The One True Platonic Heaven by John L. Casti, Joseph Henry Press, $22.95/£15.95, ISBN 0309085470 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
THE “Platonic heaven” of John Casti’s title refers to the Institute for Advanced Study that was established at Princeton University in 1930, and his semi-fictionalised account is set in the spring of 1946, just after the end of the Second World War. It is a difficult work to categorise. Casti himself calls it “scientific fiction”, which doesn’t tell us much. Neither does his remark that the Japanese term for it is shosetsu, a kind of history with elements of fiction mixed in. The genre allows a writer to move people around to places they were never in and…
