The core characters are Eliza and Rachel, a couple planning to have a baby assisted by their gay friend Hal.

To tell too much would be unwise; going in without any background to this novel gave me the best reading experience and left me emotionally touched when reaching the end of Love and Other Thought Experiments.Yet another way in which the book’s conceptualization at the macro level thrills far more successfully than the presentation at the micro level.

It’s certainly an interesting and unique read, and could’ve been such a strong piece if more of its elements had received the same attention that the core concepts and formatting did. An act of such breath-taking imagination, daring and detail that the journey we are on is believable and the debate in the mind non-stop. Everything after that is complicated, as we have one chapter narrated by the ant, which is nibbling away on Rachel’s tumour and we have Arthur who becomes an astronaut flying missions to Mars. You do not need to have known the thought experiment to follow the book – as each is concisely explained at the start of the chapter. Regardless, the ripple of a book's effect on your life can be strong; whether the change is immediate or revealed much later varies from book to book.Eliza wants to believe her partner but, as a scientist, can’t affirm something that doesn’t make sense (“We don’t need to resort to the mystical to describe physical processes,” she says). This is not to say that the story is not clever and well written, it is just done in a way that the end of the book makes the reader have to work too hard to join the dots (and it is Sci-Fi). Books with strong craft and little emotional connection can definitely be tricky; I generally love writing that plays with form, but missing the payoff can unfortunately ruin the experience, and reading several of these types of stories together certainly sounds trying. Each time you think you know what the author is doing, she pulls the rug from under you and heads in a different direction.

There are a few LGBTQ+ characters included at the forefront of the cast, but they seem to exist naturally and without identity-based conflict in this world, thus failing to generate any social commentary; I think it’s very important for marginalized characters to be present in books this way, as people worth the page space without having to examine their lives for the reader’s benefit, but again it doesn’t exactly help one connect to or feel for these characters. A book that declares, winningly, that just because it's all in your head, it doesn't mean it's not real. For me, the most powerful chapters are the fourth and fifth, which compose a kind of central diptych: the narrative from the ant’s viewpoint, followed by Rachel’s meditation, in extremity, on her “partnership” with the creature, which had “crawled in to her eye one night and changed her life”. Towards the end of the book the operating system, Zeus, says: ”You exist because of me and I exist because of you.Thus, when I read this review, I kept thinking, “This sounds like something someone wrote in an MFA program to stand out. One night she wakes up with an ant in her eye and suddenly the universe as she/we know it unravels before our (ahem) ant riddled eyes.

Each of the ten chapters is themed after a famous thought experiment like the prisoner's dilemma, the philosophical zombie or the ship of Theseus.

If you can enjoy the ride for what it is, you may come out of it with new experiences that inform and transform what comes next. There were connections that I missed the first time and also there were some pieces of wonderful writing that stood out for me. It mixes philosophy, science, psychology and constructs playful, intriguing and satisfying stories to bring famous thought experiments to life. If I had to like it to another author in would say David Mitchell, but the resemblance to his work is fleeting. I shall say no more about the Ant so as to avoid spoliers, but this nonhuman consciousness is fascinating and in terms of imagery and metaphor creates a very deep and sophisticated meditation on the nature of life and our connection with that which is other to humanity (and asks is it indeed other to humanity).