Oceanic (novella)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Oceanic"
Author Greg Egan
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction novella
Published in Asimov's Science Fiction
Publication type Magazine
Publication date August 1998
"Oceanic" is a science fiction novella published in 1998 by Greg Egan. It won the 1999 Hugo Award for Best Novella.Contents [hide]
1 Background
2 Plot summary
3 References
4 External links
[edit]
Background
"Oceanic" was first published in the August 1998 edition of Asimov's Science Fiction by Dell Magazines. In 1999 and 2007 it was republished by The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection and The Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels respectively by editor Gardner Dozois. In 2008 it was published in Greg Egan's collection Dark Integers and Other Stories and in 2009 it was again published in a collection by Egan, entitled Oceanic.[1] In 1999 "Oceanic" won the Hugo Award for Best Novella, Locus Award best novella, and the Asimov's Reader Poll for best novella.[2][3][4] It also won two forgein short story awards; the 2000 Hayakawa's SF Magazine Reader's Award and the 2001 Seiun Award.[5][6] "Oceanic" was also a finalist in the 1998 Aurealis Award for best science fiction short story, a long list nominee for the 1999 James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award and a short-list nominee for the 1999 HOMer Award for best novella.[7][8][9]
[edit]
Plot summary
The story follows Martin, a Freelander living on the oceans of Covenant. As a boy he has a religious experience that shapes his life for years to come. As he grows into manhood his experiences and studies begin to conflict with his deep rooted faith. Eventually he joins a small circle of scholars studying the effects of one of Covenant’s most abundant microbes as his views of life change dramatically.
[edit]
References
^ "Bibliography: Oceanic". ISFDB. Retrieved 2010-03-24.
^ "The Locus Index to SF Awards: 1999 Hugo Awards". Locus Online. Retrieved 2010-03-24.
^ "The Locus Index to SF Awards: 1999 Locus Awards". Locus Online. Retrieved 2010-03-24.
^ "The Locus Index to SF Awards: 1999 Asimov's Reader Poll". Locus Online. Retrieved 2010-03-24.
^ "The Locus Index to SF Awards: 2000 Hayakawa's SF Magazine Reader's Award". Locus Online. Retrieved 2010-03-24.
^ "The Locus Index to SF Awards: 2001 Seiun Awards". Locus Online. Retrieved 2010-03-24.
^ "The Locus Index to SF Awards: 1999 Aurealis Awards". Locus Online. Retrieved 2010-03-24.
^ "The Locus Index to SF Awards: 1999 James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award". Locus Online. Retrieved 2010-03-24.
^ "The Locus Index to SF Awards: 1999 HOMer Awards". Locus Online. Retrieved 2010-03-24.
[edit]
External links
'Oceanic' by Greg Egan - full text
Oceanic by Greg Egan at BestScienceFictionStories.com - A short review of the novella with resources for finding it.
4 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_(novella)
Friday, March 26, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Luminous - Greg Egan
Luminous (story collection)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Luminous is a collection of short science fiction stories by Greg Egan.
Luminous contains the following short stories.
Chaff - An agent is sent to kill a geneticist who is working in a druglord controlled stronghold in the jungles of Colombia, and working on important brain altering research.
Mitochondrial Eve - An organisation is trying to trace a common maternal ancestor for recent humanity.
Luminous - A pair of researchers have found a defect in mathematics, where something can be true and false at the same time, proving that the fundamental nature of our universe, and the universe represented by theoretical numbers, may be on a collision course for mathematical supremacy.
Mister Volition
Cocoon
Transition Dreams
Silver Fire
Reasons To Be Cheerful - A boy discovers he has a serious brain tumour, and it was causing him to be amazingly happy. Removed, he becomes despondent, and undergoes a new and extensive treatment eventually, with a form of brain network, to try and get back to a more useful life many years later.
Our Lady Of Chernobyl - A man is hired to find a radioactive religious icon. The search turns deadly.
The Planck Dive
ISBN 1-85798-573-7
The title story has since seen a sequel entitled Dark Integers. The sequel was published in the October/November 2007 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction
3 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_(story_collection)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Luminous is a collection of short science fiction stories by Greg Egan.
Luminous contains the following short stories.
Chaff - An agent is sent to kill a geneticist who is working in a druglord controlled stronghold in the jungles of Colombia, and working on important brain altering research.
Mitochondrial Eve - An organisation is trying to trace a common maternal ancestor for recent humanity.
Luminous - A pair of researchers have found a defect in mathematics, where something can be true and false at the same time, proving that the fundamental nature of our universe, and the universe represented by theoretical numbers, may be on a collision course for mathematical supremacy.
Mister Volition
Cocoon
Transition Dreams
Silver Fire
Reasons To Be Cheerful - A boy discovers he has a serious brain tumour, and it was causing him to be amazingly happy. Removed, he becomes despondent, and undergoes a new and extensive treatment eventually, with a form of brain network, to try and get back to a more useful life many years later.
Our Lady Of Chernobyl - A man is hired to find a radioactive religious icon. The search turns deadly.
The Planck Dive
ISBN 1-85798-573-7
The title story has since seen a sequel entitled Dark Integers. The sequel was published in the October/November 2007 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction
3 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_(story_collection)
Our Lady Of Chernobyl - Greg Egan
Our Lady of Chernobyl
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009)
This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from related articles; suggestions are available. (December 2009)
Our Lady of Chernobyl is a collection of short fiction by the Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan, published in 1995 by MirrorDanse, in Sydney. The book has a purple drawing of a brain on the cover and contains four short stories.Contents [hide]
1 The stories
1.1 Chaff (1993)
1.2 Beyond the Whistle Test (1989)
1.3 Transition Dreams (1993)
1.4 Our Lady of Chernobyl (1994)
[edit]
The stories
All of the four stories were first published in Asimov's Science Fiction or Interzone. All stories but Beyond the Whistle Test were also published in the more widely available (but as yet unreleased in the United States) collection Luminous. The collection was published in France, in French, as Notre-Dame de Tchernobyl.
[edit]
Chaff (1993)
Colombian drug cartels have made the Amazon Rainforest into biotechnological nightmare/utopia. A United States operative enters in search of an itinerant scientist and questions his convictions about the nature of identity.
[edit]
Beyond the Whistle Test (1989)
A full understanding of certain neural pathways results in the creation of a song that gets permanently stuck in the heads of listeners.
[edit]
Transition Dreams (1993)
An elderly man agrees to have his mind (or, if you prefer, in information stored in his brain) copied to computer. In this story Egan takes the materialist stance where such copying must act on data, and because acting on integrated brain data is equivalent to causing experiences akin to REM sleep, the man is told that in the process he will undergo unremembered dreams. This story further explores a subset of the territory covered in Permutation City.
[edit]
Our Lady of Chernobyl (1994)
Our Lady of Chernobyl was first published in Interzone #83, May 1994, then reprinted in Our Lady of Chernobyl, Notre-Dame de Tchernobyl (French translation), Luminous, Hayakawa's SF Magazine (Japanese translation), and the Italian edition of Luminous, as "Nostra Signora Di Chernobyl".
Those familiar with some of Egan's other work may be a bit surprised—there's no physics here, no philosophical explorations of the nature of consciousness and reality. This one's SF noir, albeit with a subtext that meditates on religion from an atheist perspective, a dark tale revealed to the reader as it is revealed to the Private Investigator protagonist, in fits and starts.
4 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Chernobyl
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009)
This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from related articles; suggestions are available. (December 2009)
Our Lady of Chernobyl is a collection of short fiction by the Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan, published in 1995 by MirrorDanse, in Sydney. The book has a purple drawing of a brain on the cover and contains four short stories.Contents [hide]
1 The stories
1.1 Chaff (1993)
1.2 Beyond the Whistle Test (1989)
1.3 Transition Dreams (1993)
1.4 Our Lady of Chernobyl (1994)
[edit]
The stories
All of the four stories were first published in Asimov's Science Fiction or Interzone. All stories but Beyond the Whistle Test were also published in the more widely available (but as yet unreleased in the United States) collection Luminous. The collection was published in France, in French, as Notre-Dame de Tchernobyl.
[edit]
Chaff (1993)
Colombian drug cartels have made the Amazon Rainforest into biotechnological nightmare/utopia. A United States operative enters in search of an itinerant scientist and questions his convictions about the nature of identity.
[edit]
Beyond the Whistle Test (1989)
A full understanding of certain neural pathways results in the creation of a song that gets permanently stuck in the heads of listeners.
[edit]
Transition Dreams (1993)
An elderly man agrees to have his mind (or, if you prefer, in information stored in his brain) copied to computer. In this story Egan takes the materialist stance where such copying must act on data, and because acting on integrated brain data is equivalent to causing experiences akin to REM sleep, the man is told that in the process he will undergo unremembered dreams. This story further explores a subset of the territory covered in Permutation City.
[edit]
Our Lady of Chernobyl (1994)
Our Lady of Chernobyl was first published in Interzone #83, May 1994, then reprinted in Our Lady of Chernobyl, Notre-Dame de Tchernobyl (French translation), Luminous, Hayakawa's SF Magazine (Japanese translation), and the Italian edition of Luminous, as "Nostra Signora Di Chernobyl".
Those familiar with some of Egan's other work may be a bit surprised—there's no physics here, no philosophical explorations of the nature of consciousness and reality. This one's SF noir, albeit with a subtext that meditates on religion from an atheist perspective, a dark tale revealed to the reader as it is revealed to the Private Investigator protagonist, in fits and starts.
4 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Chernobyl
Axiomatic - Greg Egan
Axiomatic (story collection)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Axiomatic (ISBN 0-7528-1650-0) is a 1995 collection of short science fiction stories by Greg Egan.
According to amazon.co.uk, in the Axiomatic stories: "Egan delivers shocking body-blows to received ideas in thought-experiment stories that like Jorge Luis Borges's philosophical squibs are booby-trapped with terrible truths and paradoxes." The Guardian describes it as "[w]onderful mind-expanding stuff, and well-written too."Contents [hide]
1 Neural Mods
2 The Jewel
3 Minds uploaded to computers
4 Other stories in Axiomatic
5 Reviews of Axiomatic
6 References
[edit]
Neural Mods
Several Axiomatic stories involve "neural mods", usually presented as small tubes containing powder inhaled through the nose, which alter the brains of their users in highly specific ways with advanced nanotechnology.
In the collection's eponymous story "Axiomatic", the protagonist enters a store selling mods not only for every variety of psychedelic experiences, but for altering one's personality traits, sexual orientation, and even religion. The protagonist seeks a custom-made mod that will suspend his moral convictions long enough for him to murder his wife's killer. In "The Walk", an executioner offers his victim a mod that will cause him to accept the killer's personal philosophy, and thus help him cope with his death.
Neural mods feature prominently in Greg Egan's first science fiction novel, Quarantine.
[edit]
The Jewel
Two stories, "Learning to Be Me" and "Closer", involve a different kind of neural implant called a "jewel"—a small computer inserted into the brain at birth that monitors its activity in order to learn how to mimic its behavior. By the time one reaches adulthood, the jewel's simulation is a near-perfect predictor of the brain's activity, and the jewel is given control of the person's body while the redundant brain is discarded. In this way, people with the jewel can eliminate the cognitive decline associated with aging by implementing their minds on a machine. Also, by transplanting the jewels into cloned bodies genetically altered to develop without brains, they can live youthfully forever.
"Learning to Be Me" explores the consequences of a man's jewel failing to synchronize with his brain, while in "Closer" a couple arranges to have the internal states of their jewels gradually made more similar so they can temporarily become a single person.
[edit]
Minds uploaded to computers
Minds are transferred to computers in a different style in "A Kidnapping". People wishing to upload themselves into computer simulations to avoid death are periodically scanned so that a recent copy of the individual can be simulated in the event of death. Due to limited computing resources, however, uploaded people are simulated slower than their physical counterparts, making communication between them difficult.
This system of uploading minds features prominently in Greg Egan's novel Permutation City.
[edit]
Other stories in Axiomatic
"The Infinite Assassin" -- An illegal recreational drug allows people to travel between parallel universes with disastrous side effects.
"The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary" -- After the invention of a method for sending messages back in time, history of the future becomes common knowledge, and every person knows their own fate.
"Eugene" -- A married couple consults a genetic engineer to design their next child.
"The Caress" -- Police investigate the origin of a half-human, half-cheetah chimera discovered in the basement of a murder victim.
"Blood Sisters" -- Two identical twin sisters are diagnosed with the same rare, fatal illness.
"The Safe-Deposit Box" -- A man inhabits the body of a different person every time he wakes up, and has lived this way his entire life.
"Seeing" -- A shooting victim's brain damage causes a permanent hallucination that he is watching himself from a bird's-eye view.
"The Moat" -- Sperm taken from a rape victim are found to contain DNA altered to be invisible to genetic testing.
"The Cutie" -- A man longing to be a father uses recent advances in biotechnology to impregnate himself with a "Cutie", a child with sub-human mental capacities, sub-human legal status, and a lifespan of four years.
"Into Darkness" -- A giant sphere of unknown origin jumps between random locations on the Earth's surface and restricts the movement of objects trapped inside in bizarre ways.
"Appropriate Love" -- A woman carries the brain of her severely injured husband inside her uterus for two years so that a new (brainless) body can be cloned to replace his.
"The Moral Virologist" -- Inspired by the AIDS epidemic, a fundamentalist Christian devotes his life to the creation of virus that will kill those he views as sexually immoral.
"Unstable Orbits in the Space Of Lies" -- An unexplained event causes everyone on Earth to rapidly become ideologically sympathetic to people physically nearby, creating a world with clear geographic boundaries between religions and philosophies that cause instant conversion for those who travel between regions.
[edit]
Reviews of Axiomatic
Danny Yee, 1995: "There are more original ideas in Axiomatic than I've seen in a science fiction collection for ages, and anyone who likes hard science fiction will revel in them." [1]
Christina Schulman, 1998: "Egan's ideas stretch your head the way the better cyberpunk does, without cyberpunk's self-indulgent grime and alienation." [2]
[edit]
References
^ Review of Axiomatic by Danny Yee
^ Review of Axiomatic by Christina Schulman
4 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_(story_collection)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Axiomatic (ISBN 0-7528-1650-0) is a 1995 collection of short science fiction stories by Greg Egan.
According to amazon.co.uk, in the Axiomatic stories: "Egan delivers shocking body-blows to received ideas in thought-experiment stories that like Jorge Luis Borges's philosophical squibs are booby-trapped with terrible truths and paradoxes." The Guardian describes it as "[w]onderful mind-expanding stuff, and well-written too."Contents [hide]
1 Neural Mods
2 The Jewel
3 Minds uploaded to computers
4 Other stories in Axiomatic
5 Reviews of Axiomatic
6 References
[edit]
Neural Mods
Several Axiomatic stories involve "neural mods", usually presented as small tubes containing powder inhaled through the nose, which alter the brains of their users in highly specific ways with advanced nanotechnology.
In the collection's eponymous story "Axiomatic", the protagonist enters a store selling mods not only for every variety of psychedelic experiences, but for altering one's personality traits, sexual orientation, and even religion. The protagonist seeks a custom-made mod that will suspend his moral convictions long enough for him to murder his wife's killer. In "The Walk", an executioner offers his victim a mod that will cause him to accept the killer's personal philosophy, and thus help him cope with his death.
Neural mods feature prominently in Greg Egan's first science fiction novel, Quarantine.
[edit]
The Jewel
Two stories, "Learning to Be Me" and "Closer", involve a different kind of neural implant called a "jewel"—a small computer inserted into the brain at birth that monitors its activity in order to learn how to mimic its behavior. By the time one reaches adulthood, the jewel's simulation is a near-perfect predictor of the brain's activity, and the jewel is given control of the person's body while the redundant brain is discarded. In this way, people with the jewel can eliminate the cognitive decline associated with aging by implementing their minds on a machine. Also, by transplanting the jewels into cloned bodies genetically altered to develop without brains, they can live youthfully forever.
"Learning to Be Me" explores the consequences of a man's jewel failing to synchronize with his brain, while in "Closer" a couple arranges to have the internal states of their jewels gradually made more similar so they can temporarily become a single person.
[edit]
Minds uploaded to computers
Minds are transferred to computers in a different style in "A Kidnapping". People wishing to upload themselves into computer simulations to avoid death are periodically scanned so that a recent copy of the individual can be simulated in the event of death. Due to limited computing resources, however, uploaded people are simulated slower than their physical counterparts, making communication between them difficult.
This system of uploading minds features prominently in Greg Egan's novel Permutation City.
[edit]
Other stories in Axiomatic
"The Infinite Assassin" -- An illegal recreational drug allows people to travel between parallel universes with disastrous side effects.
"The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary" -- After the invention of a method for sending messages back in time, history of the future becomes common knowledge, and every person knows their own fate.
"Eugene" -- A married couple consults a genetic engineer to design their next child.
"The Caress" -- Police investigate the origin of a half-human, half-cheetah chimera discovered in the basement of a murder victim.
"Blood Sisters" -- Two identical twin sisters are diagnosed with the same rare, fatal illness.
"The Safe-Deposit Box" -- A man inhabits the body of a different person every time he wakes up, and has lived this way his entire life.
"Seeing" -- A shooting victim's brain damage causes a permanent hallucination that he is watching himself from a bird's-eye view.
"The Moat" -- Sperm taken from a rape victim are found to contain DNA altered to be invisible to genetic testing.
"The Cutie" -- A man longing to be a father uses recent advances in biotechnology to impregnate himself with a "Cutie", a child with sub-human mental capacities, sub-human legal status, and a lifespan of four years.
"Into Darkness" -- A giant sphere of unknown origin jumps between random locations on the Earth's surface and restricts the movement of objects trapped inside in bizarre ways.
"Appropriate Love" -- A woman carries the brain of her severely injured husband inside her uterus for two years so that a new (brainless) body can be cloned to replace his.
"The Moral Virologist" -- Inspired by the AIDS epidemic, a fundamentalist Christian devotes his life to the creation of virus that will kill those he views as sexually immoral.
"Unstable Orbits in the Space Of Lies" -- An unexplained event causes everyone on Earth to rapidly become ideologically sympathetic to people physically nearby, creating a world with clear geographic boundaries between religions and philosophies that cause instant conversion for those who travel between regions.
[edit]
Reviews of Axiomatic
Danny Yee, 1995: "There are more original ideas in Axiomatic than I've seen in a science fiction collection for ages, and anyone who likes hard science fiction will revel in them." [1]
Christina Schulman, 1998: "Egan's ideas stretch your head the way the better cyberpunk does, without cyberpunk's self-indulgent grime and alienation." [2]
[edit]
References
^ Review of Axiomatic by Danny Yee
^ Review of Axiomatic by Christina Schulman
4 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_(story_collection)
Incandescence - Greg Egan
Incandescence (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Incandescence
Author Greg Egan
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction
Publisher Gollancz
Publication date 15 May 2008
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages 304 pp
ISBN 978-0575081628
OCLC Number 192027449
Incandescence is a 2008 science fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan. The book is based on the idea that the theory of general relativity could be discovered by a pre-industrial civilisation[1].Contents [hide]
1 Plot summary
2 Criticism
2.1 Adam Roberts' review and Greg Egan's response
3 External links and references
[edit]
Plot summary
The novel has two narratives in alternate chapters. The first follows two citizens of the Amalgam, a galaxy-spanning civilisation, investigating the origin of DNA found on a meteor by the Aloof. The Aloof control the galactic core and until the novel begins, have rejected all attempts at contact by the Amalgam. The second is set on a small world known as the Splinter, and covers the attempts by its inhabitants to understand the environment it exists in. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the Splinter orbits a particularly large black hole.
The Amalgam is explored in two other short stories, "Glory" and "Riding the Crocodile".
[edit]
Criticism
One review compared Incandescence to "a not particularly enthralling lecture on the process of scientific discovery, combined with the physics of a black hole" [2]. Another reviewer described much of this criticism as "trite received opinion" and said the book had "hints of greatness and pleasing moments" but its structure was "a failed literary experiment" and ultimately rather dull[3].
[edit]
Adam Roberts' review and Greg Egan's response
On June 6, 2008, Adam Roberts released a review[4] criticizing Incandescence for its awkward prose and weak characterization.
In response, Egan dissected the review, going so far as to call it "probably the first genuine hatchet job I've ever received."[5]. In particular, he accuses Adam Roberts of malicious nitpicking and a straw man argument, and suggests that Roberts should have known he would be unfairly biased against the book and refused to review it:“ But if someone aspires to be taken seriously as a reviewer, they either need to read the entire book, carefully, and give at least as much thought to what they've read as a twelve-year-old would when sitting a reading comprehension test, or — if that prospect is far too unpleasant to bear — they should decline to review the book. [...] In short, Roberts has as much of a good time as I'd have at the Bayreuth Festival, and as little worth reporting about the experience. The mystery is why he bought the ticket in the first place; a previous encounter with Schild's Ladder should have warned off any but the most masochistic of science-haters. ”
—Greg Egan, [5]
[edit]
External links and references
Greg Egan's Incandescence
Locus Magazine's Russell Letson reviews Greg Egan includes reviews of Incandescence, "Glory" and "Riding the Crocodile".
^ Egan, Greg (2008-07-22). "The Big Idea". Whatever. John Scalzi. Retrieved 2008-08-30.
^ Simpson, Paul (2008-05-09). "Incandescence Review". Total Sci Fi. Titan Magazines. Retrieved 2008-08-30.
^ McCalmont, Jonathan (2008-09-01). "The SF Site Featured Review: Incandescence". The SF Site. Retrieved 2008-10-01.
^ Roberts, Adam (2008-06-06). "Strange Horizons Reviews: Incandescence by Greg Egan". Strange Horizons. Retrieved 2009-05-25.
^ a b Egan, Greg. "Anatomy of a Hatchet Job". Retrieved 2009-05-25.
3.5 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Incandescence
Author Greg Egan
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction
Publisher Gollancz
Publication date 15 May 2008
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages 304 pp
ISBN 978-0575081628
OCLC Number 192027449
Incandescence is a 2008 science fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan. The book is based on the idea that the theory of general relativity could be discovered by a pre-industrial civilisation[1].Contents [hide]
1 Plot summary
2 Criticism
2.1 Adam Roberts' review and Greg Egan's response
3 External links and references
[edit]
Plot summary
The novel has two narratives in alternate chapters. The first follows two citizens of the Amalgam, a galaxy-spanning civilisation, investigating the origin of DNA found on a meteor by the Aloof. The Aloof control the galactic core and until the novel begins, have rejected all attempts at contact by the Amalgam. The second is set on a small world known as the Splinter, and covers the attempts by its inhabitants to understand the environment it exists in. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the Splinter orbits a particularly large black hole.
The Amalgam is explored in two other short stories, "Glory" and "Riding the Crocodile".
[edit]
Criticism
One review compared Incandescence to "a not particularly enthralling lecture on the process of scientific discovery, combined with the physics of a black hole" [2]. Another reviewer described much of this criticism as "trite received opinion" and said the book had "hints of greatness and pleasing moments" but its structure was "a failed literary experiment" and ultimately rather dull[3].
[edit]
Adam Roberts' review and Greg Egan's response
On June 6, 2008, Adam Roberts released a review[4] criticizing Incandescence for its awkward prose and weak characterization.
In response, Egan dissected the review, going so far as to call it "probably the first genuine hatchet job I've ever received."[5]. In particular, he accuses Adam Roberts of malicious nitpicking and a straw man argument, and suggests that Roberts should have known he would be unfairly biased against the book and refused to review it:“ But if someone aspires to be taken seriously as a reviewer, they either need to read the entire book, carefully, and give at least as much thought to what they've read as a twelve-year-old would when sitting a reading comprehension test, or — if that prospect is far too unpleasant to bear — they should decline to review the book. [...] In short, Roberts has as much of a good time as I'd have at the Bayreuth Festival, and as little worth reporting about the experience. The mystery is why he bought the ticket in the first place; a previous encounter with Schild's Ladder should have warned off any but the most masochistic of science-haters. ”
—Greg Egan, [5]
[edit]
External links and references
Greg Egan's Incandescence
Locus Magazine's Russell Letson reviews Greg Egan includes reviews of Incandescence, "Glory" and "Riding the Crocodile".
^ Egan, Greg (2008-07-22). "The Big Idea". Whatever. John Scalzi. Retrieved 2008-08-30.
^ Simpson, Paul (2008-05-09). "Incandescence Review". Total Sci Fi. Titan Magazines. Retrieved 2008-08-30.
^ McCalmont, Jonathan (2008-09-01). "The SF Site Featured Review: Incandescence". The SF Site. Retrieved 2008-10-01.
^ Roberts, Adam (2008-06-06). "Strange Horizons Reviews: Incandescence by Greg Egan". Strange Horizons. Retrieved 2009-05-25.
^ a b Egan, Greg. "Anatomy of a Hatchet Job". Retrieved 2009-05-25.
3.5 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescence_(novel)
Schild's Ladder - Greg Egan
"Schild's Ladder
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the construction in differential geometry, see Schild's ladder.Schild's Ladder
Author Greg Egan
Country Australia
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction
Publication date 2002
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 0-06-107344-X
OCLC Number 60664155
Schild's Ladder is a 2002 science fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan. The book derives its name from Schild's ladder, a construction in differential geometry.
[edit]
Plot summary
This novel is perhaps the hardest science fiction ever published by Egan, filled with non-trivial mathematics and theoretical physics. Twenty-thousand years in the future, Cass, a humanoid physicist from Earth, travels to Mimosa orbital station and begins a series of experiments to test the extremities of the fictitious Sarumpaet rules, a set of fundamental equations in "Quantum Graph Theory," which holds that physical existence is a manifestation of complex constructions of mathematical graphs. However, the experiments unexpectedly create a bubble of something more stable than ordinary vacuum, dubbed novo-vacuum, that expands outward at half the speed of light as ordinary vacuum collapses to this new state at the border, hinting at more general laws beyond the Sarumpaet rules. The local population is forced to flee to ever more distant star systems to escape the steadily approaching border, but since the expansion never slows, it is just a matter of time before the novo-vacuum encompasses any given object.
Two factions develop as the expanding bubble swallows star after star: the Preservationists, who wish to stop the expansion and preserve the Milky Way at any cost; and the Yielders, who consider the novo-vacuum to be too important a discovery to destroy.
Six hundred years after the initial experiment, aboard the Rindler, a vessel that has matched velocities with the border, a variety of refugees are probing the novo-vacuum in order to understand the physics that makes it possible. The novo-vacuum turns out to be more complicated than anyone suspects, however, and Egan's usual topics of simulation and quantum ontology are taken to the extreme when we learn that a whole ordered universe exists within this zone of apparent chaos, existing as direct elaborations of the quantum graph's lattice structure, of which elementary particles, fundamental interactions, and spacetime itself are only special cases.
The title derives from the mathematical construction known as 'Schild's ladder', devised by the mathematician and physicist Alfred Schild.
[edit]
External links
Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder
Audio review and discussion of Schild's Ladder at The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast"
3.5 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild's_Ladder
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the construction in differential geometry, see Schild's ladder.Schild's Ladder
Author Greg Egan
Country Australia
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction
Publication date 2002
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 0-06-107344-X
OCLC Number 60664155
Schild's Ladder is a 2002 science fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan. The book derives its name from Schild's ladder, a construction in differential geometry.
[edit]
Plot summary
This novel is perhaps the hardest science fiction ever published by Egan, filled with non-trivial mathematics and theoretical physics. Twenty-thousand years in the future, Cass, a humanoid physicist from Earth, travels to Mimosa orbital station and begins a series of experiments to test the extremities of the fictitious Sarumpaet rules, a set of fundamental equations in "Quantum Graph Theory," which holds that physical existence is a manifestation of complex constructions of mathematical graphs. However, the experiments unexpectedly create a bubble of something more stable than ordinary vacuum, dubbed novo-vacuum, that expands outward at half the speed of light as ordinary vacuum collapses to this new state at the border, hinting at more general laws beyond the Sarumpaet rules. The local population is forced to flee to ever more distant star systems to escape the steadily approaching border, but since the expansion never slows, it is just a matter of time before the novo-vacuum encompasses any given object.
Two factions develop as the expanding bubble swallows star after star: the Preservationists, who wish to stop the expansion and preserve the Milky Way at any cost; and the Yielders, who consider the novo-vacuum to be too important a discovery to destroy.
Six hundred years after the initial experiment, aboard the Rindler, a vessel that has matched velocities with the border, a variety of refugees are probing the novo-vacuum in order to understand the physics that makes it possible. The novo-vacuum turns out to be more complicated than anyone suspects, however, and Egan's usual topics of simulation and quantum ontology are taken to the extreme when we learn that a whole ordered universe exists within this zone of apparent chaos, existing as direct elaborations of the quantum graph's lattice structure, of which elementary particles, fundamental interactions, and spacetime itself are only special cases.
The title derives from the mathematical construction known as 'Schild's ladder', devised by the mathematician and physicist Alfred Schild.
[edit]
External links
Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder
Audio review and discussion of Schild's Ladder at The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast"
3.5 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild's_Ladder
Teranesia - Greg Egan
"Teranesia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Teranesia
Author Greg Egan
Country Australia
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction
Publication date 1999
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 0-57506-854-X
OCLC Number 41388662
Teranesia is a 1999 science fiction novel by Greg Egan.
[edit]
Plot summary
The novel explores an unusual connection between molecular genetics and quantum computing, with criticism of some of the excesses of postmodernism and feminism theory. However, most of the novel focuses on future south-east Asian politics (Egan criticized Indonesian imperialism and Australian treatment of refugees), repressed childhood guilt, evolutionary biology and academic life. As often in Egan's books, there is some focus on sexuality: this time the lead character is merely gay (rather than some of the more exotic alternatives in other novels).
[edit]
External links
About Teranesia
Greg Egan's Afterword to the book
Review by Simon Petrie at Andromeda Spaceways
Review by Greg L. Johnson at SF Site
Review by David Mathew at Infinity Plus
Review by Aaron M. Renn at SF Book Review
Review by Jonathan M. Sullivan at SF Reader
Review at Special Circumstances"
3 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teranesia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Teranesia
Author Greg Egan
Country Australia
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction
Publication date 1999
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 0-57506-854-X
OCLC Number 41388662
Teranesia is a 1999 science fiction novel by Greg Egan.
[edit]
Plot summary
The novel explores an unusual connection between molecular genetics and quantum computing, with criticism of some of the excesses of postmodernism and feminism theory. However, most of the novel focuses on future south-east Asian politics (Egan criticized Indonesian imperialism and Australian treatment of refugees), repressed childhood guilt, evolutionary biology and academic life. As often in Egan's books, there is some focus on sexuality: this time the lead character is merely gay (rather than some of the more exotic alternatives in other novels).
[edit]
External links
About Teranesia
Greg Egan's Afterword to the book
Review by Simon Petrie at Andromeda Spaceways
Review by Greg L. Johnson at SF Site
Review by David Mathew at Infinity Plus
Review by Aaron M. Renn at SF Book Review
Review by Jonathan M. Sullivan at SF Reader
Review at Special Circumstances"
3 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teranesia
Diaspora - Greg Egan
Diaspora (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Diaspora
Paperback, 5th Imp., 2003
Author Greg Egan
Country Australia
Language English
Genre(s) Hard science fiction novel
Publisher Gollancz
Publication date July 1998
Media type Print (paperback)
Pages 376 pp (PB edition)
ISBN 0-75280-925-3
OCLC Number 39837889
Diaspora, a hard science fiction novel by the Australian writer Greg Egan, first appeared in print in 1997.Contents [hide]
1 Plot introduction
2 The world of the novel
3 Plot summary
4 Characters
5 The Polises
6 Polis time, delta, and perception
7 Reviews
8 References
9 Editions
9.1 English editions
9.2 Translations
10 Footnotes
[edit]
Plot introduction
This novel uses for its setting a posthuman future, in which transhumanism long ago (during the mid 21st-century) became the default philosophy embraced by the vast majority of human cultures.
The novel began as a short story entitled "Wang's Carpets" which originally appeared in New Legends, a collection of short stories edited by Greg Bear (Legend, London, 1995). Egan later adapted and included "Wang's Carpets" as a chapter in the novel.
The author appends a glossary which explains many of the specialist terms in the novel. Egan invents several new theories of physics, beginning with Kozuch Theory, the dominant physics paradigm for nearly nine hundred years before the beginning of the novel. Kozuch Theory treats elementary particles as semi-point-like wormholes, whose properties physicists can explain entirely in terms of their geometries in six dimensions. Certain assumptions, common to Greg Egan literature, inform the plot, such as the digital mutability of reality (the idea that no difference exists between any "real" thing and a sufficiently similar mathematical replica of that thing).
For the story, Egan adopts Keri Hulme's gender-neutral pronouns "ve", "vis", and "ver" for most of the characters in the novel, who opt to have a neutral gender.
[edit]
The world of the novel
By 2975 CE (Universal Time), the year in which the novel begins, humanity has "speciated" into three distinct groupings:
fleshers, biological societies consisting of statics, the original, naturally-evolving race of Homo sapiens, and a wide variety of exuberant derivatives, who have modified their genes beyond the static baseline. These include enhancements such as disease-resistance, life-extension, intelligence-amplification, and the ability to allow selected transhumans to thrive in new environments, such as the sea. There even exists a subculture (the dream apes) whose ancestors bred out the capacity for speech and some of the higher brain-functions, apparently[citation needed] in order to attain a primal innocence and rapport with nature. In contrast to 21st-century society prior to the novel's "Introdus" event, the vast profusion of qualitatively different types of fleshers has made any sort of global civilisation impossible. This situation has prompted the development of a culture of "Bridgers" who modify their own minds to form a chain of intermediates between exuberant strains.
gleisner robots, individual software-based intelligences housed inside artificial anthropoid, or flesher-shaped, physical bodies (from a design by a corporation named Gleisner[1]) who interact with the world in flesher-paced "real time," a trait which they regard as important, as they consider the polis citizens too remote and solipsistic. The gleisners live in space, mostly in the asteroid belt, and in various other places in the Solar System; Egan implies that they long ago agreed to leave Earth to the fleshers to avoid conflict. They eventually implement a program of interstellar exploration using a fleet of 63 ships, targeting the nearest 21 stars.
the citizens[2], intelligence as disembodied computer software running entirely within simulated reality-based communities known as polises.[3] These represent the majority by far of "humanity" in the novel, followed in a distant second place by the gleisners. Together with vast networks of sensors, probes, drones and satellites, they collectively make up the Coalition of Polises, the backbone and bulk of human civilisation. They interact primarily in virtual environments called scapes, through the use of avatars or icons. The citizens of the Coalition view the gleisners and their quest as puerile and ultimately futile, believing that only "bacteria with spaceships . . . knowing no better and having no choice" would attempt to deface (by means of mass colonisation) the galaxy, especially if virtual realities afford limitless possibilities at a small fraction of the total resource-consumption.
Diaspora focuses in large part on the nature of life and intelligence in a post-human context, and questions the meaning of life and the meaning of desires. If, for instance, the meaning of human life and human desires depend on the meaning of ancestral human biology ("to spread one's genes"), then what meaning do lives and desires have, and what serves as the basis of values when biology no longer forms a part of life?
[edit]
Plot summary
Diaspora begins with a description of "orphanogenesis", the birthing of a citizen without any ancestors (most citizens descend from fleshers uploaded at some point), and the subsequent upbringing of the newborn Yatima within Konishi polis. Yatima matures within a few real-time days, because citizens' subjective time runs about 800 times as rapidly as flesher and gleisner time. Early on, Yatima and a friend, Inoshiro, use abandoned gleisner bodies to visit a Bridger colony near the ruins of Atlanta on Earth.
Years later, the gleisner Karpal, using a gravitational-wave detector, determines that a binary neutron star system in the constellation of Lacerta has collapsed, releasing a huge burst of energy. Previous predictions portrayed the system's stable orbit as likely to last for another seven million years. By analysing irregularities in the orbit, Karpal discovers that the devastating burst of energy will reach Earth within the next four days. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Earth to urge the fleshers — gathered in a conference — either to migrate to the polises or at least to shelter themselves. Many fleshers reject this advice, or fail fully to appreciate its urgency quickly enough. Stirred up by a paranoid Static diplomat, many fleshers suspect that Yatima and Inoshiro have come to bring about an involuntary "Introdus" or mass-migration into the polises, involving virus-sized nanomachines disintegrating the human body and recording information as they convert the brain into a memory crystal. The gamma ray burst reaches Earth shortly after the conference, causing a mass extinction. The gleisners and the Coalition of Polises survive the burst, thanks to radiation hardening. Over the next few years, Yatima and other citizens and gleisners attempt to bring any surviving fleshers into the safety of the polises.
The novel's title itself refers to a quest undertaken by most of the inhabitants of Carter-Zimmerman ("C-Z"), a polis devoted to physics and understanding the cosmos, along with volunteers from throughout the Coalition of Polises. The Diaspora consists of a collection of one thousand clones (digital copies) of C-Z polis, deployed in all directions in the hope of gathering as much data as possible in order to revise the long-held classical understanding of Kozuch Theory. The bulk of the novel follows this expedition, rotating back and forth between different cloned instances of the same cast of main characters as different C-Z clones make discoveries along the way, relaying information to one another at first over hundreds of light years, then later between universes.
[edit]
Characters
Yatima[4] appears as an Orphan, a being formed by the Konishi polis conceptory rather than by a parent or parents. A central character in the novel, ve usually takes the iconic form of an African herdsman in a purple robe. Yatima exhibits a deep love of mathematics and a desire to explore the unknown.
Blanca, who habitually uses the icon of a featureless black silhouette, also inhabits the Konishi polis. One of the first three people that Yatima meets and a physicist and scape-architect, Blanca has a reputation as an acknowledged expert on Kozuch Theory throughout the Coalition of Polises.
Inoshiro, another of Yatima's earliest friends, uses an icon featuring metallic, pewter-grey skin. A native of Konishi but a frequenter of Ashton-Laval, a polis of great artistic merit, ve proudly considers verself delinquent. Inoshiro frequently attempts to attract Yatima away from philosophical Konishi and into more aesthetic and avant-garde pursuits. Inoshiro originates the idea of visiting the fleshers of Atlanta in ancient gleisner bodies.
Gabriel, Yatima's third early friend, has an icon covered in short, golden-brown fur. Gabriel, Blanca's lover and another great physicist, differs from most polis citizens in having chosen for himself a specific (though non-functional) gender, a trait considered eccentric and perhaps perverted by many citizens of the Coalition.
Karpal, a gleisner astronomer who lives on the surface of the Moon, first discovers the collapse of Lac G-1 in Lacerta. He later leaves his robotic body and gleisner society to transmigrate to the Carter-Zimmerman polis, seeking a more profound understanding of physics, unavailable to creatures whose minds remain programmed to think of things in terms of their bodies.
Orlando Venetti, originally a leader of the Bridger colony of Atlanta; he and his mate Liana Zabini first welcome Inoshiro and Yatima upon their arrival in gleisner form. In the Lacerta Event, Liana dies but the visitors from Konishi rescue Orlando and bring him into the polis; he joins the Diaspora, and thanks to his Bridger training he makes the first interactive contact with an alien intelligence. Before joining the Diaspora he creates a son, Paolo, who ultimately joins Yatima in exploring higher universes on the trail of the "Transmuters".
Radiya acts as Yatima's first mentor in abstract mathematics and in exploration of the "Truth Mines", Konishi’s metaphoric representation of the world of mathematical theorems. Ve uses icon of a fleshless skeleton made of twigs and branches, with a skull carved from a knotted stump.
Hermann, an extremely eccentric member of the Diaspora, often appears as a segmented worm with six flesher-shaped feet attached to elbow-jointed legs, based on the curl-up from the work of M. C. Escher. Very old (a product of the original 21st-century Introdus), Hermann describes verself as vis own great-great-grandson because ve has reinvented vis own personality so many times during vis long life.
The Star Puppies, a group of Carter-Zimmerman citizens, elect to stay conscious, in real time, for the duration of their spaceflight in the Diaspora (most others enter a state of suspension). The Puppies take the form of space-evolved creatures dwelling in a scape representing the hull of the spacecraft, employing personality outlooks (software which accentuates specific moods & values) to ensure they feel constant joy in, and at, the universe around them.
[edit]
The Polises
Humanity began transferring itself into the polises (the Introdus) in the late 21st century UT.
Many polises exist, though the novel mentions only a few. Though the author does not go into any great detail about them in a physical sense, they apparently exist as hardware-based supercomputers of unknown size and computational ability, all probably hidden in safe places. Konishi polis, at least, lies buried deep beneath the Siberian tundra.
Each polis has its own unique character, encapsulated in a "charter" which defines its goals, philosophies, and attitudes to other polises and to the external world. "Society" expects citizens to heed the charter of the polis they "live" in; should they begin to disagree with the charter, they can always migrate to a polis which appears more amenable to them.
The most prominent differences between the various polises, at least in the novel, involves their attitudes toward the physical world. Polis societies range from those who wish to experience the real world of normal time and space to the wholly solipsistic who live their entire lives in esoteric, isolated virtuality.
The citizens of Konishi polis seem to concern themselves mostly with abstract mathematics and esoteric philosophical pursuits, and generally show little interest in the physical world. They use visual icons for social purposes, but regard simulated physical interaction as a violation of individual autonomy.
After the Lacerta Event, Yatima emigrates from Konishi to Carter-Zimmerman polis, which rejects the solipsism exemplified by Konishi and embraces the study of the physical universe as of paramount importance. Given the Lacerta Event, which suggests that the universe has the capability of unleashing unknown extreme dangers, Yatima has begun to share this viewpoint.
[edit]
Polis time, delta, and perception
For internal dating and time standards the polises use CST (Coalition Standard Time), measured in tau elapsed since the adoption of the system on January 1, 2065 (UT). The novel begins at CST date 23 387 025 000 000. CST defines one tau as the amount of time in which a polis citizen can experience the passage of one second of subjective time; this elastic value changes with improvements in polis hardware. At the period of the novel a polis citizen's mind can operate at a maximum speed of about eight hundred times that of a flesher's mind, so 1 tau equals approximately 1/800 sec.
Nothing compels citizens to experience time at such a high rate; they can equally choose to "rush", meaning to experience consciousness at a speed slower than the polis hardware can maintain. Hence citizens could experience consciousness at the same speed as a human flesher would, or slower, or even freeze their conscious state for a set time or until a previously determined event occurs. Egan suggests that some citizens have opted to experience consciousness so slowly that they can witness continental drift and geological erosion.
The polises measure distance, another arbitrary value within their virtual scapes, in "delta", which Egan does not fully explain, although the glossary indicates that citizen's icons are generally about 2 delta high.
Almost all polis citizens, except for those who specifically elect otherwise, experience the world through two sensory modalities: Linear and Gestalt, which Egan describes as distant descendants of hearing and seeing, respectively. Linear conveys information quantitatively, as a string or strings of information formulated with a language hardwired into the mind of almost all Citizens. Citizens may "speak" to one another in Linear by sending streams of data back and forth, from mind to mind — either private conversations carried on between a specific subset of intended participants, or public announcements accessible to all involved in a conversation or otherwise "listening in".
Gestalt conveys information qualitatively, and data sent or received about anything arrives all at once for interpretation by the mind of the Citizen in all its aspects simultaneously, resulting in an experience of immediacy. A citizen need not consciously consider the information sent (as in Linear): Gestalt operates rather entirely or almost entirely subconsciously. Citizens use Gestalt to create icons or for themselves — "visual" representations within Scapes (Gestalt "areas" or "spaces"). Citizens also use Gestalt to convey Tags — packages of information described as like an odour or essence, which any other Citizens within a range of several delta (or who happen to "read" for specific Tags) can gather. Each Citizen has a unique Tag which identifies them as a particular person, regardless of their other appearances, and citizens may emit Tags for other purposes as well, as when Citizens need to convey and understand arbitrary information instantly. Early in the novel, for instance, Yatima learns about an asteroid in the real world by reading its tags subconsciously, which inform ver instinctively about its properties such as mass, velocity, rotation, composition, emission spectra, and other such data discernible to the Coalition's satellite network. Later on, however, on Earth, when ve and Inoshiro inhabit derelict Gleisner bodies, Yatima must remind verself that Fleshers are real people, even though they lack tags identifying themselves as such.
[edit]
Reviews
Infinity Plus
Parsec
Mathematical Fiction
SF Site
SF Reader
[edit]
References
Greg Egan's homepage
Egan's 1994 novel, Permutation City, can serve as a very loose prequel to Diaspora, as it features early experimentation into the uploading of minds into supercomputers.
"Orphanogenesis", the first chapter of the novel, available for free download from Egan's website
"The Planck Dive", published in Egan's short-story collection Luminous, also concerns events in the Diaspora.
[edit]
Editions
[edit]
English editions
September 1997: Hardback, ISBN 1-85798-438-2 (UK edition), Publisher: Gollancz, 320 pages
September 1997: Paperback, ISBN 1-85798-439-0 (UK edition), Publisher: Gollancz
1997: Hardback, Cover of ISBN B000GX6OQU, Publisher: Orion
February 1998: Hardback, ISBN 0-06-105281-7 (USA edition), Publisher: Eos
July 1998: Paperback, ISBN 0-75280-925-3 (UK edition), Publisher: Gollancz
April 1999: Unbound, ISBN 0-606-18687-5 (USA edition), Publisher: Demco Media
November 1999: Mass Market Paperback, ISBN 0-06-105798-3 (USA edition), Publisher: Eos
[edit]
Translations
1999: Boukoumanis Editions, Athens, Translated by Christodoulos Litharis (Greek translation)
February 2000: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich, ISBN 3-45316-181-5 (pb), translated by Bernhard Kempen (German translation)
2003: Mondadori/Urania, Milan, ISSN 1120-5288 / Number 1460 (pb periodical), translated by Riccardo Valla (Italian translation)
2005: Hayakawa, Tokyo, ISBN 4-15011-531-1 (pb), translated by Makoto Yamagishi (Japanese translation)
April 2009: La casa del libro, Granada, Spain ISBN 978-84-96013-52-0 (Spanish of Spain, Europe), Publisher: Grupo Editorial AJEC
[edit]
Footnotes
^ Egan's short story "Transition Dreams" in the collection Luminous mentions the corporation
^ Disembodied minds, sometimes referred to generally as infomorphs within the genre.
^ Polis in Greek means "city/state".
^ The word yatima in Swahili means "orphan"; see "yatima". Internet Living Swahili Dictionary. The Kamusi Project. Retrieved 2009-03-06.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Diaspora
Paperback, 5th Imp., 2003
Author Greg Egan
Country Australia
Language English
Genre(s) Hard science fiction novel
Publisher Gollancz
Publication date July 1998
Media type Print (paperback)
Pages 376 pp (PB edition)
ISBN 0-75280-925-3
OCLC Number 39837889
Diaspora, a hard science fiction novel by the Australian writer Greg Egan, first appeared in print in 1997.Contents [hide]
1 Plot introduction
2 The world of the novel
3 Plot summary
4 Characters
5 The Polises
6 Polis time, delta, and perception
7 Reviews
8 References
9 Editions
9.1 English editions
9.2 Translations
10 Footnotes
[edit]
Plot introduction
This novel uses for its setting a posthuman future, in which transhumanism long ago (during the mid 21st-century) became the default philosophy embraced by the vast majority of human cultures.
The novel began as a short story entitled "Wang's Carpets" which originally appeared in New Legends, a collection of short stories edited by Greg Bear (Legend, London, 1995). Egan later adapted and included "Wang's Carpets" as a chapter in the novel.
The author appends a glossary which explains many of the specialist terms in the novel. Egan invents several new theories of physics, beginning with Kozuch Theory, the dominant physics paradigm for nearly nine hundred years before the beginning of the novel. Kozuch Theory treats elementary particles as semi-point-like wormholes, whose properties physicists can explain entirely in terms of their geometries in six dimensions. Certain assumptions, common to Greg Egan literature, inform the plot, such as the digital mutability of reality (the idea that no difference exists between any "real" thing and a sufficiently similar mathematical replica of that thing).
For the story, Egan adopts Keri Hulme's gender-neutral pronouns "ve", "vis", and "ver" for most of the characters in the novel, who opt to have a neutral gender.
[edit]
The world of the novel
By 2975 CE (Universal Time), the year in which the novel begins, humanity has "speciated" into three distinct groupings:
fleshers, biological societies consisting of statics, the original, naturally-evolving race of Homo sapiens, and a wide variety of exuberant derivatives, who have modified their genes beyond the static baseline. These include enhancements such as disease-resistance, life-extension, intelligence-amplification, and the ability to allow selected transhumans to thrive in new environments, such as the sea. There even exists a subculture (the dream apes) whose ancestors bred out the capacity for speech and some of the higher brain-functions, apparently[citation needed] in order to attain a primal innocence and rapport with nature. In contrast to 21st-century society prior to the novel's "Introdus" event, the vast profusion of qualitatively different types of fleshers has made any sort of global civilisation impossible. This situation has prompted the development of a culture of "Bridgers" who modify their own minds to form a chain of intermediates between exuberant strains.
gleisner robots, individual software-based intelligences housed inside artificial anthropoid, or flesher-shaped, physical bodies (from a design by a corporation named Gleisner[1]) who interact with the world in flesher-paced "real time," a trait which they regard as important, as they consider the polis citizens too remote and solipsistic. The gleisners live in space, mostly in the asteroid belt, and in various other places in the Solar System; Egan implies that they long ago agreed to leave Earth to the fleshers to avoid conflict. They eventually implement a program of interstellar exploration using a fleet of 63 ships, targeting the nearest 21 stars.
the citizens[2], intelligence as disembodied computer software running entirely within simulated reality-based communities known as polises.[3] These represent the majority by far of "humanity" in the novel, followed in a distant second place by the gleisners. Together with vast networks of sensors, probes, drones and satellites, they collectively make up the Coalition of Polises, the backbone and bulk of human civilisation. They interact primarily in virtual environments called scapes, through the use of avatars or icons. The citizens of the Coalition view the gleisners and their quest as puerile and ultimately futile, believing that only "bacteria with spaceships . . . knowing no better and having no choice" would attempt to deface (by means of mass colonisation) the galaxy, especially if virtual realities afford limitless possibilities at a small fraction of the total resource-consumption.
Diaspora focuses in large part on the nature of life and intelligence in a post-human context, and questions the meaning of life and the meaning of desires. If, for instance, the meaning of human life and human desires depend on the meaning of ancestral human biology ("to spread one's genes"), then what meaning do lives and desires have, and what serves as the basis of values when biology no longer forms a part of life?
[edit]
Plot summary
Diaspora begins with a description of "orphanogenesis", the birthing of a citizen without any ancestors (most citizens descend from fleshers uploaded at some point), and the subsequent upbringing of the newborn Yatima within Konishi polis. Yatima matures within a few real-time days, because citizens' subjective time runs about 800 times as rapidly as flesher and gleisner time. Early on, Yatima and a friend, Inoshiro, use abandoned gleisner bodies to visit a Bridger colony near the ruins of Atlanta on Earth.
Years later, the gleisner Karpal, using a gravitational-wave detector, determines that a binary neutron star system in the constellation of Lacerta has collapsed, releasing a huge burst of energy. Previous predictions portrayed the system's stable orbit as likely to last for another seven million years. By analysing irregularities in the orbit, Karpal discovers that the devastating burst of energy will reach Earth within the next four days. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Earth to urge the fleshers — gathered in a conference — either to migrate to the polises or at least to shelter themselves. Many fleshers reject this advice, or fail fully to appreciate its urgency quickly enough. Stirred up by a paranoid Static diplomat, many fleshers suspect that Yatima and Inoshiro have come to bring about an involuntary "Introdus" or mass-migration into the polises, involving virus-sized nanomachines disintegrating the human body and recording information as they convert the brain into a memory crystal. The gamma ray burst reaches Earth shortly after the conference, causing a mass extinction. The gleisners and the Coalition of Polises survive the burst, thanks to radiation hardening. Over the next few years, Yatima and other citizens and gleisners attempt to bring any surviving fleshers into the safety of the polises.
The novel's title itself refers to a quest undertaken by most of the inhabitants of Carter-Zimmerman ("C-Z"), a polis devoted to physics and understanding the cosmos, along with volunteers from throughout the Coalition of Polises. The Diaspora consists of a collection of one thousand clones (digital copies) of C-Z polis, deployed in all directions in the hope of gathering as much data as possible in order to revise the long-held classical understanding of Kozuch Theory. The bulk of the novel follows this expedition, rotating back and forth between different cloned instances of the same cast of main characters as different C-Z clones make discoveries along the way, relaying information to one another at first over hundreds of light years, then later between universes.
[edit]
Characters
Yatima[4] appears as an Orphan, a being formed by the Konishi polis conceptory rather than by a parent or parents. A central character in the novel, ve usually takes the iconic form of an African herdsman in a purple robe. Yatima exhibits a deep love of mathematics and a desire to explore the unknown.
Blanca, who habitually uses the icon of a featureless black silhouette, also inhabits the Konishi polis. One of the first three people that Yatima meets and a physicist and scape-architect, Blanca has a reputation as an acknowledged expert on Kozuch Theory throughout the Coalition of Polises.
Inoshiro, another of Yatima's earliest friends, uses an icon featuring metallic, pewter-grey skin. A native of Konishi but a frequenter of Ashton-Laval, a polis of great artistic merit, ve proudly considers verself delinquent. Inoshiro frequently attempts to attract Yatima away from philosophical Konishi and into more aesthetic and avant-garde pursuits. Inoshiro originates the idea of visiting the fleshers of Atlanta in ancient gleisner bodies.
Gabriel, Yatima's third early friend, has an icon covered in short, golden-brown fur. Gabriel, Blanca's lover and another great physicist, differs from most polis citizens in having chosen for himself a specific (though non-functional) gender, a trait considered eccentric and perhaps perverted by many citizens of the Coalition.
Karpal, a gleisner astronomer who lives on the surface of the Moon, first discovers the collapse of Lac G-1 in Lacerta. He later leaves his robotic body and gleisner society to transmigrate to the Carter-Zimmerman polis, seeking a more profound understanding of physics, unavailable to creatures whose minds remain programmed to think of things in terms of their bodies.
Orlando Venetti, originally a leader of the Bridger colony of Atlanta; he and his mate Liana Zabini first welcome Inoshiro and Yatima upon their arrival in gleisner form. In the Lacerta Event, Liana dies but the visitors from Konishi rescue Orlando and bring him into the polis; he joins the Diaspora, and thanks to his Bridger training he makes the first interactive contact with an alien intelligence. Before joining the Diaspora he creates a son, Paolo, who ultimately joins Yatima in exploring higher universes on the trail of the "Transmuters".
Radiya acts as Yatima's first mentor in abstract mathematics and in exploration of the "Truth Mines", Konishi’s metaphoric representation of the world of mathematical theorems. Ve uses icon of a fleshless skeleton made of twigs and branches, with a skull carved from a knotted stump.
Hermann, an extremely eccentric member of the Diaspora, often appears as a segmented worm with six flesher-shaped feet attached to elbow-jointed legs, based on the curl-up from the work of M. C. Escher. Very old (a product of the original 21st-century Introdus), Hermann describes verself as vis own great-great-grandson because ve has reinvented vis own personality so many times during vis long life.
The Star Puppies, a group of Carter-Zimmerman citizens, elect to stay conscious, in real time, for the duration of their spaceflight in the Diaspora (most others enter a state of suspension). The Puppies take the form of space-evolved creatures dwelling in a scape representing the hull of the spacecraft, employing personality outlooks (software which accentuates specific moods & values) to ensure they feel constant joy in, and at, the universe around them.
[edit]
The Polises
Humanity began transferring itself into the polises (the Introdus) in the late 21st century UT.
Many polises exist, though the novel mentions only a few. Though the author does not go into any great detail about them in a physical sense, they apparently exist as hardware-based supercomputers of unknown size and computational ability, all probably hidden in safe places. Konishi polis, at least, lies buried deep beneath the Siberian tundra.
Each polis has its own unique character, encapsulated in a "charter" which defines its goals, philosophies, and attitudes to other polises and to the external world. "Society" expects citizens to heed the charter of the polis they "live" in; should they begin to disagree with the charter, they can always migrate to a polis which appears more amenable to them.
The most prominent differences between the various polises, at least in the novel, involves their attitudes toward the physical world. Polis societies range from those who wish to experience the real world of normal time and space to the wholly solipsistic who live their entire lives in esoteric, isolated virtuality.
The citizens of Konishi polis seem to concern themselves mostly with abstract mathematics and esoteric philosophical pursuits, and generally show little interest in the physical world. They use visual icons for social purposes, but regard simulated physical interaction as a violation of individual autonomy.
After the Lacerta Event, Yatima emigrates from Konishi to Carter-Zimmerman polis, which rejects the solipsism exemplified by Konishi and embraces the study of the physical universe as of paramount importance. Given the Lacerta Event, which suggests that the universe has the capability of unleashing unknown extreme dangers, Yatima has begun to share this viewpoint.
[edit]
Polis time, delta, and perception
For internal dating and time standards the polises use CST (Coalition Standard Time), measured in tau elapsed since the adoption of the system on January 1, 2065 (UT). The novel begins at CST date 23 387 025 000 000. CST defines one tau as the amount of time in which a polis citizen can experience the passage of one second of subjective time; this elastic value changes with improvements in polis hardware. At the period of the novel a polis citizen's mind can operate at a maximum speed of about eight hundred times that of a flesher's mind, so 1 tau equals approximately 1/800 sec.
Nothing compels citizens to experience time at such a high rate; they can equally choose to "rush", meaning to experience consciousness at a speed slower than the polis hardware can maintain. Hence citizens could experience consciousness at the same speed as a human flesher would, or slower, or even freeze their conscious state for a set time or until a previously determined event occurs. Egan suggests that some citizens have opted to experience consciousness so slowly that they can witness continental drift and geological erosion.
The polises measure distance, another arbitrary value within their virtual scapes, in "delta", which Egan does not fully explain, although the glossary indicates that citizen's icons are generally about 2 delta high.
Almost all polis citizens, except for those who specifically elect otherwise, experience the world through two sensory modalities: Linear and Gestalt, which Egan describes as distant descendants of hearing and seeing, respectively. Linear conveys information quantitatively, as a string or strings of information formulated with a language hardwired into the mind of almost all Citizens. Citizens may "speak" to one another in Linear by sending streams of data back and forth, from mind to mind — either private conversations carried on between a specific subset of intended participants, or public announcements accessible to all involved in a conversation or otherwise "listening in".
Gestalt conveys information qualitatively, and data sent or received about anything arrives all at once for interpretation by the mind of the Citizen in all its aspects simultaneously, resulting in an experience of immediacy. A citizen need not consciously consider the information sent (as in Linear): Gestalt operates rather entirely or almost entirely subconsciously. Citizens use Gestalt to create icons or for themselves — "visual" representations within Scapes (Gestalt "areas" or "spaces"). Citizens also use Gestalt to convey Tags — packages of information described as like an odour or essence, which any other Citizens within a range of several delta (or who happen to "read" for specific Tags) can gather. Each Citizen has a unique Tag which identifies them as a particular person, regardless of their other appearances, and citizens may emit Tags for other purposes as well, as when Citizens need to convey and understand arbitrary information instantly. Early in the novel, for instance, Yatima learns about an asteroid in the real world by reading its tags subconsciously, which inform ver instinctively about its properties such as mass, velocity, rotation, composition, emission spectra, and other such data discernible to the Coalition's satellite network. Later on, however, on Earth, when ve and Inoshiro inhabit derelict Gleisner bodies, Yatima must remind verself that Fleshers are real people, even though they lack tags identifying themselves as such.
[edit]
Reviews
Infinity Plus
Parsec
Mathematical Fiction
SF Site
SF Reader
[edit]
References
Greg Egan's homepage
Egan's 1994 novel, Permutation City, can serve as a very loose prequel to Diaspora, as it features early experimentation into the uploading of minds into supercomputers.
"Orphanogenesis", the first chapter of the novel, available for free download from Egan's website
"The Planck Dive", published in Egan's short-story collection Luminous, also concerns events in the Diaspora.
[edit]
Editions
[edit]
English editions
September 1997: Hardback, ISBN 1-85798-438-2 (UK edition), Publisher: Gollancz, 320 pages
September 1997: Paperback, ISBN 1-85798-439-0 (UK edition), Publisher: Gollancz
1997: Hardback, Cover of ISBN B000GX6OQU, Publisher: Orion
February 1998: Hardback, ISBN 0-06-105281-7 (USA edition), Publisher: Eos
July 1998: Paperback, ISBN 0-75280-925-3 (UK edition), Publisher: Gollancz
April 1999: Unbound, ISBN 0-606-18687-5 (USA edition), Publisher: Demco Media
November 1999: Mass Market Paperback, ISBN 0-06-105798-3 (USA edition), Publisher: Eos
[edit]
Translations
1999: Boukoumanis Editions, Athens, Translated by Christodoulos Litharis (Greek translation)
February 2000: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich, ISBN 3-45316-181-5 (pb), translated by Bernhard Kempen (German translation)
2003: Mondadori/Urania, Milan, ISSN 1120-5288 / Number 1460 (pb periodical), translated by Riccardo Valla (Italian translation)
2005: Hayakawa, Tokyo, ISBN 4-15011-531-1 (pb), translated by Makoto Yamagishi (Japanese translation)
April 2009: La casa del libro, Granada, Spain ISBN 978-84-96013-52-0 (Spanish of Spain, Europe), Publisher: Grupo Editorial AJEC
[edit]
Footnotes
^ Egan's short story "Transition Dreams" in the collection Luminous mentions the corporation
^ Disembodied minds, sometimes referred to generally as infomorphs within the genre.
^ Polis in Greek means "city/state".
^ The word yatima in Swahili means "orphan"; see "yatima". Internet Living Swahili Dictionary. The Kamusi Project. Retrieved 2009-03-06.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)
Distress - Greg Egan
Distress (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Distress is a 1995 science fiction novel by Greg Egan ISBN 0061052647.Contents [hide]
1 Plot summary
2 Gender roles
3 Anarchism
4 Footnotes
[edit]
Plot summary
It describes the political intrigue surrounding a mid-twenty-first century physics conference, at which is to be presented a unified Theory of Everything. In the background of the story is an epidemic mental illness, related in some way to the imminent discovery of the TOE. The action takes place on an artificial island called "Stateless", which has earned the wrath of the world's large biotech companies for its pilfering of their intellectual property. The novel contains a great deal of satirical commentary on gender identities, multinational capitalism, and postmodern thought. It also features Egan's usual playful exploration of physical, metaphysical, and epistemological theories.
[edit]
Gender roles
Egan uses his hypothetical future to postulate the existence of not just one but five new genders, and introduces a set of new pronouns to designate each one. One of the central characters of the novel, Akili Kuwale, provides a demonstration of this change and its implications. As an asexual human, Akili has had all reproductive organs removed entirely, distinct from hermaphrodites who possess both. Within the scope of the novel, Egan uses the pronouns 've', 'ver', and 'vis' to represent Akili's definitive gender neutrality.
[edit]
Anarchism
Egan also uses the hypothetical technological advances in Distress to explore ideas about anarchism, especially when its protagonist, Andrew Worth, a journalist, travels to the anarchistic man-made island 'stateless'. Andrew meets some small characters on stateless who explain to him the relationship between anarchistic principles and various ideas such as; quantum physics; information theory; independent spirituality[1].
Worth also meets a painter, Munroe, who attempts to explain how anarchy on stateless functions[2].
Munroe is an Australian as is Andrew Worth and Greg Egan himself. Egan uses Munroe to deliver a critique of Australian culture.
"Don't you ever get sick of living in a society which talks about itself, relentlessly - and usually lies? Which defines everything worthwhile - tolerance, honesty, loyalty, fairness - as 'uniquely Australian'?"[3]
A major theme running through Egan's presentation of a futuristic anarchism is something called 'Technolibération', which is to do with the liberation of technology and information from corporate control as well as the idea of using advanced technology to enable liberatory social movements.
[edit]
Footnotes
^ (p.221)
^ (p.114)
^ (p.121)
3.5 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distress_(novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Distress is a 1995 science fiction novel by Greg Egan ISBN 0061052647.Contents [hide]
1 Plot summary
2 Gender roles
3 Anarchism
4 Footnotes
[edit]
Plot summary
It describes the political intrigue surrounding a mid-twenty-first century physics conference, at which is to be presented a unified Theory of Everything. In the background of the story is an epidemic mental illness, related in some way to the imminent discovery of the TOE. The action takes place on an artificial island called "Stateless", which has earned the wrath of the world's large biotech companies for its pilfering of their intellectual property. The novel contains a great deal of satirical commentary on gender identities, multinational capitalism, and postmodern thought. It also features Egan's usual playful exploration of physical, metaphysical, and epistemological theories.
[edit]
Gender roles
Egan uses his hypothetical future to postulate the existence of not just one but five new genders, and introduces a set of new pronouns to designate each one. One of the central characters of the novel, Akili Kuwale, provides a demonstration of this change and its implications. As an asexual human, Akili has had all reproductive organs removed entirely, distinct from hermaphrodites who possess both. Within the scope of the novel, Egan uses the pronouns 've', 'ver', and 'vis' to represent Akili's definitive gender neutrality.
[edit]
Anarchism
Egan also uses the hypothetical technological advances in Distress to explore ideas about anarchism, especially when its protagonist, Andrew Worth, a journalist, travels to the anarchistic man-made island 'stateless'. Andrew meets some small characters on stateless who explain to him the relationship between anarchistic principles and various ideas such as; quantum physics; information theory; independent spirituality[1].
Worth also meets a painter, Munroe, who attempts to explain how anarchy on stateless functions[2].
Munroe is an Australian as is Andrew Worth and Greg Egan himself. Egan uses Munroe to deliver a critique of Australian culture.
"Don't you ever get sick of living in a society which talks about itself, relentlessly - and usually lies? Which defines everything worthwhile - tolerance, honesty, loyalty, fairness - as 'uniquely Australian'?"[3]
A major theme running through Egan's presentation of a futuristic anarchism is something called 'Technolibération', which is to do with the liberation of technology and information from corporate control as well as the idea of using advanced technology to enable liberatory social movements.
[edit]
Footnotes
^ (p.221)
^ (p.114)
^ (p.121)
3.5 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distress_(novel)
Permutation City - Greg Egan
Permutation City
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Permutation City
Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author Greg Egan
Country Australia
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction novel
Publisher Millennium Orion Publishing Group
Publication date 1994
Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages 310 pp
ISBN ISBN 1-85798-174-X
OCLC Number 30834713
Permutation City is a 1994 science fiction novel by Greg Egan that explores many concepts, including quantum ontology, via various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulated reality. It won the John W. Campbell Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year in 1995 and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award that same year. The novel was also cited in a 2003 Scientific American article on multiverses by Max Tegmark.[1][2]Contents [hide]
1 Themes and setting
2 Story
2.1 Part Two
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
[edit]
Themes and setting This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (October 2008)
Permutation City deals with a question common in cyberpunk and postcyberpunk works: is there any difference between a computer simulation of a person and a "real" person? More specifically, Permutation City focuses on exploring one possible model of consciousness and reality, the Logic of the Dust Theory of reality, or simply Dust Theory, similar to the Ultimate Ensemble Mathematical Universe hypothesis proposed by Max Tegmark.
Like some other works of contemporary science fiction, it begins with the assumption that human consciousness is Turing computable: in other words, that all aspects of genuine consciousness can be produced by a computer program. Specifically, the book deals with some possible consequences of human consciousness being amenable to mathematical manipulation, as well as some possible consequences of simulated realities. In this way, Egan attempts to deconstruct not only some standard notions of self, memory, and mortality, but also of physical reality. Over the course of the story, Egan gradually elaborates the Logic of the Dust Theory of reality, the implications of which form the premise for much of the story's intrigue.
The story explores these ideas through a variety of avenues. One is that of the Autoverse, an artificial life simulator ultimately based on a cellular automaton complex enough to represent the substratum of an artificial chemistry. The Autoverse is a deterministic chemistry set, internally consistent and vaguely resembling real chemistry, but with only thirty-two elements and no nuclear analogue. In the novel, tiny environments, simulated in the Autoverse and filled with small populations of a simple, designed lifeform, Autobacterium lamberti, are maintained by a dwindling community of enthusiasts obsessed with getting A. lamberti to evolve, something Autoverse chemistry seems to make extremely difficult.
Another venue for these explorations is VR, virtual realities making extensive use of patchwork heuristics to simulate, crudely, completely immersive and convincing physical environments, albeit at a maximum of seventeen times slower than "real" time, the limit to the optical crystal computing technology used at the time of the story. Larger VR environments, covering a greater internal volume in greater detail, are cost prohibitive even though VR worlds are computed selectively for inhabitants, reducing redundancy and extraneous objects and places to the minimum details required to provide a convincing experience to those inhabitants, e.g. a mirror not being looked at would be reduced to a reflection value, with details being "filled in" as necessary if its owner were to turn their model-of-a-head towards it.
Within the story, "Copies", digital renderings of human brains with complete subjective consciousness, the technical descendants of ever more comprehensive medical simulations, live within VR environments after a process of "scanning". Copies are the only objects within VR environments that are completely mathematically internally consistent, everything else being the product of varying levels of generalisation, lossy compression, and hashing at all times.
Copies form the conceptual spine of the story, and much of the plot deals directly with the "lived" experience of Copies, most of whom are the survivors of wealthy billionaires suffering terminal illnesses or fatal accidents, who spend their existences in VR worlds of their creating, usually maintained by trust funds which independently own and operate large computing resources for their sakes, separated physically and economically from most of the rest of the world's computing power, which is privatised as a fungible commodity. In this way, Egan also deals with the socioeconomic realities of life as a Copy (the global economy of the novel is in recession and Copies often lose their vital assets), many of the less wealthy of whom live in "the Slums", a euphemism for the state of being bounced around the globe to the cheapest physical computing available at any given time in order to save money.
Many such lower-and-middle-class Copies exist at considerable "slowdown" relative to "real" time or even optimum Copy time, in order to save further money by allowing themselves to be computed momentarily from place to place and saved in suspension for cheap in the meantime. Through this, the concept of solipsism is examined prominently, with many lower-and-middle-class Copies attending social functions called Slow Clubs, where socialising Copies agree to synchronise with the slowest person present. Many of these lower/middle-class Copies become completely deracinated from their former lives and from world events, or else become Witnesses, who spend their time observing (at considerable time lapse) world events unfold, at the cost of any meaningful relationships with their fellow Copies. A subculture of lower/middle-class Copies, calling themselves "Solipsist Nation" after a philosophical work by their nominal founder, choose to completely repudiate the "real" world and any Copies still attached to it, reprogramming their models-of-brains and their VR environments in order to design themselves into their own personal vision of paradise, of whatever size and detail, disregarding slowdown in the process.
Further Egan novels which deal with these issues from various other perspectives include Diaspora and Schild's Ladder.
[edit]
Story
The plot of Permutation City follows the lives of several people in a near future reality where the Earth is ravaged by the effects of climate change, the economy and culture are largely globalised (the most commonly used denomination of currency is the ecu, the precursor to the euro in use at the time the book was written), and civilisation has accumulated vast amounts of ubiquitous computing power and memory which is distributed internationally and is traded in a public market called the QIPS Exchange (QIPS from MIPS, where the Q is Quadrillions).
Most importantly, from the perspective of the story, this great computing capacity is used to construct physiological models of patients for medical purposes, reducing the need for actual medical experimentation and enabling personalised medical treatments, but also enabling the creation of Copies, whole brain emulations of "scanned" humans which are detailed enough to allow for subjective conscious experience on the part of the emulation. Although not yet in widespread usage, scanning has become safe enough and common enough to allow for a subset of wealthy or dedicated humans to afford to create backups of themselves, generally with the intention of surviving the biological deaths of their bodies.
A minority of Copies exist, though they are largely perceived (with some justification) as being a collection of the thanatophobic eccentric rich. Copies do not yet possess human rights under the laws of any nation or international body, although a subgroup of the wealthiest Copies, those still involved with their own estates or businesses, finance a powerful lobby and public relations effort to advance the Copy rights cause. To this effect, the legal status of Copies is viewed as somewhat farcical even by sceptics of the cause, and many expect full Copy rights to be granted in Europe within two decades.
The plotline travels back and forth between the years of 2045 and 2050, and deals with events surrounding the life of a Sydney man named Paul Durham, who is obsessed, yet frustrated, with experimenting on Copies of himself (because he believes Copies of himself should be more willing to undergo experimentation). In the latter time frame, Durham is suspected to be a con artist of some type, who travels around the world visiting rich Copies and offering them prime real estate in some sort of advanced supercomputer which, according to his pitch, will never be shut down and will be powerful enough to support any number of Copies in VR environments of their own designing at no slowdown whatsoever, no matter how preposterously opulent those environments might be.
He pitches this concept to the Copies, predicated upon the prediction that the Copy rights movement might run into resistance due to devastating climate change. As the world undergoes increasingly extreme and erratic weather, a variety of international bodies, especially the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which has been particularly hard-hit by tropical storms, have proposed projects to use their vast computing resources to attempt to intervene, utilising chaotic effects to their advantage, in global weather patterns with such precision as to minimise weather-related destruction while also minimising the scale of the efforts necessary to do so. Durham predicts this will clash with the spread of Copy rights, as both Copies and weather simulations will demand increasing QIPS Exchange shares in the future. All that each Copy must do is to make the laughably small investment of two million ecus in order to bring Durham's fantasy computer into existence.
As part of his plot, Durham hires Maria Deluca, an Autoverse enthusiast. She has recently become famous within the small community of Autoverse hobbyists for developing a variety of A. lamberti which evolved the capacity to metabolise an Autoverse toxin, and pays her thirty thousand dollars to design an Autoverse program which, given a large enough computer, could potentially evolve into a planet bearing Maria's own strain of evolvable Autoverse life. She desperately wants the money to have her dying mother scanned into a Copy. Since no such computer to fully evolve Autoverse life exists, Durham has to try to convince Maria that he is a wealthy Autoverse enthusiast interested in her evolvability results and looking for a proof of concept for a much larger system. He also clandestinely commissions a famous virtual reality architect, Malcolm Carter, to build a full scale, high resolution VR city, Permutation City, the largest VR environment ever conceived, complete with reactive crowds and a staggering variety of full scale, high resolution scenic views.
As computer fraud investigators begin to close in on Durham's scheme, Maria is pressured by police into covertly gathering evidence in order to incriminate Durham, while continuing to work for him. She learns more about Durham himself, including his time spent in psychiatric care and his callous experimentation on his own Copies, as well as his assiduously reticent Copy backers.
Meanwhile, two Slum-dwelling Solipsist Nation Copies, Peer and Kate, explore their post-human existences as well as their strained but loving relationship, until Kate's long-time friend Malcolm Carter offers to secretly hack them both, along with any moderately-sized software packages they wish, into Permutation City's machine code, guaranteeing them a place in the city were it ever to run, but permanently debarring them from manipulating the city's implementation for fear of being deleted as extraneous cruft by automated software.
At the end of Part One, Durham reveals the full extent of his plan to Maria: after taking his earlier self-experiments to their logical conclusion, he became convinced of something he came to call the Logic of the Dust Theory, which holds that there is no difference, even in principle, between physics and mathematics, and that all mathematically possible structures exist, among them our physics and therefore our spacetime. These structures are being computed, in the manner of a program on a universal Turing machine, using something Durham refers to as "dust" which is a generic, vague term describing anything which can be interpreted to represent information; and therefore, that the only thing that matters is that a mathematical structure be self-consistent and, as such, computable. As long as a mathematical structure is possibly computable, then it is being computed on some dust, though it doesn't matter how much, only that there can be a possible interpretation where such a computation is taking place.
Due to the computability of consciousness and the function of consciousness as a matrix for interpretation, Copies hold the unique position of being the only conscious beings which themselves are not being computed by self-consistent mathematical rules (existing, of course, in virtual realities held together by heuristics merely for the sake of their experience). As such, in principle it should be the case that when a Copy is terminated and deleted, its own conscious experience will continue due to the fact that there is no precedent within the Copy's interpretive matrix by which the Copy should suddenly cease. Indeed, Durham himself claims to have been through such a process several times, each time finding himself back in "the real world" after deletion, with there existing some plausible explanation as to why he believed himself to have been a Copy who was deleted, though with each successive experience of Copying himself and being deleted, he gradually became increasingly confident that the experiences were actually the result of his consciousness finding a logical interpretation in which it had not actually ceased, rather than each successive experience being ultimately true and real.
Because of this, Durham is staging a massive, momentary buyout of the world's processing power to simulate a minute or two of a "Garden of Eden" configuration of an infinitely-expanding, massively complex cellular automaton universe (similar to what is known as a "Spacefiller" configuration in Conway's Game of Life) based on a fictional, Turing complete cellular automaton known as TVC ("Turing/Von Neumann/Chang", named after its conceiver and designer), in which each iteration of the expansion serves to "manufacture" an extra layer of blocks of a computing configuration. Ultimately, if a Copy were to be run in such a self-consistent universe, and were to observe, via a series pre-defined experiments, the cellular nature of its own processing implementation, then there would be precedent for that self-consistent "TVC universe" to persist in its own terms even after its termination and deletion in the universe it was designed and launched in. His and his investors' Copies would therefore persist indefinitely in the simulation, and since the "space" of the TVC universe would be made of self-reproducing cellular automaton computer processors, the simulation would not possess a finite number of states and the passengers wouldn't, in principle, run out of interesting things to get up to.
Implanting himself and his investors in this TVC universe, Durham believed he could prove or falsify his hypothesis that his experience of repeated termination and continuation was the result of his own interpreting himself into universes in which he might plausibly have believed he had had such an experience, as opposed to merely having inhabited such a universe all along. If he were to implant his Copy into the TVC universe, have the copy run a number of experiments to anchor itself in that universe, and then terminate it, only to find himself still in the TVC universe (indeed, the purpose of growing the TVC universe from a Garden of Eden configuration was to prove to his Copy that such a TVC universe as it found itself to inhabit must have been launched from a non-TVC universe, as opposed to merely having always existed and evolved towards this the current state in which he didn't know whether it had) rather than back in "the real world" again, then he would be vindicated; if not, then his hypothesis would be falsified and he might consider himself crazy (his last several experiences of termination and subsequent continuation involved him finding himself in the position of having been recently cured of psychosis). The Autoverse planetary seed program designed by Maria was to be included in the TVC universe package for his investors to explore once life had evolved there after it had been run on a significantly large segment of the TVC universe.
Though Maria believes Durham to be obviously rationalising his experiences while psychotic, she agrees to Durham's request to have herself scanned and inserted into the TVC launch as an on-hand Autoverse expert. The six-hundred thousand dollar fee will allow her mother to be scanned, and she is certain that her copy will never wake because she demands to be present at the launch to verify that her copy isn't run during the launch period, and is subsequently deleted.
After a successful launch, simulation, termination, and deletion of the TVC universe, Durham and Maria have uncomfortable sex in awkward celebration, and later that night, while Maria is asleep, Durham disembowels himself with a kitchen knife in his bathtub, believing his role as the springboard for his deleted TVC Copy to discover its true identity to be fulfilled.
[edit]
Part Two
Maria wakes in Permutation City 7000 years of subjective time after the launch, furious at Durham for being awoken and refusing to believe that the launch was successful. Durham quickly persuades her, however, and she begins to study the history of the Planet Lamberti, the autoverse simulation that she had started and that had been running on Permutation City infrastructure for billions of years of Autoverse time. Intelligent life in the form of complex swarms of insects has evolved on Lamberti from Maria's original Autobacterium hydrophilus.
The citizens of Permutation City were on the verge of making contact with the intelligent life that had evolved on Planet Lamberti. However, a town hall vote restricted the Autoverse scholars from making contact until the insects had independently hypothesized the existence of a creator.
Durham confides in Maria that he doesn't believe the insects will ever seriously consider the concept of a creator and intends to use her slice of the universe's processing power (as a founder of the world she was given de facto control of a continuously-growing zone of the processor network) to make forbidden first contact with the life of Planet Lamberti. He believes this is necessary because he's no longer able to freeze the Autoverse simulation or slow it down past a constant multiple of the size of the processor network. Durham is worried that the rules of their simulated universe are breaking down.
What he doesn't realize is that the intelligence of Planet Lamberti has exceeded the complexity of their own world, and that Lamberti has ceased to be defined as their simulation - Permutation City is now defined in terms of Autoverse physics rather than the other way around. That's why they were unable to interfere with the Autoverse simulation - its laws were inviolate now, not the cellular automata processor-network's laws. Shortly after failing to convince Planet Lamberti of the creator theory, the insects discover a set of field equations with a stable solution for each of their universe's elements; furthermore, initial studies on the equations show that they predict the spontaneous instantiation of matter at high temperatures.
To the citizens' alarm, Permutation City and eventually the entire processor-network begins to collapse into nothingness. Their processor network is no longer necessary to the existence of the Autoverse; there is a better solution that has superseded it, rendering the processor network literally nonexistent. This is a kind of reverse ontological argument: rather than the subjective, conscious necessity of God virtually creating him, his non-necessity destroys him - in this case the citizens of Permutation City. As Permutation City collapses, Durham creates a new Garden of Eden configuration and prepares to launch it in the processor network's last few seconds as a means of escape for Maria and the other founders, though he initially declines to board it himself. In the final moments, Maria convinces him to change his mind (literally reconfiguring it to desire escape) and together they leave, pledging to discover the underlying rules that governed the Autoverse's takeover of Permutation City.
[edit]
See also
Mind uploading
Simulated reality
[edit]
References
^ Max Tegmark, Parallel Universes, Scientific American, May 2003
^ Max Tegmark, Parallel Universes
4.5 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Permutation City
Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author Greg Egan
Country Australia
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction novel
Publisher Millennium Orion Publishing Group
Publication date 1994
Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages 310 pp
ISBN ISBN 1-85798-174-X
OCLC Number 30834713
Permutation City is a 1994 science fiction novel by Greg Egan that explores many concepts, including quantum ontology, via various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulated reality. It won the John W. Campbell Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year in 1995 and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award that same year. The novel was also cited in a 2003 Scientific American article on multiverses by Max Tegmark.[1][2]Contents [hide]
1 Themes and setting
2 Story
2.1 Part Two
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
[edit]
Themes and setting This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (October 2008)
Permutation City deals with a question common in cyberpunk and postcyberpunk works: is there any difference between a computer simulation of a person and a "real" person? More specifically, Permutation City focuses on exploring one possible model of consciousness and reality, the Logic of the Dust Theory of reality, or simply Dust Theory, similar to the Ultimate Ensemble Mathematical Universe hypothesis proposed by Max Tegmark.
Like some other works of contemporary science fiction, it begins with the assumption that human consciousness is Turing computable: in other words, that all aspects of genuine consciousness can be produced by a computer program. Specifically, the book deals with some possible consequences of human consciousness being amenable to mathematical manipulation, as well as some possible consequences of simulated realities. In this way, Egan attempts to deconstruct not only some standard notions of self, memory, and mortality, but also of physical reality. Over the course of the story, Egan gradually elaborates the Logic of the Dust Theory of reality, the implications of which form the premise for much of the story's intrigue.
The story explores these ideas through a variety of avenues. One is that of the Autoverse, an artificial life simulator ultimately based on a cellular automaton complex enough to represent the substratum of an artificial chemistry. The Autoverse is a deterministic chemistry set, internally consistent and vaguely resembling real chemistry, but with only thirty-two elements and no nuclear analogue. In the novel, tiny environments, simulated in the Autoverse and filled with small populations of a simple, designed lifeform, Autobacterium lamberti, are maintained by a dwindling community of enthusiasts obsessed with getting A. lamberti to evolve, something Autoverse chemistry seems to make extremely difficult.
Another venue for these explorations is VR, virtual realities making extensive use of patchwork heuristics to simulate, crudely, completely immersive and convincing physical environments, albeit at a maximum of seventeen times slower than "real" time, the limit to the optical crystal computing technology used at the time of the story. Larger VR environments, covering a greater internal volume in greater detail, are cost prohibitive even though VR worlds are computed selectively for inhabitants, reducing redundancy and extraneous objects and places to the minimum details required to provide a convincing experience to those inhabitants, e.g. a mirror not being looked at would be reduced to a reflection value, with details being "filled in" as necessary if its owner were to turn their model-of-a-head towards it.
Within the story, "Copies", digital renderings of human brains with complete subjective consciousness, the technical descendants of ever more comprehensive medical simulations, live within VR environments after a process of "scanning". Copies are the only objects within VR environments that are completely mathematically internally consistent, everything else being the product of varying levels of generalisation, lossy compression, and hashing at all times.
Copies form the conceptual spine of the story, and much of the plot deals directly with the "lived" experience of Copies, most of whom are the survivors of wealthy billionaires suffering terminal illnesses or fatal accidents, who spend their existences in VR worlds of their creating, usually maintained by trust funds which independently own and operate large computing resources for their sakes, separated physically and economically from most of the rest of the world's computing power, which is privatised as a fungible commodity. In this way, Egan also deals with the socioeconomic realities of life as a Copy (the global economy of the novel is in recession and Copies often lose their vital assets), many of the less wealthy of whom live in "the Slums", a euphemism for the state of being bounced around the globe to the cheapest physical computing available at any given time in order to save money.
Many such lower-and-middle-class Copies exist at considerable "slowdown" relative to "real" time or even optimum Copy time, in order to save further money by allowing themselves to be computed momentarily from place to place and saved in suspension for cheap in the meantime. Through this, the concept of solipsism is examined prominently, with many lower-and-middle-class Copies attending social functions called Slow Clubs, where socialising Copies agree to synchronise with the slowest person present. Many of these lower/middle-class Copies become completely deracinated from their former lives and from world events, or else become Witnesses, who spend their time observing (at considerable time lapse) world events unfold, at the cost of any meaningful relationships with their fellow Copies. A subculture of lower/middle-class Copies, calling themselves "Solipsist Nation" after a philosophical work by their nominal founder, choose to completely repudiate the "real" world and any Copies still attached to it, reprogramming their models-of-brains and their VR environments in order to design themselves into their own personal vision of paradise, of whatever size and detail, disregarding slowdown in the process.
Further Egan novels which deal with these issues from various other perspectives include Diaspora and Schild's Ladder.
[edit]
Story
The plot of Permutation City follows the lives of several people in a near future reality where the Earth is ravaged by the effects of climate change, the economy and culture are largely globalised (the most commonly used denomination of currency is the ecu, the precursor to the euro in use at the time the book was written), and civilisation has accumulated vast amounts of ubiquitous computing power and memory which is distributed internationally and is traded in a public market called the QIPS Exchange (QIPS from MIPS, where the Q is Quadrillions).
Most importantly, from the perspective of the story, this great computing capacity is used to construct physiological models of patients for medical purposes, reducing the need for actual medical experimentation and enabling personalised medical treatments, but also enabling the creation of Copies, whole brain emulations of "scanned" humans which are detailed enough to allow for subjective conscious experience on the part of the emulation. Although not yet in widespread usage, scanning has become safe enough and common enough to allow for a subset of wealthy or dedicated humans to afford to create backups of themselves, generally with the intention of surviving the biological deaths of their bodies.
A minority of Copies exist, though they are largely perceived (with some justification) as being a collection of the thanatophobic eccentric rich. Copies do not yet possess human rights under the laws of any nation or international body, although a subgroup of the wealthiest Copies, those still involved with their own estates or businesses, finance a powerful lobby and public relations effort to advance the Copy rights cause. To this effect, the legal status of Copies is viewed as somewhat farcical even by sceptics of the cause, and many expect full Copy rights to be granted in Europe within two decades.
The plotline travels back and forth between the years of 2045 and 2050, and deals with events surrounding the life of a Sydney man named Paul Durham, who is obsessed, yet frustrated, with experimenting on Copies of himself (because he believes Copies of himself should be more willing to undergo experimentation). In the latter time frame, Durham is suspected to be a con artist of some type, who travels around the world visiting rich Copies and offering them prime real estate in some sort of advanced supercomputer which, according to his pitch, will never be shut down and will be powerful enough to support any number of Copies in VR environments of their own designing at no slowdown whatsoever, no matter how preposterously opulent those environments might be.
He pitches this concept to the Copies, predicated upon the prediction that the Copy rights movement might run into resistance due to devastating climate change. As the world undergoes increasingly extreme and erratic weather, a variety of international bodies, especially the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which has been particularly hard-hit by tropical storms, have proposed projects to use their vast computing resources to attempt to intervene, utilising chaotic effects to their advantage, in global weather patterns with such precision as to minimise weather-related destruction while also minimising the scale of the efforts necessary to do so. Durham predicts this will clash with the spread of Copy rights, as both Copies and weather simulations will demand increasing QIPS Exchange shares in the future. All that each Copy must do is to make the laughably small investment of two million ecus in order to bring Durham's fantasy computer into existence.
As part of his plot, Durham hires Maria Deluca, an Autoverse enthusiast. She has recently become famous within the small community of Autoverse hobbyists for developing a variety of A. lamberti which evolved the capacity to metabolise an Autoverse toxin, and pays her thirty thousand dollars to design an Autoverse program which, given a large enough computer, could potentially evolve into a planet bearing Maria's own strain of evolvable Autoverse life. She desperately wants the money to have her dying mother scanned into a Copy. Since no such computer to fully evolve Autoverse life exists, Durham has to try to convince Maria that he is a wealthy Autoverse enthusiast interested in her evolvability results and looking for a proof of concept for a much larger system. He also clandestinely commissions a famous virtual reality architect, Malcolm Carter, to build a full scale, high resolution VR city, Permutation City, the largest VR environment ever conceived, complete with reactive crowds and a staggering variety of full scale, high resolution scenic views.
As computer fraud investigators begin to close in on Durham's scheme, Maria is pressured by police into covertly gathering evidence in order to incriminate Durham, while continuing to work for him. She learns more about Durham himself, including his time spent in psychiatric care and his callous experimentation on his own Copies, as well as his assiduously reticent Copy backers.
Meanwhile, two Slum-dwelling Solipsist Nation Copies, Peer and Kate, explore their post-human existences as well as their strained but loving relationship, until Kate's long-time friend Malcolm Carter offers to secretly hack them both, along with any moderately-sized software packages they wish, into Permutation City's machine code, guaranteeing them a place in the city were it ever to run, but permanently debarring them from manipulating the city's implementation for fear of being deleted as extraneous cruft by automated software.
At the end of Part One, Durham reveals the full extent of his plan to Maria: after taking his earlier self-experiments to their logical conclusion, he became convinced of something he came to call the Logic of the Dust Theory, which holds that there is no difference, even in principle, between physics and mathematics, and that all mathematically possible structures exist, among them our physics and therefore our spacetime. These structures are being computed, in the manner of a program on a universal Turing machine, using something Durham refers to as "dust" which is a generic, vague term describing anything which can be interpreted to represent information; and therefore, that the only thing that matters is that a mathematical structure be self-consistent and, as such, computable. As long as a mathematical structure is possibly computable, then it is being computed on some dust, though it doesn't matter how much, only that there can be a possible interpretation where such a computation is taking place.
Due to the computability of consciousness and the function of consciousness as a matrix for interpretation, Copies hold the unique position of being the only conscious beings which themselves are not being computed by self-consistent mathematical rules (existing, of course, in virtual realities held together by heuristics merely for the sake of their experience). As such, in principle it should be the case that when a Copy is terminated and deleted, its own conscious experience will continue due to the fact that there is no precedent within the Copy's interpretive matrix by which the Copy should suddenly cease. Indeed, Durham himself claims to have been through such a process several times, each time finding himself back in "the real world" after deletion, with there existing some plausible explanation as to why he believed himself to have been a Copy who was deleted, though with each successive experience of Copying himself and being deleted, he gradually became increasingly confident that the experiences were actually the result of his consciousness finding a logical interpretation in which it had not actually ceased, rather than each successive experience being ultimately true and real.
Because of this, Durham is staging a massive, momentary buyout of the world's processing power to simulate a minute or two of a "Garden of Eden" configuration of an infinitely-expanding, massively complex cellular automaton universe (similar to what is known as a "Spacefiller" configuration in Conway's Game of Life) based on a fictional, Turing complete cellular automaton known as TVC ("Turing/Von Neumann/Chang", named after its conceiver and designer), in which each iteration of the expansion serves to "manufacture" an extra layer of blocks of a computing configuration. Ultimately, if a Copy were to be run in such a self-consistent universe, and were to observe, via a series pre-defined experiments, the cellular nature of its own processing implementation, then there would be precedent for that self-consistent "TVC universe" to persist in its own terms even after its termination and deletion in the universe it was designed and launched in. His and his investors' Copies would therefore persist indefinitely in the simulation, and since the "space" of the TVC universe would be made of self-reproducing cellular automaton computer processors, the simulation would not possess a finite number of states and the passengers wouldn't, in principle, run out of interesting things to get up to.
Implanting himself and his investors in this TVC universe, Durham believed he could prove or falsify his hypothesis that his experience of repeated termination and continuation was the result of his own interpreting himself into universes in which he might plausibly have believed he had had such an experience, as opposed to merely having inhabited such a universe all along. If he were to implant his Copy into the TVC universe, have the copy run a number of experiments to anchor itself in that universe, and then terminate it, only to find himself still in the TVC universe (indeed, the purpose of growing the TVC universe from a Garden of Eden configuration was to prove to his Copy that such a TVC universe as it found itself to inhabit must have been launched from a non-TVC universe, as opposed to merely having always existed and evolved towards this the current state in which he didn't know whether it had) rather than back in "the real world" again, then he would be vindicated; if not, then his hypothesis would be falsified and he might consider himself crazy (his last several experiences of termination and subsequent continuation involved him finding himself in the position of having been recently cured of psychosis). The Autoverse planetary seed program designed by Maria was to be included in the TVC universe package for his investors to explore once life had evolved there after it had been run on a significantly large segment of the TVC universe.
Though Maria believes Durham to be obviously rationalising his experiences while psychotic, she agrees to Durham's request to have herself scanned and inserted into the TVC launch as an on-hand Autoverse expert. The six-hundred thousand dollar fee will allow her mother to be scanned, and she is certain that her copy will never wake because she demands to be present at the launch to verify that her copy isn't run during the launch period, and is subsequently deleted.
After a successful launch, simulation, termination, and deletion of the TVC universe, Durham and Maria have uncomfortable sex in awkward celebration, and later that night, while Maria is asleep, Durham disembowels himself with a kitchen knife in his bathtub, believing his role as the springboard for his deleted TVC Copy to discover its true identity to be fulfilled.
[edit]
Part Two
Maria wakes in Permutation City 7000 years of subjective time after the launch, furious at Durham for being awoken and refusing to believe that the launch was successful. Durham quickly persuades her, however, and she begins to study the history of the Planet Lamberti, the autoverse simulation that she had started and that had been running on Permutation City infrastructure for billions of years of Autoverse time. Intelligent life in the form of complex swarms of insects has evolved on Lamberti from Maria's original Autobacterium hydrophilus.
The citizens of Permutation City were on the verge of making contact with the intelligent life that had evolved on Planet Lamberti. However, a town hall vote restricted the Autoverse scholars from making contact until the insects had independently hypothesized the existence of a creator.
Durham confides in Maria that he doesn't believe the insects will ever seriously consider the concept of a creator and intends to use her slice of the universe's processing power (as a founder of the world she was given de facto control of a continuously-growing zone of the processor network) to make forbidden first contact with the life of Planet Lamberti. He believes this is necessary because he's no longer able to freeze the Autoverse simulation or slow it down past a constant multiple of the size of the processor network. Durham is worried that the rules of their simulated universe are breaking down.
What he doesn't realize is that the intelligence of Planet Lamberti has exceeded the complexity of their own world, and that Lamberti has ceased to be defined as their simulation - Permutation City is now defined in terms of Autoverse physics rather than the other way around. That's why they were unable to interfere with the Autoverse simulation - its laws were inviolate now, not the cellular automata processor-network's laws. Shortly after failing to convince Planet Lamberti of the creator theory, the insects discover a set of field equations with a stable solution for each of their universe's elements; furthermore, initial studies on the equations show that they predict the spontaneous instantiation of matter at high temperatures.
To the citizens' alarm, Permutation City and eventually the entire processor-network begins to collapse into nothingness. Their processor network is no longer necessary to the existence of the Autoverse; there is a better solution that has superseded it, rendering the processor network literally nonexistent. This is a kind of reverse ontological argument: rather than the subjective, conscious necessity of God virtually creating him, his non-necessity destroys him - in this case the citizens of Permutation City. As Permutation City collapses, Durham creates a new Garden of Eden configuration and prepares to launch it in the processor network's last few seconds as a means of escape for Maria and the other founders, though he initially declines to board it himself. In the final moments, Maria convinces him to change his mind (literally reconfiguring it to desire escape) and together they leave, pledging to discover the underlying rules that governed the Autoverse's takeover of Permutation City.
[edit]
See also
Mind uploading
Simulated reality
[edit]
References
^ Max Tegmark, Parallel Universes, Scientific American, May 2003
^ Max Tegmark, Parallel Universes
4.5 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
An Unusual Angle - Greg Egan
"An Unusual Angle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia An Unusual Angle
Author Greg Egan
Country Australia
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction novel
Publisher Nostrillia Press
Publication date 1983
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 978-0909106126
OCLC Number 12214214
Dewey Decimal 823 19
LC Classification PR9619.3.E35 U5 1983
An Unusual Angle (1983) was the first novel published by Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan by Norstrilia Press. It concerns a high school boy who makes "a movie in his head."
While it is out of print, the remaining unsold copies are available at Slow Glass Books in Melbourne, Australia."
3 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Unusual_Angle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia An Unusual Angle
Author Greg Egan
Country Australia
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction novel
Publisher Nostrillia Press
Publication date 1983
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 978-0909106126
OCLC Number 12214214
Dewey Decimal 823 19
LC Classification PR9619.3.E35 U5 1983
An Unusual Angle (1983) was the first novel published by Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan by Norstrilia Press. It concerns a high school boy who makes "a movie in his head."
While it is out of print, the remaining unsold copies are available at Slow Glass Books in Melbourne, Australia."
3 out of 5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Unusual_Angle
Quarantine - Greg Egan
Quarantine (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2009)
For the novel by Jim Crace which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, see Quarantine (Jim Crace novel).
Quarantine is a hard science fiction novel by Greg Egan. Within a detective fiction framework, the novel explores the consequences of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which Egan acknowledges was chosen more for its entertainment value than for its likelihood of being correct.
[edit]
Plot summary
The novel is set in the near future (2034-2080), after the solar system has been surrounded by an impenetrable shield (constructed by either aliens or extra-solar humans) known as the Bubble. The Bubble permits no light to enter the solar system, and as a consequence the stars can no longer be seen. This seems to be mere background at first, but in fact it is central to the plot.
In the novel a physical process in the human brain is responsible for collapsing quantum wavefunctions representing systems into particular eigenstates. Human observations of the universe were reducing its diversity and potentiality (for instance, by rendering it uninhabitable to beings that relied on stars being something other than the enormous nuclear fusion-powered furnaces human astronomers have observed them to be). Hence it is suggested that the Bubble was constructed to prevent humanity from wreaking massive destruction on the rest of the universe through the process of mere observation.
In the course of the novel, the situation is further complicated when human researchers discover a way of modifying the brain to provide conscious control over the process, allowing people to suspend wavefunction collapse at will, and to choose which state the wavefunction will collapse to. This allows a person to choose how any nondeterministic event (such as flipping a coin) will turn out, provided that he is not being observed by anyone who is still involuntarily collapsing wavefunctions. This is used to perform a variety of low-probability tricks, such as tunneling through locked doors or getting past guards who happen to all be looking the other way as the person passes.
The novel contains ideas not related to quantum mechanics. Of particular note is the fact that people habitually download software to run in their brains. Such "neural mods" (whose titles are always given in boldface, such as Sentinel or P3) are installed by insufflating several drops of fluid carrying genetically modified microorganisms, which in turn carry nanomachines capable of rewiring nerve cells.
The story's narrator accepts a case to investigate the disappearance of a woman from a psychiatric Institute, which leads him to the Ensemble. This is an organization that is developing a wavefunction collapse inhibitor neural mod, the "eigenstate mod". This mod allows the user to stop being an observer in the sense of quantum mechanics and consequently to "smear", i.e. to exist in a superposition of different states at the same time and to pick eigenstates of personal preference from the range of possible states, when the personal wavefunction is collapsed.
He is put under the control of the Ensemble by the forced installation of a "loyalty mod" in his brain which makes loyal support for the organization his highest goal. The narrator meets a group of other Ensemble loyalists (the Canon) who have discovered that their keepers have failed to specify exactly what they are to be loyal to (except by its name) and consequently, being its most loyal members, start to define what the Ensemble is themselves. The narrator, working with the Canon, then proceeds to steal the eigenstate mod.
A rogue member of the Canon infects all of humanity with the software. (Normally, neither the microorganisms nor the nanomachines involved in installing neural mods can survive long outside the human body, but in this case the rogue scientist uses the eigenstate-control mod to modify their properties.) As a result, causality is weakened all over the globe, and the untrained humans, not knowing what to do with their newfound freedom, break down the fabric of reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2009)
For the novel by Jim Crace which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, see Quarantine (Jim Crace novel).
Quarantine is a hard science fiction novel by Greg Egan. Within a detective fiction framework, the novel explores the consequences of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which Egan acknowledges was chosen more for its entertainment value than for its likelihood of being correct.
[edit]
Plot summary
The novel is set in the near future (2034-2080), after the solar system has been surrounded by an impenetrable shield (constructed by either aliens or extra-solar humans) known as the Bubble. The Bubble permits no light to enter the solar system, and as a consequence the stars can no longer be seen. This seems to be mere background at first, but in fact it is central to the plot.
In the novel a physical process in the human brain is responsible for collapsing quantum wavefunctions representing systems into particular eigenstates. Human observations of the universe were reducing its diversity and potentiality (for instance, by rendering it uninhabitable to beings that relied on stars being something other than the enormous nuclear fusion-powered furnaces human astronomers have observed them to be). Hence it is suggested that the Bubble was constructed to prevent humanity from wreaking massive destruction on the rest of the universe through the process of mere observation.
In the course of the novel, the situation is further complicated when human researchers discover a way of modifying the brain to provide conscious control over the process, allowing people to suspend wavefunction collapse at will, and to choose which state the wavefunction will collapse to. This allows a person to choose how any nondeterministic event (such as flipping a coin) will turn out, provided that he is not being observed by anyone who is still involuntarily collapsing wavefunctions. This is used to perform a variety of low-probability tricks, such as tunneling through locked doors or getting past guards who happen to all be looking the other way as the person passes.
The novel contains ideas not related to quantum mechanics. Of particular note is the fact that people habitually download software to run in their brains. Such "neural mods" (whose titles are always given in boldface, such as Sentinel or P3) are installed by insufflating several drops of fluid carrying genetically modified microorganisms, which in turn carry nanomachines capable of rewiring nerve cells.
The story's narrator accepts a case to investigate the disappearance of a woman from a psychiatric Institute, which leads him to the Ensemble. This is an organization that is developing a wavefunction collapse inhibitor neural mod, the "eigenstate mod". This mod allows the user to stop being an observer in the sense of quantum mechanics and consequently to "smear", i.e. to exist in a superposition of different states at the same time and to pick eigenstates of personal preference from the range of possible states, when the personal wavefunction is collapsed.
He is put under the control of the Ensemble by the forced installation of a "loyalty mod" in his brain which makes loyal support for the organization his highest goal. The narrator meets a group of other Ensemble loyalists (the Canon) who have discovered that their keepers have failed to specify exactly what they are to be loyal to (except by its name) and consequently, being its most loyal members, start to define what the Ensemble is themselves. The narrator, working with the Canon, then proceeds to steal the eigenstate mod.
A rogue member of the Canon infects all of humanity with the software. (Normally, neither the microorganisms nor the nanomachines involved in installing neural mods can survive long outside the human body, but in this case the rogue scientist uses the eigenstate-control mod to modify their properties.) As a result, causality is weakened all over the globe, and the untrained humans, not knowing what to do with their newfound freedom, break down the fabric of reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(novel)
Why Isn't Greg Egan A Superstar? - Jon Evans
"I have a confession to make. About ten years ago, I pretty much gave up on reading science fiction. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it anymore; it was that I increasingly felt like I had already read all the good stuff, so I decided to take a few years off. But even during that period, there were still a few authors I simply couldn’t not buy if I came across their new work. William Gibson, Neal Stephenson ... and most of all, Greg Egan.
(If you haven’t read any Egan, you so should. He takes the wildest frontiers of today’s science and turns them into truly brainbending speculative fiction that continually challenges the reader’s ideas of both reality and humanity. He’s also a terrific sentence-by-sentence writer. I’d recommend you start with his novel Permutation City1, previously reviewed here by Jo Walton, and/or his collection Axiomatic.)"
4 out of 5
http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=10585
(If you haven’t read any Egan, you so should. He takes the wildest frontiers of today’s science and turns them into truly brainbending speculative fiction that continually challenges the reader’s ideas of both reality and humanity. He’s also a terrific sentence-by-sentence writer. I’d recommend you start with his novel Permutation City1, previously reviewed here by Jo Walton, and/or his collection Axiomatic.)"
4 out of 5
http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=10585
Shared Experience - Greg Egan
"Still, for the first time in our lives, we would have been through exactly the same experience, from exactly the same point of view -- even if the experience was only spending eight hours locked in separate rooms, and the point of view was that of a genderless robot with an identity crisis. "
-- Closer
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Greg_Egan
-- Closer
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Greg_Egan
Truth - Greg Egan
"The truth is whatever you can get away with. No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape."
-- Distress
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Greg_Egan
-- Distress
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Greg_Egan
New Scientist - Greg Egan
"The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan."
4 out of 5
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Greg_Egan
4 out of 5
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Greg_Egan
Caffeine - Greg Egan
"Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century. - “Distress”"
4 out of 5
4 out of 5
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