Friday, January 06, 2006

You can't leave the house.




In his take on the detective novel Nighttrain, Martin Amis uses the career of an astrophysicists as an extended allegory of darkness where there should be light. One image he uses is that of the Bootes void. A region of space 250 million light years across that contains nothing, a void, in fact a supervoid, and one of the largest know objects, or non-objects in the universe.
So Amis uses this as a metaphor for emptiness.
Convieniently failing to mention the largest know obect. The Sloan Great Wall. 1.37 billion lives across. A nice fence enclosing a eco-friendly house, with a few of the mountains and the sea. Re-affirms your faith in the abstract laws of creation.
Which means Amis had Jennifer Rockwell killed herself for nothing. Amis should do a stretch for the authorially assisted suicide of fictional life.

The picture is of the entire universe. The Sloan Great Wall is the ribbon of bright green light a third of the way up from the mid-point.