Ratner's Star (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Don DeLillo
- First Published: 1976
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Science fiction, Science fantasy
- Subjects: United States or Americans, Science or scientists, Genius, Connecticut, Mathematics or mathematicians
- Locales: Connecticut
Ratner's Star is a fantastic narrative in two parts built around an enticing plot idea. In part 1, “Adventures: Field Experiment Number One,” Billy Twillig is summoned to a Connecticut think tank, the School of Mathematics of the Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures. Billy is a boy genius, a fourteen-year-old winner of the first Nobel Prize in Mathematics who has done brilliant work with the “zorg,” a kind of number but a “useless” one. The center occupies a huge cycloid—architecturally imaginative but impossible to visualize. Billy is summoned to the...
[The entire page is 1113 words long]
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