synoptic_view 's review for:

Micromegas by Voltaire

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Part of my "early sci fi" binge. Definitely gives those sci fi feelings--much more than I expected from a works whose primary purpose is satire of different philosophical ideas. Even simple stuff like the calculations of relative size at the beginning are classic sci fi. I also found myself really wondering about the relationship between size and intelligence. Size seems clearly to be correlated with intelligence among earth creatures, but that relationship is confounded by other size-correlated factors. And there is a simple physics argument that you need more size to pack in more neuron equivalents--although you run into the problem of communicating between ever more distant computation units. So, basically, I got a lot of sci Fi thoughts out of this brief book of philosophical satire. The satire was pretty good too, although I need to revisit my enlightenment era philosophy to get more from it.