Read: December 2022
Collection of short sci-fi stories.
The merchant and the alchemist’s gate
Time travelling story in a 1001 night Arabian setting.
This was my favourite of the short stories in this book. It’s for a sci-fi story unusual setting, together with the archaic writing style make it very interesting and not just another time-travelling story. The concept is also surprising.
As the author writes in the end notes: “Back in the 1990s the physicist Kip Thorne was on a book tour, and I heard him give a talk in which he described how you could - in theory - create a time machine that obeyed Einstein’s theory of relativity. I found it absolutely fascinating. Movies and television have encouraged us to think of time machines as vehicles you ride in, or else some kind of teleporter that beams you to different era. But what Thorne described was more like a pair of doors, where anything that goes in or comes out of one door will come out or go into the other door a fixed period of time later. Several questions raised by vehicular or transporter-style time machines - what about the movement of the Earth, why haven’t we seen visitors from the future yet - were answered by this type of time machine. Even more interesting was the fact that Thorne had performed some mathematical analysis indicating that you couldn’t change the past with this time machine, and that only a single, self-consistent timeline was possible.”
Exhalation
An individual trying to figure out how their mind works and realises that everyone is a machine whose memories are dependent on air flow and entropy.
From the author’s end notes: “(Inspiration for this story came from) the chapter in Roger Penrose’s book The Emporer’s New Mind in which he discusses entropy. He points out that therer’s a sense in which it’s incorrect to say we eat food because we need the energy it contains. The conservation of energy means that it is neither created nor destroyed; we are radiating energy constantly, at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it. The difference is that the heat energy we radiate is a high-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder; we live by increasing the disorder of the universe. It’s only because the universe started in a highly ordered state that we are able to exist at all.” Quotes
What’s expected of us
A simple machine shows people that free will doesn’t exist, and a warning from the future to never use it.
The lifecycle of software objects
More a novella than a short story, since it’s quite lengthy.
In the near future, pet avatars are developed to work in virtual reality. Over time they get more and more developed, gain new experiences and abilities and resemble children growing up. How far would owners of these pets go to protect them?
Dacey’s patent automatic nanny
Feels like an actual historic description of an early 20th century invention of a nanny automaton that enabled removing parental care from child rearing.
The truth of fact, the truth of feeling
Two tales: A near future where everthing we do is recorded and helps (or worsens) arguments about who was right about something in the past.
A missionary brings reading and writing to isolated tribes in the rain forest. Writing history down instead of letting it be shaped by memories and time changes the way people think and relate to things, even the perception of themselves.
The great silence
Fabel of parrots and how we haven’t learned to listen to them yet, despite living side by side for thousands of years. Instead, we try to reach out far into the universe with telescopes, to find species to communicate with.
Omphalos
Mostly written in an archeologist’s prayer to God. In an alternate reality, the general scientific theory is that the universe was created by God a few thousand years ago. Then evidence is found that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe.
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom
Quantum mechanical devices let you peek into an alternate timeline and communicate and compare your life to your other selves. Questions about morality, free will and if we should behave in a good way if our alternate selves aren’t either.