicks, man. Then seemingly random surreal bonkers nonsense happens for the remaining 150 pages of this 190 page book.
It is trippy. It is bananas. I hated almost every page of it. It is the new waveist new wavey new wave sf book that ever new waved. Sometimes the literary experimentation of New Wave excites me, sometimes I’m confused and bored. This is just boring. I’d recommend it to people who hate plot, surrealists, and elderly hippies whose tastes never left the sixties.
Didn’t grok it, didn’t dig it, a real bad trip, man.
March 22, 2020
Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...
"I love finding a SF book on the used bookstore shelf by an author I have never heard of. I am even more excited when a virtually unknown novel is endorsed by one of the great SF critics, in this case John Clute. According to Clute’s SF Encyclopedia entry [link] M. K. Joseph was a UK-born resident of New Zealand where he worked as a professor of English and writer. His early novels and poetry were not SF—The Hole in the Zero (1967) is his first, and one [...]"
"I love finding a SF book on the used bookstore shelf by an author I have never heard of. I am even more excited when a virtually unknown novel is endorsed by one of the great SF critics, in this case John Clute. According to Clute’s SF Encyclopedia entry [link] M. K. Joseph was a UK-born resident of New Zealand where he worked as a professor of English and writer. His early novels and poetry were not SF—The Hole in the Zero (1967) is his first, and one [...]"
December 10, 2025
Disappointed. I expected so much more beyond the borders of reality. Instead, it was all the same but different. More like improbable realities. Looking at any of them without any point of reference would still feel like really.
September 10, 2023
Lo que comienza como una space opera al uso termina como una experimento de desarrollo de las personalidades de los protagonistas en un ¿ambiente? privado de toda lógica causal. No mata.
November 1, 2024
Un viaje psicodélico. Nada más.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews