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Einstein's Question

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The back cover of IZ 224 has an advert for Einstein's Question, by Steve and Deja Whitehouse. I read this fascinating novel several weeks ago and would like to discuss some of its deep aspects here.
The book concerns the role of living entities in our universe, the possibility that our universe is part of a unified collection of universes called a multiverse, that every entity (even each elementary particle) in each of these universes can be said to be living, how all this relates to theology, how mathematics can describe all this, and how the acts of living entities can hold the multiverse together. Much physics and social science can be learned by reading it with care.
The main idea is stability, in physics and social science. All entities in each universe must be somehow stable, this stability is needed to ensure the stability of each universe, and the latter can guarantee the stability of the multiverse itself. In fact, individual entities can act to bring this global stability about, or to keep it in place. We have a new take on the adage 'everything depends on everything else,' without the usual New Age irrationalist connotations.
The multiverse is looked over by the Guardians, beings with nearly divine powers. They enlist the Terran physicist Edward to help them intervene in an attack on our planet by a race of fanatical extraterrestrials. Stability of our universe alone demands intervention, as does fixing the ecological mess that we have made of the Earth. They succeed, but at a price that we can technically call genocidal. The moral is that anything at all can and should be sacrificed to ensure stability. For without stability nothing can exist, and preserving the proper existing entities is an overriding, ethically justified goal at any moment.
The authors now introduce another problem. This time the stability of the multiverse is threatened by the failure of one universe to enter a state conducive to global stability. This is a nearly Planck-scale Quantum Universe, which is governed by the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics. With the help of beings even more god-like than the Guardians, humans are reduced to elementary particles, to assist in solving the problem. They do so by entering the Quantum Universe and carrying out acts of observation. These create the desired state of the entire Quantum Universe, just as (it is claimed) observation of the contents of a box determines the state--living or dead--of Schrödinger's cat. The multiverse and the Earth therein are saved.
Here I wish to state a criticism of this wonderful, strange book. The couple writes as if observation was an accepted tool in quantum theory. It is not. The notion that 'mind' and its acts of observation are essential to Quantum Mechanics was introduced by J. von Neumann, criticised by Schrödinger by using his cat, and is quite controversal. Indeed, the true interpretation of quantum mechanics is (as a mathematician told me) 'up for grabs.' Steve and Deja Whitehouse should have mentioned this.
There is much is this fine book that I am incompetant to discuss. The authors use the notion of stability in the physical and social sciences. I do not fully understand its latter use, although I believe that 'stability' is one idea that unifies the entire text. The discussions of political and social theory are too brief for me, as is the treatment of democracy therein. But this is a merely subjective criticism of this intellectually dazzling work.
[...].
IZ, by the way, refers to "Interzone," The UK's (and, I believe, Europe's) best Science Fiction magazine. P.S. I live in Uppsala, Sweden, not in Amsterdam.