Einstein’s Dreams
Year: 1993
Author: Alan Lightman
Length: 140 pages
I can appreciate poetic works that try to string each idea together into a connected narrative. I’ve seen few that have done this as well as Einstein’s Dreams has. Of course, the problem with trying to make all these disparate poems work together is that they are still just brief glimpses into stories that could easily stand on their own. Perhaps that’s the curse of well-written poetry—it leaves you wanting more. I’d almost consider these stories as writing prompts for anyone looking to make an entire book out of the dreams of the world’s best physicist.
Many of the stories in this collection/novel play upon the ideas of general relativity. The way the physics is described and how the people in these worlds live feel legitimately realistic. Of course, sometimes the physics “gimmick” isn’t revealed until the end of a story, thus leaving me in the dark as to what was actually happening as I read through the dream. I didn’t have enough patience to read through these stories again to fully understand the way their worlds worked.
As a cohesive narrative, there isn’t much that advances the story here. It’s mostly focused on exploring interesting applications of theoretical physics in the terms of people and their lives. Some are stronger than others, but they’re all basically the same idea repeated a couple dozen times in slightly different packaging. And maybe I was expecting something more like Shakespeare in Love (1998) where Einstein’s dreams help him break through the concepts he’s trying to discover. Instead, the titular character is only in a few pieces of joining text that frame the whole collection. But at least the prose was pretty.
Poetic exploration of theoretical physics, I give Einstein’s Dreams 3.0 stars out of 5.
