The Entropy Pump

Contribution by Charles Stross to the shared world anthology The Weerde that takes place in a setting where an old race of shapechangers lives covertly side by side with humanity. The story (online) deals with a pet peeve of Stross: change and how people, or in this case the shapechangers, deal with it. Basically the shapechangers can get very old, but the oldest among them, who look out for threats to the survival of their kind, have become unreliable, as they haven’t been able to adapt to the accelerated social and technological changes. The approaches to problem-solving of the ancients shapechangers have become a problem themselves and the younger shaperchangers initiate a purge.

That’s where the story stops. Nicely written, but I expect it is a more satisfying experience if read together with all the other stories in the anthology, as in this form we only get a single small glimpse into the world of the Weerde.

by Greg Egan (online)
takes place in the Amalgam setting

Egan’s writing has two very strong characteristics, but one of them, the ultra hard SFnal aspect, gets mentioned more often than the other. Egan is, like James White before him, one of the few science fiction writers who creates optimistic futures. This idealistic notion that human or intelligent and consciousness life can better itself, not just technologically but also morally, is an equally strong part of his fiction as his hard sf notions.

Often connected to the concept of paradise or utopian societies is the meme that these civilizations will die out, because people who have achieved peace and material comfort, who have left behind wars, diseases and other threats of our age, will inevitably decline because of a lack of challenge. What’s left is the search for knowledge, but what if even that is finite? The story doesn’t give a clear answer, no real solution. What it gives is hope, hope that even when the external source of knowledge seems to have dried up, when it looks like science has ended, the internal variety of the Amalgam, the diversity of an galactic civilization with countless sentient races, will be enough to carry through until the moment when new directions for the search for knowledge have opened.

If you want an interesting counterpoint to this story, read Peter Watts story Ambassador, which is IMHO thematically related, even if it goes at the whole theme from a completely different direction and takes a completely different position. But then, Peter Watts stories are rarely outbursts of happiness.

Rating: 5/5

by Greg Egan (online)

Reading Dark Integers felt like coming to a well you thought had dried up, only to realize that there’s excellent water again. And what water. You could get drunk on it. Dark Integers is a sequel to Egan’s story Luminous about a world where number crunching with big integers can prove contradicting and incompatible arithmetic laws. This time the stakes are even higher, with two groups from two universes (three guys on our side and an unknown number of aliens on the other side, who are way more powerful than we are) monitoring the topological border between the different arithmetical system that represent each universe. And then, after ten years of not much happening, the far side detects an intrusion of our arithmetics into their world.

If this story proves one thing, then that Egan is back in full force. This one is as mindblowing and clever as the best of his earlier stuff. I liked that he expanded on the concept of his earlier story and made it just a consequence of a deeper truth, showing that the characters of the first story were held back by thinking in terms of a Platonic space and that doing away with that and thinking purely in terms of physical processes worked much better. Overall, a very neat story and it’s good to see Egan back to form, as if he’d never been away from writing.

Rating: 5/5

by Desmond Warzel (online)

A delightful little story that mixes the all too common idea of time travel, and especially of killing Hitler, with a typical edit war on Wikipedia. What might seem at first like an unlikely mix makes for a rather fresh take on this old concept. Everyone who has been on a forum or witnessed an edit war will instantly now the kind of people that turn up in the the story: the overeager noobs, the wizened old forum-admin, the more learned oldsters. Short, but very funny (spotted on Boing Boing).

Rating: 5/5

by Greg Egan (online)

The main character is a photographer who takes pictures of grisly occurrences and tries to chronicle various mass murderers with his camera. One day one of them appears in his office and tells him of his next murder. This starts out with a passage that gives the whole text a dreamlike, nightmarish quality, furthered by the real nature of the mass murderer. The final passage of the story is a clumsy attempt to make an important point about human nature, that doesn’t feel as if it has naturally evolved from the story but like a moral Egan wanted to tack on to give the ending more importance. Doesn’t work well, thought.

Rating: 2/5

by Greg Egan (online)

Another of Egan’s early horror stories. This one is told from the perspective of the monster, a relentless, flesh-eating horror dreamed up by twelve respective elders to guard a small community. The monster is bound by a contract that allows him to only catch those who broke certain rules, but the monster hungers for more.

The depiction of the monster is excellent, it reads as if Egan had great fun writing it. There’s plenty of dry humor when the reader follows the monster’s thoughts while it catches local small-time criminals and how it thinks of those that created and bound it to this community. Since the one thing the monster wants is to be free and it’s obvious that he is soon getting it, part of the tension in the story comes from the question how he’ll be stopped. Overall a very delightful, early Egan story.

Rating: 5/5

by Greg Egan (online)

One of the earliest stories of Egan, when he still wrote horror instead of SF. This one is about vampires and mind vampires (something not well explained in the story, or at all). Well written, but to be earnest, I thought it was rather confusing to puzzle out what was really going on. I’m still not sure what exactly happened, was everything the main character did something he did because he was possessed by mind vampires, or did some of the stuff really happened and he was later possessed, or was everything just something he made up because he was possessed or messed up. Still, despite being confusing, it’s written in very enthralling style that keeps you reading until the end.

Rating: 3/5

by Jetse De Vries (online at Clarkesworld Magazine)

QC is about all the things that have been dominant in cutting edge SF in recent years, the technological singularity, matter to computronium transformation, solid state entities and the likes. Still, trying to get something fresh and new out of these themes becomes harder and harder, too much people have worked this field. And while QC doesn’t really introduces new ideas, it tries to look at ideas already there in a different way. QC gives the reader an extremely short and dense future history of things to come, told with a voice that has a subtle edge of wit that can be quiet biting in its nonchalant way. For all the things that change, it seems to say, for all the hyper- and ultra-acceleration of everything, some things remain the same. For growth we need conflict, chaos and order, the old concept are still valid. Since the whole singularity-concept is highly speculative itself, whether the position that everything changes or some things remain the same despite the acceleration of technology, seems moot, but since SF is dealing with ideas, getting other position or POVs is always nice. And in closing, the story ends with one of the oldest dreams of SF, corroborating the earlier theme that despite the changes, despite the gap between humans and the posthumans that now occupy the solar Matrioshka brain, some things remain the same.

Rating: 5/5

by David Marusek
later incorporated into his first novel Counting Heads

I’ve started reading Counting Heads by David Marusek, with starts with the short story that garnered him much attention. And I’m, to say it mildly, perplexed. Why did people thought this was a great story? Sure, there’s some nifty world-building (but even that isn’t in the class of someone like Egan or Stross), but past that there’s nothing outstanding. The plot is minimal, guy meets girl, they marry, everything looks like happily ever after, then something mean happens to the guy. He mopes around and the story stops.
The twist that under the utopian surface teem orwellian structures wasn’t well introduced. Instead of being scared or horrified I felt like laughing. The abilities of the state agency are too powerful, too all-seeing, too over the top. Mind you, one problem might be that the main character is such a nitwit that he hasn’t realized how fucked up his future is, and how Marusek portrays the rest of this society, most others are equally clueless. Still, the whole story just didn’t work for me, and the characters weren’t outstanding or interesting enough to make it something character-driven. Some good starting points, but I hope the rest of the novel is much better than this.

Rating: 3/5

by Greg Egan (Online)
set in the same universe as his next novel Incandescence

Synopsis: Leila and Jasim are part of a cooperative meta-civilization known as the Amalgam, and after long lives in Amalgam space have done everything they could have want to do. But before they decide to finally let life go, they want to do something grand, something audacious. They decide to penetrate the space of the Afoot, beings that supposedly exist in and around the core of the galaxy and stop every attempt of the Amalgam to explore their space.

I go right out and say that this is not the best Greg Egan has written, but it’s still good, and after such a long writing hiatus gives hope that his next novel might be up to his old stuff. What I liked about RtC was the feeling of exploration, something I would like to see in more SF, the pure joy of finding things out (especially about mysterious alien civilizations). Which is a bit of a cheat, since at the end we don’t know much more about the Afoot than at the begin of the story (Egan probably had already in mind writing a novel in the same universe). The world-building is top-notch, the whole Amalgam felt like Egan had taken Star Trek’s notion of the Federation, thought hard about the concept, cut away the bad stuff, fused it with his own ideas and gave it a hard push toward the next millennium. The result is just cool. If there was a part I disliked about the story it was the idea that someone would want to die after a very long life. Sure, I might be wrong, and if you lived thousands of years or even longer, that might be how people would react, but even if a lived a million years you would see me screaming and kicking brought to death, not willfully going toward it (in Wil McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol trilogy is an interesting alternative for a society with immortality technology, the technological reincarnation of personality templates after long lives, that might be an interesting idea to look at, but just choosing death seems awfully wrong, and after reading Egan’s Border Guards I wonder what his personal opinion on this matter is). Overall, Riding the Crocodile is a nice bit and I can’t wait until Incandescence comes out.

Rating: 4/5