The Hair-Carpet Weavers Q1: Overall Impressions
What were your overall impressions of this book? Did it remind you of other works? How would you classify it within the body of SF?
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Home › Monthly Book Selections › 161. (September 2026) The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach (also called The Hair Carpet Weavers )
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Comments
It was an odd one. It took me a while to understand why it was a SF book at all. The first chunk didn't make any real reference to anything other than early-Modern technology, and it also took a while for me to work out what the book was trying to say, what it was about.
However, it was intriguing enough that I kept with it, and the wider scope eventually became apparent. That part of it reminded me a little of le Guin's Always Coming Home, which wandered for a long while before I worked out what the author was trying to say.
I also hadn't expected the format to be what it was, and it reminded me a bit of City in the sense of having multiple linked tales. But the links here were much more direct from one story to the next - there was a sense of one word or idea being introduced towards the end of each story, which was then picked up and amplified in the next.
For me, this sense of linking but without really knowing where the chain was going worked very well - like @NeilNjae I was a bit perplexed at first but was keen to stay with it. Ultimately I really liked it and thought it well worth reading.
The start with early modern tech and no sense of why this was the starting point reminded me of some AE van Vogt, though I think he would have gone off in a different, esoteric mind-improvement direction!