15 The real source of this insight is Hardy, in his Apology’s famous “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game,” which UPGC’s narrator rips off without any attribution at all (p. 78: “Mathematics, you see, is a young man’s game. It is one of the few human endeavors where youth is a necessary requirement [ sic ] for greatness”). Actually, this FN is probably the place to point out that Doxiadis’s novel is filled with what appear to be little more than very slight rephrasings of stuff in Hardy’s Apology and/or C. P. Snow’s famous Foreword to it. Flipping through the two books at random, one might, e.g., compare UPGC’s “Anybody who claims that scientists—even the purest of the pure, the most abstract, high-flying mathematicians—are motivated exclusively by the Pursuit of Truth for the Good of Mankind, either has no idea what he’s talking about or is blatantly lying” with Hardy’s “So if a mathematician, or a chemist, or even a physiologist, were to tell me that the driving force in his work had been the desire to benefit humanity, then I should not believe him.” Or see Hardy’s “Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty,” and UPGC’s “Riemann had died at thirty-nine, Niels Henrik Abel at twenty-seven and Evariste Galois at a mere tragic twenty…”; or C. P. Snow’s description of the Hardy-Littlewood team as “the most famous collaboration in the history of mathematics” vs. Doxiadis’s narrator calling it “one of the most renowned partnerships in the history of mathematics.” On UPGC pages 129–30, Doxiadis even cribs nearly word for word a deathbed exchange between Hardy and Ramanujan and tags it with the footnote “Hardy also recounts the incident in his Mathematician’s Apology without, however, acknowledging my uncle’s presence,” which is not only intrusive and irritating but wrong, since it is not in the Apology but in Snow’s Foreword to it that the scene really appears.

It’s hard to know just how indictable UPGC is for its reliance on Hardy. It doesn’t seem like outright plagiarism, because plagiarism implies sneakiness, and Doxiadis has a fully attributed Hardy-quotation right up front as the novel’s epigraph. Plus it’s true that much commercial genre fiction has a long history of liberating stuff from established literary works. For the record, though, it’s still one of the more irksome things about UPGC.