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Dust, a novel A question this book asks is how novel is any novel, and another question it asks is whether the fictional cosmology it presents is actual, and another is whether anyone knows.
Superficially,
Dust
is a story of a team of immortal space aliens who travel the
universe trying to bail worlds out of the trouble they get
themselves into. But
those and other fantastical characters are a means of concisely
giving focus to a perspective of the history of humanity,
beginning with the cave paintings at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc about 30
millennia ago and culminating on 9/11, with the continuing
terror in the Middle East.
Most of the story is the civil rights issues of the
twentieth century, from the Russian revolutions through the
Montgomery bus boycott to the Palestinian problem showing both
failures and successes, but it’s also ordinarily personal.
So the main questions this book asks are not only how much fact
is in any fiction and how much fiction is in any non-fiction but
also why and for whom.
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