A review by swaggynikki
The King of Infinite Space by Lyndsay Faye

God this book was off the walls. I read its inner flap at the library and all I gleaned from it was "modern gay Hamlet retelling" and I thought "why not" and I checked it out, and that elevator pitch is such an understatement that it's almost laughable. It is a Hamlet retelling, and it is set in the modern day, and it is gay, but it definitely not what you're thinking when you here that. It has an interesting take on how to write a neurodivergent character: all the chapters from Ben's (aka Hamlet's) perspective use changes in typeface and font size and other types of formatting to show that something weird is going on in his head, but the rambling word-association structure of his narration (which felt exactly like how it feels to think in my head) probably did a better job of it. My fear in a modern gay Hamlet retelling is that Ophelia's character would get shafted, like a more literary version of bad AO3 characterization, but luckily this adaptation did give her her flowers (literally!). Her twist was unexpected (to me, very bad at predictions) and the book basically did the ideal version of incorporating Horatio as a romantic lead without undercutting Ophelia's importance. I have no idea why the witches from Macbeth were there, but I'm down with their inclusion. But my favorite part of this book is absolutely that it introduced me to the field of the philosophy of physics. I'm writing this a few months after reading the book, and the plot and characters haven't crossed my mind many times since I finished it, but I think about the things Hamlet/Ben says about philosophy of physics regularly. The way he talks about himself, and how he's a neutron star and Horatio is the other neutron star and how his mental state is, like the status of Schrodinger's cat, possibly destroyed beyond return is a little ridiculous sometimes, but that's how any good Hamlet interpretation should be. His moments do sometimes border on silly (I quote "I'm like the sweater from the Weezer song. Unraveling" on a regular basis) but they're also fascinating, and I like how the book wasn't afraid to get really philosophically weird with him. I just wish he was written at a time where he could have known about enmeshed particles.