Oracle - Greg Egan

Novella

Number of words : 18000
Percent of complex words : 12.1
Average syllables per word : 1.5
Average words per sentence : 19.7


READABILITY INDICES

Fog : 12.7
Flesch : 58.0
Flesch-Kincaid : 10.1

PEOPLE

Robert Stoney

A professor of mathematics.

Peter Quint

A spook, and one of Stoney's captors.

Franza Kafka

Not a Commie, and a writer.

Arthur

Stoney's boyfriend at the time of his trouble.

Mr Wills

A detective at the Manchester CID.

Guy Burgess

A corrupted English spy.

Hermann Weyl

A mathematician.

Chris

A friend at school Stoney was in love with who died of bovine tuberculosis.

Eddington

A physicist.

Hardy

A mathematician.

Newton

A scientist.

Helen

A time travelling multiverse shifting android.

Ealing

A movie director.

Everett

Had a time travel theory that was right.

Feynman

A physicist.

Yang

A physicist.

John Hamilton

Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Also an author of religious defenses and children's fantasies.

Elizabeth Anscombe

A philosopher and winner of a debate with Hamilton.

Aquinas to Wittgenstein

Philosophers.

William Hamilton

John's brother.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Another mathematician that did war work.

Nevill Mott

Made the superconducting alloys for the imager.

Rosalind Franklin

From Birkbeck, helped perfect the fabrication process for the computing circuits.

William Blake

A poet.

Joyce Hamilton

John's dying wife.

Helen of Troy

Ancient beauty.

Huysmans

Basically just a very dim Catholic.

Luke

Assistant and an affair of Stoney's.

Wagner

A composer.

Michael Polanyi

An academic philosopher who agrees to moderate the debate.

Kurt Godel

Austrian mathematician.

Aristotle

Ancient philosopher.

Hamilton's young friend

Has a PhD in algebraic geometry from Cambridge.

H.G. Wells

An author.

Milton, Dante, John the Divine

Writers.


PLACES

Sherborne

A public school he went to.

Thames

A river in England.

Westminster Abbey

A church in England.

Saint Paul's Cathedral

A big church in England.

Cavendish Laboratory

Where Stoney works at Cambridge. A mid-Victorian building.

Cairo

City in Egypt.

Bogota

City in Colombia.

London

Capital of England.

Calcutta

City in India.

Manchester

City in England.

Boston

USA city.

Auschwitz

A nazi concentration camp.

Madras

City in India.

Shepherd's Bush

Where the BBC studios are located.

Guy's Hospital

Stoney knows an oncologist there.


ORGANISATIONS

CID

Police detectives.

Trinity College

Part of Cambridge University.

MI6

English international espionage agency.

Socratic Club

A society that holds debates at Oxford University.

BBC

British Broadcasting Corporation.

Oxford University

In England.

Cambridge University

In England.




TECHNOLOGY

Mark I

A computer.

Spin resonance imager

Used to see inside the human body.


MEDIA

Yang and Mills in '54

A paper that generalised Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism to apply to the strong nuclear force.

Physical Review

A physics journal.

Kingdom of Nescia

Children's fantasies by John Hamilton.

Signs and Wonders

Anti-materialism tract by John Hamilton.

The Broken Planet

Anti-science book by John Hamilton.

Faustus

Devil-dealing character.

Letters from a Demon

Satirical newspaper column by John Hamilton.

Cedric Duffy

A John Hamilton character.

Pendragon

Mythical Arthurian leader.

Tower of Babel

Mythical ancient structure.

Mythopoesis

Essay by Tollers.

Can A Machine Think?

A BBC debate between Stoney and Hamilton.

The Seat of Oak

One of Hamilton's Nescia books.


CONCEPTS

Baudot Code

A character set for telegraphy.

Mercury

Roman deity.

Pan

Woodland deity.

Incompleteness Theorem

Postulated by Kurt Godel.

The Goldbach conjecture

One of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory and in all of mathematics. Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.

Fermat's Last Theorem

About positive integer algebra.

Oracle

A machine that could solve the halting problem.



ANIMALS

Pekinese

A created dog breed.

Hamsters

Small rodents that will fuck anything.


PLOT


Robert Stoney is a professor of mathematics and of interest to MI6 because of the work he could do. He is also exploited by some dodgy spooks because he is gay, and in this decade that is something that can be used against you.

They actually take him to try and torture it out of him at one stage, locking him in a cramped cage. Amazingly, he is rescued by a woman who is a time traveller. Even more than that, an android and a multiversal troubleshooter. Helen stays with him for some time, and they discuss the problems of trying to change the past, and the differing branches. They can't change big things, but certainly can affect minor elements. So they bedevil the spook Quint that tortured Stoney, driving him towards breakdown.

This soon leads him to success as she can point out some shortcuts in research to come up with some technology like a resonance imager, or medical breakthroughs, even if it is not his field.

Others wonder why he is so successful all of a sudden, and he attracks the interest of a religious conservative and anti-science and anti-materialist author John Hamilton. They end up debating on the BBC, which goes ok. Helen accompanies Stoney and Hamilton has a 'young adviser'. Hamilton's wife Joyce is dying of bone cancer, but he thinks Stoney is of the devil and refuses any help.

Something Helen tells John can be accomplished with timeline tricks is a solution to the halting problem, of being able to tell if a computer program will work or not because you can use an infinite number of paths to interrogate it. To be able to solve the halting problem would give you an Oracle machine, as Stoney calls it.

At the end, after his wife has died he is visited by a version of himself from another timeline, which rather freaks him out. He still refuses to accept technological assitance towards his happiness, however and will not go with his visiting self.


4 out of 5

http://www.gregegan.net/MISC/ORACLE/Oracle.html