Short reviews: fiction

Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson)

Cryptonomicon is a hard novel to summarise. It is about World War II code-breakers and 1990s tech entrepreneurs, but also manages to concern itself with most other things as well.

I first read Cryptonomicon over two years ago. However, it is a massive book, and since it happens in the same universe as The Baroque Cycle, I assumed reading it again would reveal many new things. I was not wrong.

Neal Stephenson has a humorously extravagant (baroque?) writing style that is always entertaining to read, but in Cryptonomicon it is taken to an extreme. Stephenson turns mundane activities like writing a business plan, eating cereal, taking a car ride in the Philippines, and visiting a dentist into lengthy but hilarious tangents. Do they contribute to the plot? Who cares!

As this is a Neal Stephenson novel, certain vices will also be present. A printed version of the book, dropped from a bomber, would punch a hole through the deck of a Japanese warship. The plot meanders to an extent that puts most rivers to shame. And some things are just plain weird.

But overall, Cryptonomicon makes for a great read for anyone with the time to spare, and an interest in codebreaking, history, war, mathematics, the Internet, the financial industry, or technology.

Exhalation (Ted Chiang)

“Exhalation”, this short story collection’s titular work, is the greatest short story I have ever read. (You may read it online for free – and legally, as far as I can tell – here). The careful setup builds to a beautiful and intuitive analogy that make the philosophical points at the end hit hard.

Based on the strengths of “Exhalation” (the short story), I bought Exhalation (the short story collection). None of the other stories surpass “Exhalation”, though they are mostly good and sometimes excellent.

Reading a Ted Chiang story is like watching an eerily intricate machine in action, or listening to a Bach fugue: the feeling is one of orderliness and precision combined with an almost casual ease. The premise of each story is fundamentally a thought experiment; a “what-if” question knocks down one domino and the story follows its consequences all the way down the chain. Nothing is wasted or in excess, and the beats of the pacing come like metronome beats. In the best of the stories, these beats are almost undetectable at first, gradually building up into dawning revalation as the pieces fall together and the story reaches its climax.

Aside from “Exhalation”, there are two stories that stand out.

“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” is a thoughtful exploration of the effect of the medium on what is seen as true (a topic that Neil Postman would feel right at home with). The story cleverly parallels the story of a person in an African village being introduced to literacy in the past, and a person in the future grappling with the consequences of technology that records everything people see. In a world of cautionary tales about technology stealing our identities, destroying our communities, or letting dinosaurs loose in the park, Chiang’s take on this issue is surprisingly forward-looking.

In “Omphalos” (an Ancient Greek word for “navel”, as in the expression “navel of the world”), the what-if question is: what if creationism were true, but humanity was a side-effect rather than the pinnacle of creation? The story is told in the form of prayers to god. Chiang takes the reader on a tour of what the scientific facts of this world look like: old trees with no growth rings in the middle, mummified people without navels, and so on, until finally a physics discovery, while confirming without doubt the existence of miracles, also leads inevitably to the conclusion that we are not the purpose of god’s creation. All this takes place in parallel with the emotional arc of the central character, which is told in a sympathetic and realistic manner.

Summerland (Hannu Rajaniemi)

The year is 1938. The Spanish Civil War rages on, Europe braces for war, Queen Victoria reigns from the afterlife, and the Soviets are merging souls into a godlike overmind, starting with Lenin’s.

In the alternative universe of Summerland, Marconi discovered more than he bargained for when working with radio transmission, and soon enough ectotanks and other supernatural weaponry were being deployed in World War I. Since then much of early-1900s spiritualism has been proven right.

Most significant is Summerland, an afterlife where souls can lodge themselves (provided they have a ticket) and even interact to a limited extent with the living.

In terms of plot, Summerland is a fairly straightforward spy novel. This is executed well (though my judgement may not be representative of those who know more about spy novels), but the premise is what makes Summerland special.

(Rajaniemi is best known for his far-future science fiction trilogy, which starts with The Quantum Thief; this is also recommended.)

The Curse of Chalion (Lois McMaster Bujold)

At the time of writing, the “Reception” section of the Wikipedia page for this book tells me nothing but “The book has received a number of reviews”.

This rather underwhelming (though doubtlessly accurate) statement does not do the book justice. The Curse of Chalion shines not through outstanding excellence in one respect, but rather by bringing a variety of good elements together: characters that feel like real people, an atmospheric setting, and above all a hard-to-pin-down tastefulness where nothing is in excess.

If I had to critique something, some of the turning points in the plot are rather deus ex machina. However, overall the book is a great example of fantasy built on literary merits rather than genre props, and makes for a very enjoyable story to get lost in.

(The introduction of the Wikipedia article, however, is little but a list of all the awards the book has won.)

Unsong (Scott Alexander)

In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth. For a while, everything was fine. Then Thamiel, the left hand of God, appears in the centre of the Earth and corrupts a third of the angelic host. A war begins between the angels and demons, in which the demons gain the upper hand. Their victory is averted only when the mathematically talented archangel Uriel initiates his backup plan: switching the world from running on divine light to running on mathematical laws. Angels and demons both are reduced to mere metaphors, and the world is saved.

Saved, that is, until humans get very good at harnessing those laws and send Apollo 8 on a trip around the moon in 1968. Unfortunately all space beyond the moon is simply an illusion to make the universe seem consistent with the physics that now reigns on Earth. Instead of looping around the moon, Apollo 8 crashes into the edge of the world, damaging the delicate celestial machinery that Uriel put into place to maintain his conversion.

Various glitches start to show up in the working of the world. Angels and demons begin returning: Uriel reappears in a hurricane in the Mexican Gulf, from where he plays the role of an overworked sysadmin issuing a constant stream of patches to prevent physics from crashing, while demons spring up from Lake Baikal and start invading Russia.

The backstory of Unsong, told in various short excerpts throughout the book, continues with a very clever account of how the world reacts to this turn of events. Cold War politicking continues; for example, at one point Henry Kissinger successfully convinces President Nixon to ally with Hell in order to keep the Russians in check.

The main plot line begins in 2017. In this universe, kabbalah works. In particular, it makes possible the discovery of Names of God – words which have magical powers, but whose distribution is controlled by strict copyright laws. The main character, Aaron Smith-Teller, is a gifted kabbalist, but works a low-paid job helping a company find Names: he reads potential Names off a computer screen all day long, and if he finds a Name, gives it over to the company. The process cannot be automated because computers lack a soul and hence can’t detect which words are Names, necessitating this sort of low-skill work.

Unsong is remarkable not just for its crazy premise, but for the consistency and ruthlessness of its internal logic (which characters do not fail to exploit). Imagine you stumble across a Name that grants souls to inanimate objects. What do you do? That’s obvious: use it on a computer, have it start searching for new Names at superhuman speed, sell the Names for profit, buy more computers, and continue in this vein until you have magic powers beyond your dreams and can take over the world. If the Bible is literally true, what is the overriding moral priority? Simple: end the existence of hell; countless people suffering eternal torture for vague reasons cannot be part of a just universe.

The central question that many of Unsong’s characters grapple with is the problem of theodicy: why would a good god create a world with so much evil? This question does not have direct relevance to our own world, but it leads to other interesting questions (as well as giving the author a chance to flaunt their ingenuity; the book actually has a plausible answer). Together with characters who are often both idealistic and ruthless – I’m particularly fond of Jalaketu West, AKA “The Comet King” – this makes the book a good exploration of many moral themes.

Be warned, though: Unsong is about a universe where words, rather than equations, are the building blocks of reality. This leads to a lot of perverse verbal ingenuity, including more puns than can possibly be healthy. If you don’t want to read about characters who protest at the World’s Fair by waving signs saying “No it isn’t!”, or how atheists also include a leviathan in their mythology by calling the whole world a giant fluke, stay away.

Unsong was published online, chapter by chapter. This means two things, one bad and one good. First, it is a bit less polished than a published novel might be. Second, you can read it for free online.

Review: Diaspora (Greg Egan)

Book: Diaspora, by Greg Egan (1997)

2.0k words (≈7 minutes)

The last review I wrote of a Greg Egan book began with a consideration of what science fiction is and how to classify it. This time I’m tempted to do the same. Once again, a Greg Egan novel strikes very close to the heart of (one view of) what science fiction is about.

Science fiction is typically associated with some combination of space, dinosaurs, and time-travel. However, I’d argue that what makes for great science fiction is not time-traveling space dinosaurs, but ideas.

In addition to the typical literary elements of a novel, great science fiction explores scientific/technological/philosophical/sociological ideas in a way no other medium can match. This frequently has side-effects. Fewer pages are left for character development. The turning points of the plot often revolve around insights rather than drama and violence.

Diaspora takes this quality and turns it up to eleven. The book is remarkable for the inventiveness, coherence, and above all, sheer volume of ideas it presents. Page after page, the reader is presented with fictional physics, the realities (or lack thereof) of life in a virtual reality environment, the mind-twisting experience of gazing at a four-dimensional night sky, and the consequences of all this for characters and their choices.

Diaspora is not a balanced novel. Though the characters are believable and make genuine, difficult choices, they are not always the main focus. The plot takes a while to get started, and once it does, it focuses more on a series of shorter subplots rather than one overarching plot.

Yet when it comes to its ideas and their presentation, Diaspora is the Platonic ideal which other science fiction novels can only strive towards. If you enjoy reading about the type of ideas Diaspora is filled with, the novel is an incomparable joy to read. And if you don’t, well, the novel is still bound to be incomparable.


Physics vs plot

The novel begins in the year 2975. Humanity has split into three factions:

• The most normal are the “fleshers”. As their name suggests, they are flesh-and-blood biological humans, though many have modified their minds and bodies into different forms, hence making communication between different groups difficult. They consider the gleisners and the citizens to be too far removed from reality.
• The “gleisners” consider the fleshers hopeless luddites. They have uploaded their minds into computers, which in turn are part of robotic bodies well-adapted to outer space.
• The “citizens” consider everyone else hopeless luddites, while being seen by everyone else as reality-detached solipsists. They exist as software running in virtual reality communities known as “polises”. The polises have sufficiently powerful hardware to simulate more than one second of experienced time for its citizens for each real second that passes, and hence the rest of the world passes in slow motion from their perspective (though others slow down the rate at which they experience time, either to keep touch with reality or to watch mountains erode and continents move in front of their eyes). Citizens running as fast as possible since the polises were built have experienced about 740 000 years of time, even though the polises have existed for only nine centuries.

Unlike most citizens, Yatima, our main character, is an orphan: built by the polis software from scratch, rather than being designed by “parents”. The first chapter is dedicated to detailing how this process unfolds, from the process of choosing a “genetic” code for a new mind to the orphan becoming self-aware. By describing the process visually, Egan manages to make fictional algorithms operating in abstract multidimensional space interesting.

If, after twenty pages of this, you think the plot must be about to begin, you are in for a surprise – instead, Egan takes us through the outline of a proof of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem. Here’s a sample:

"Ve tried smoothing and flattening the six points [six points on the surface of a sphere that form an octahedron]. That was easy – but it made the eight triangles [of the octahedron] as bowed and non-Euclidean as they’d been on the original sphere. It seemed ‘obvious’ that the points and the triangles could never be made flat simultaneously . . . but Yatima still couldn’t pin down the reason why the two goals were irreconcilable. Ve measured the angles where four triangles met, around what had once been a point of the diamond: 90, 90, 90, 90. That much made perfect sense: to lie flat, and meet nicely without any gaps, they had to add up to 360 degrees. Ve reverted to the un-blunted diamond, and measured the same angles again: 60, 60, 60, 60. A total of 240 was too small to lie flat; anything less than a full circle forced the surface to roll up like the point of a cone …

That was it! That was the heart of the contradiction! Every vertex needed angles totaling 360 degrees around it, in order to lie flat . . . while every flat, Euclidean triangle supplied just 180 degrees. Half as much. So if there’d been exactly twice as many triangles as vertices, everything would have added up perfectly – but with six vertices and only eight triangles, there wasn’t enough flatness to go round."

(“Ve”, “vis”, and “ver” are genderless pronouns that Egan uses, since many of the virtual citizens do not have a gender)

The math explanations give just enough intuition to impart some ideas, while not slowing the plot to a complete crawl (though I have to admit that the Wikipedia page for the Gauss-Bonnet theorem still looks like hieroglyphics to me).

We are next introduced to the “Truth Mines”, a virtual cave system where every known mathematical theorem is linked by tunnels that trace out the path from basic axioms to a proof (this is a monumentally cool idea).

Only some time afterwards does the plot begin, when Yatima and vis friend Inoshiro download their minds onto gleisner robots and go visit the city of Atlanta, where a group of fleshers live.

A revealing point about the novel is that though there is a plot line involving a lot of action after a cosmic disaster strikes Earth, an even more significant plot line is figuring out the physics that caused the disaster in the first place.

In addition, the novel lacks antagonist characters – the plot is very much man versus nature rather than any of the other archetypical conflict types. Or, to be more precise: man (and woman (and genderless virtual software person)) versus cosmic catastrophe caused by unknown physics that the characters have to figure out.

The status quo of theoretical physics for centuries at the beginning of the novel is Kozuch theory, a fictional successor to relativity and quantum mechanics in which elementary particles are the mouths of wormholes. It only gets wilder from there. Egan clearly knows a lot of physics; his website includes a comprehensive set of articles covering the basics of special & general relativity and quantum mechanics, in addition to an even larger set of more advanced articles. This shows in the discussion of physics theories in the book. If the next great advance in physics is eerily similar to Kozuch theory, I wouldn’t be too surprised.


Convincing craziness

Though Egan and his characters spend a lot of time explaining and ruminating about things, the novel never seems to fall into the trap of explaining too much.

For example, works involving teleportation, mind-cloning, or generally anything that allows minds to work like software (copied, put on hold, transmitted, etc.) often rehash philosophical debates about whether the clones are the same person as the original (and countless similar debates that are mostly about semantics).

Diaspora sidesteps these debates, wisely focusing instead on what the characters experience. When one character is paused, cloned six times, and the clones restarted in six different places, Egan simply describes the character relaxing in a virtual reality environment before seamlessly finding out his destination. This is what the event would feel like, to each of the six versions; no need for philosophical pontification about the nature of identity.

This is part of what makes Diaspora so convincing: the characters are completely at home in their strange world, and confront the dilemmas it poses like real people seeking pragmatic solutions, rather than philosophers expounding their theories. Philosophical themes are unavoidable when the setting looks like it does in Diaspora, but they come about naturally, rather than being forced. Other works –  Permutation City, another Greg Egan novel, comes to mind – are all about the philosophy, and succeed at this, but the approach in Diaspora makes for a more visceral story.

Many science fiction works seem to work backwards, as if the author had thought “I want X to happen; what do I have to introduce to make X possible?” This often leads to contorted logic, and makes the ideas serve the plot rather than have the plot illustrate the ideas.

Diaspora gives the sense that Egan worked forwards. Given technology that enables uploading and running minds in a virtual reality, what happens? If a sketch of the next great unifying theory of physics looks like this, what technology does it allow and where does it lead? Egan follows these premises to their logical consequences. This is another point that gives the novel a gripping plausibility, despite the far-future setting.


Scarcity may go, but math you will always have with you

Having evolved on some distant, finite world, they’d inherited the most valuable survival trait of all.

Restraint.

The characters of Diaspora live in virtual reality environments of almost unlimited abundance. They can clone themselves, merge with their clones, speed up or slow down time as they see fit (though the hardware their minds run on can only go so fast), and even modify their personalities. Their physical hardware is not invulnerable, especially after several polises are launched into space, but worries about physical security are mostly a thing of the distant past.

Not counting theoretical physics, most of the problems the characters deal with are therefore questions of how much they are willing to distance themselves from reality, how much they’re willing to modify themselves, and what their purpose is.

Potentially infinite amounts of experience and knowledge may be available, but in the end there are still an infinite number of worlds that “[they] would never see, never touch, never understand.” An element of restraint becomes crucial. I’m reminded of the recurring phrase “remit not paucity”, which occurs in (and is an anagram of) Permutation City. Thus, perhaps the central message is that to have purpose and identity in the face of limitless opportunities, it is not enough to choose what to do – you must also choose what not to do.

Diaspora does not present one view of how to do this. Some characters clone themselves and irrevocably change themselves in the service of a larger mission, others for more poorly thought-out reasons. A few, having exhausted over unfathomably long lifespans all that existence has to offer, or having reached the end of a lonely mission with no hope of return, opt to die.

And, true to the spirit of the book, others faced with the same choice instead choose to devote the rest of eternity to math:

Everything else from vis life in the home universe had been diluted into insignificance by the scale of their journey, but this timeless world still made perfect sense. In the end, there was only mathematics.

See also: the review of Permutation City, another similar Greg Egan novel with a greater focus on philosophical speculation

Review: The Baroque Cycle (Neal Stephenson)

Books:
Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson (2003).
The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson (2004).
The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson (2004).

2.8k words (≈ 10 minutes)

The Baroque Cycle is nothing if not ambitious: three volumes, subdivided into eight books, with chapters covering the 60 years from 1655 to 1715.

And what riveting subject has Neal Stephenson chosen for this grand work? Nothing less than the rise of science and finance, and with them, the modern world. If the proceedings of the Royal Society and machinations of VOC stockbrokers do not sound like the most gripping subjects for a novel:

1. Stephenson succeeds in building an engaging plot out of them (though it takes nearly three thousand pages).
2. There are also pirates, sword fights, and even a duel fought with cannons.

Plot

Quicksilver starts in 1713 with the ever-mysterious Enoch Root arriving to summon Daniel Waterhouse back to Europe to try to settle the dispute between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (or, perhaps more accurately, the dispute inflicted on Leibniz by Newton). Daniel leaves his home in Massachusetts, where he had founded a small, quaint institute called the Massachusetts Bay Institute of the Technologickal Arts to continue Leibniz’s research on mechanized computation and information storage.

The first part of Quicksilver jumps between the story of Daniel getting to know fellow student Isaac Newton and becoming involved with the fledgling Royal Society in 1660s to 1670s England, and the story of Daniel’s sea voyage in 1713, which, of course, proceeds without any complications, meandering, or pirates.

In the next part we are introduced to the two other main protagonists: Jack Shaftoe, a London-born urchin who comes to acquire a truckload of sobriquets on his adventures (including King of the Vagabonds, L’Emmerdeur, Quicksilver, Ali Zaybak, and Sword of Divine Fire), and Eliza, a former slave who uses her financial acumen to build a fortune and gain a slew of titles herself.

In The Confusion, the second volume, Daniel is mostly relegated to the sidelines, and the story focuses on Jack’s globe-spanning adventures and Eliza’s political and financial machinations in Europe. Whereas the plot of Quicksilver often trudges along slowly, The Confusion is structured better and moves a lot faster. And where Quicksilver focused on science, The Confusion deals heavily with money.

The System of the World returns the focus to Daniel, beginning with Daniel’s arrival in England in the January of 1714. If The Confusion is where Stephenson masters the art of plot, The System of the World is where he masters the art of character. While previous books had touching moments of character development (particularly the scene in The Confusion where Daniel confronts a demented Newton, and the climax of Eliza’s storyline in the same book), The System of the World has all three main characters undergo change, confront their inner demons, and reach the conclusion of their story arcs.


The System of the Cycle

Overall, The Baroque Cycle does not have the structure of a trilogy, but of a single, monstrously intricate novel. Quicksilver acts as an introduction to the characters that sets up the setting and some of the later conflicts, The Confusion is the adventurous mid-section of the novel where side plots are explored and conflicts develop, and The System of the World is a 900-page climax, complete with no less than five different epilogues.

Therefore I recommend that if you choose to read Quicksilver, you should aim to read all three volumes, since the first or even the first two volumes don’t form a satisfying whole on their own. After Quicksilver, I was ambivalent about reading the next volume because of the way that the book felt like a long prologue. However, the ideas in the book stuck with me, and after I had read the remaining parts, I realized that that was exactly what the book was.

(A word of warning: Quicksilver might be an introduction, but it is an essential one; given the information density of the books, skipping straight to The Confusion would be a bit like starting your pilot training by landing a 747 in heavy crosswinds. Also, Quicksilver focuses on the science more than the other books, and its descriptions of Newton’s and Hooke’s work and the spirit of the Royal Society are themselves worth reading the book for.)


Grand themes

The Baroque Cycle is a loose prequel to Cryptonomicon, Stephenson’s earlier novel about World War II codebreakers and 1990s internet entrepreneurs trying to start a data haven and an internet bank. Reading Cryptonomicon is definitely not required, though there are several minor connections.

What Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle share are themes. Stephenson says that the idea for The Baroque Cycle came when he read about Leibniz’s early work on computation and realized that the themes of science, computation and money in Cryptonomicon were also present in late-1600s and early-1700s Europe.

These themes are in turn related to the overarching theme of that time period: the Enlightenment, and the gradual rise of modern scientific, financial, and political institutions amidst the lingering medieval background that came with it.


Science & alchemy

Stephenson has clearly done his research on the period. Almost every natural philosopher in Europe at the time makes an appearance, including Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christiaan Huygens, Edmond Halley, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, John Locke, John Wilkins, John Flamsteed, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, and Thomas Newcomen. This group of people, all of whom were contemporaries, are responsible for inventing and/or discovering calculus, the inverse square law, the law of elasticity, Halley’s comet, the rings of Saturn, pendulum clocks, the mathematics of probability, the wave theory of light, the particle theory of light, the steam engine, the binomial series, the theory of extinction, the Newtonian telescope, cells, matrices and the method for solving them, dynamics, Boolean algebra, mechanical calculators, and, last but definitely not least, physics as a science.

There are parallels, no doubt intentionally enforced by Stephenson, between the science of Newton’s time and the digital revolution of the late 1900s. In both cases, a new tool (the scientific method / the computer) opened up a new world, which a horde of bright but often eccentric people promptly began exploring, leaving a blazing trail of results and discoveries for later generations to build on. The spirit of discovery and experimentation of this early group of explorers is captured well, particularly in Quicksilver, where we see, for instance, Hooke trying to figure out the law by which gravity diminishes with altitude by lowering a weight into a well.

This period is doubly interesting because even as the vanguard of science made progress by leaps and bounds, earlier superstitions and beliefs remained in favor. At one point, Daniel and Newton discuss how gravity works, with Daniel saying: “The inner workings of gravity, you seem to be saying, are beyond the grasp, or even the reach, of Natural Philosophy. To whom should we appeal, then? Metaphysicians? Theologians? Sorcerers?” Newton replies: “They are all the same to me, and I am one.”

Alchemy, one of Newton’s main interests in addition to physics, theology, and saving England’s economy from ruin, features heavily in the book. In the universe of The Baroque Cycle, alchemy partially works, though it requires knowledge and ingredients that are vanishingly rare. The character of Enoch Root, who also appears 400 years later in Cryptonomicon, is strongly hinted to be immortal (this is not much of a spoiler; the first two chapters of Quicksilver should already make this clear).

The slight speculative touch might seem to be a contradictory addition to a work concerned with the rise of scientific thinking. However, it ingeniously captures something about the spirit of the time. Perhaps the golden age of the supernatural was the dawn of science, the time between the rise of rational inquiry and the discovery of nature’s laws through this inquiry, when theology and alchemy seemed only one experiment away from confirmation. Today we know that we live in the universe of physics, but the people who first charted the border between the natural and supernatural did not have the benefit of this certainty, and often they could not have known which side of the border they were exploring.


Leibniz & Newton

The central scientific figures in the book are perhaps the most important: Hooke, Leibniz, and Newton. All three were polymaths who probed entirely new realms, yet one of those names stands out more than the others.

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” Newton famously wrote in a letter to Hooke, showing the depth of his humility. Or was he discretely insulting Hooke, who is said to have been hunchbacked and short, and thus a poor giant to stand upon? No one knows, because during Newton’s presidency of the Royal Society, all portraits of Hooke, as well as much of his equipment, were removed.

During his long career, Newton waged bitter disputes over priority against Hooke and Leibniz. In particular he used his role as the president of the Royal Society to get the entire English scientific establishment on his side in the war against Leibniz.

Stephenson incorporates this evidence into his portrayal of Newton as capricious, harsh, unforgiving, and unstable. At the same time, he is ruthlessly obsessive in pursuit of his studies, thinking nothing of personal sacrifices like half-blinding himself to study sunspots, sticking things into his eye to probe the nature of optics, tasting chemicals in his quest for alchemy, and starving himself and foregoing sleep to tend to an experiment.

Newton also has a reverence for the old and the sacred, which drives his obsession with theology (particularly the Old Testament), his pursuit of alchemy, and his disdain of even his own calculus in cases where Euclidean geometry is sufficient.

Leibniz, on the other hand, is portrayed as a far gentler, more genial figure. He is also markedly more forward-looking, particularly in his vision that computation and even thought can, in principle, be mechanized.

One of the main overarching plots in The Baroque Cycle is the dispute between Newton and Leibniz over not just the invention of calculus, but also over the broader differences in their philosophical views. Ultimately, this plot line is somewhat overshadowed by other conflicts, which is somewhat disappointing given the buildup. The System of the World does have one chapter where Newton and Leibniz fight it out over their philosophical and theological views, but it gets cut short by an interruption.


Paying for it all

In addition to his scientific, alchemical, and theological work, Newton was also the Master of the Mint for the latter half of his life. He presided over a recoinage of the English currency that helped stave off disaster, and persecuted counterfeiters with his typical ruthless zeal.

That The Baroque Cycle’s themes happen to coincide so well in this time period and its key figures is no accident. The rise of science happened at the same time, and probably for at least some of the same reasons, as the rise of modern financial institutions.

Stephenson gives plenty of examples of the backwardness of doing business in the 1600s. People were only beginning to trust banks, cheques, and other indirect means of payment. One chapter goes to some length in describing the difficulties of shipping timber across the borders of a few dozen fragmented states and provinces, each with its own complex and expensive system of tariffs. Even in the relatively modern England, the inconsistency of the coins means that paying with them is more like bartering than using money; this, and counterfeiters, are the main problems that face Newton in his role as Master of the Mint.

Just like with science, The Baroque Cycle portrays a world in transition from one system another. And also just like with its depiction science, parts of the older system refuse to budge: Jack’s dealings in The Confusion center heavily on gold, the eternal store of value.


Politics

The Baroque Cycle also deals heavily with the politics of the time. This is probably partly due to plot reasons: historical events are the core of the plot of many a historical novel, and historical events tend to be driven by politics. But another factor is that many of the political changes of the period are part of the grander narrative of the Enlightened world order that The Baroque Cycle charts. The dispute between Whigs and Tories, or between the Roundheads and Cavaliers before them, features heavily, as do the schemes of Louis XIV.

As with natural philosophers, countless political figures of the time make an appearance, including William III of England, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, James Stuart, Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, Caroline of Ansbach, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, and Peter the Great, who makes an “incognito” visit to London during which he tears apart half the city.

Even the Spanish Inquisition makes an unexpected appearance. But though Jack bemoans that “This Inquisition is as patient as Death. Nothing can stop it”, another character replies: “Nothing […]except for the Enlightenment”.


Baroque is the soul of wit

Upon being handed a draft of Isaac Newton’s Principia, a character in Quicksilver complains about its length and exclaims: “Some sharp editor needs to step in and take that wretch in hand!” I can’t help but think that Stephenson was reflecting on his own experiences when he wrote that line.

Neal Stephenson is known for complex, lengthy works, and The Baroque Cycle is the lengthiest and most complex. While each page may not be quite as significant as a page of Newton’s Philosophiœ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, it is not nearly as bloated as it may seem.
 
In any fictional work of this scale, there will be slow parts. Especially in Quicksilver, the plot occasionally meanders a bit too much, though The Confusion and The System of the World are a lot better in this regard.

On the smaller scale, Stephenson explains historical background in great detail, often hijacking two characters into having a somewhat stilted conversation that conveniently reveals relevant historical details. But this also means that readers do not have to do their history homework before reading to follow the plot. In addition to historical details, Stephenson delights in relating the particulars of different mechanisms, whether mines or phosphorus purification plants. How interesting these are depends heavily on the reader.

Like Stephenson’s other novels, The Baroque Cycle features plenty of his enviable dry wit. Stephenson is also not afraid to freeze the narration for a paragraph, or even half a page, to go off on some tangent that eventually circles back like Halley’s Comet after setting up the perfect metaphor or humorous remark. The Baroque Cycle does not have any of the hilarious multipage tangents found in Cryptonomicon, and thus has less laugh-out-loud moments, but on the other hand the tangents and humor in The Baroque Cycle tend to be more topical and better integrated with the atmosphere and setting. Some may find the idiosyncrasies of his style distracting, but I found Stephenson’s prose to be very enjoyable.


Winds of change and engines of change

The Baroque Cycle is certainly baroque. The number of characters, subplots, and events - let alone pages - nears the astronomical. But from this mess Stephenson manages to erect a surprisingly compelling image of a world in transition.

Consider medieval society. The standards of human welfare are atrocious and stagnant. The world remains at least as great a mystery as it was a thousand years prior. The Spanish Inquisition is knocking on doors. And then consider the modern world, with its unprecedented and ever-expanding level of well-being, depth of knowledge, and individual freedoms.

What’s more important - at least for a novelist - is that somewhere in between things changed, and the world was caught in the turmoil of that change. Somewhere in between were the people who first thought of science and liberalism, and the forces that supported them, and the people and forces that were against them.

The Baroque Cycle is a story about this change - specifically, about the moment when the roots of the modern world began to sprout. For a while, alchemy coexisted with science, swords with guns, pirates with stock-markets, and slaves with steam engines - and in each case it was still unknown which way the scales would tip. The new mixed with the old, and the old with the new. It is this moment that The Baroque Cycle captures so well, and from which it forms its soul.

Review: Permutation City (Greg Egan)

Book: Permutation City, by Greg Egan (1979).
2.2k words (≈ 8 minutes)

One way to classify science fiction works is by the scope of the speculative concepts in the work.

For example, the first tier could contain works in which the only speculative elements are things with non-Earth-shattering consequences. Maybe dinosaur DNA could somehow remain intact for over sixty million years. Maybe an evil organization is plotting to create a pandemic.

Then there would be works in which the speculative element is something paradigm-shifting. What if humans made contact with aliens? What would an artificial intelligence do? What if genetic engineering were cheap and widespread?

The level after that would be works that ask similar questions, but go deeper into their consequences, especially by exploring what they say about human nature. How do you tell whether reality is simulated? Can humans even understand sufficiently advanced aliens? What does the possibility of artificial intelligence say about consciousness?

And the last tier is works in which the whole point is speculating about the ultimate nature of the universe itself. Isaac Asimov’s short story "The Last Question" is a classic example. Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City is another.

(It is hard to limit spoilers in this review, since the plot of the book is very tightly wound to the questions it explores. You have been warned.)


Copies everywhere

The first paragraphs are as pedestrian as it gets: our protagonist, Paul Durham, wakes up in a room and looks around.

Oh, and Durham is inside a computer (literally, though not too literally). He is a “copy”; the “original” had a brain scan made of himself, and started running that in a computer. The simulated reality isn’t an exact copy: only brains are simulated in any detail, while the rest of the environment is an approximation, though a photorealistic one, to save on running costs. Even on economy mode, though, copies in the 2050 world of Permutation City run at best at less than one tenth the speed of the real world.

In the novel’s world, many rich clients have their brains scanned before their biological death, and the copies started after they die. However, they cannot retreat into their virtual worlds, since copies can be affected by real-world events, particularly because legally, they are software, not people.

The wealthiest copies run on private computers managed and paid for by a trust fund. Less wealthy ones run much slower, and their running speed depends on the price of computing power changes, which is traded on a global market (note that the book was published in the 1990s; cloud-based computing power as a service was probably not a very common idea).

What this means for the world of Permutation City is that in addition to private copies running relatively fast, there are also virtual slums of slow-running copies that can afford computing power only when it’s cheapest, and cannot generate new income because their slow running speed (tens or hundreds of times less than the real-world) makes them useless for most jobs. A subculture of poorer copies, calling themselves the "Solipsist Nation", tries to reject external reality completely.

Egan’s bleak vision of copy inequality is not one I have encountered before, and one that seems a bit too credible for comfort.

All the standard brain emulation -related questions are also given some space. To what extent is a copy, based on a brain scan done some time before a person’s death, really a continuation of the life of that person? What about the legal and moral status of a copy of a copy? In general, Egan keeps the sledgehammer on the wall when exploring moral questions, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions and instead focusing on characters’ reactions and attitudes to these questions.


Assemble from the dust?

Egan does, however, present a sustained speculative argument about the nature of copies and therefore consciousness. He presents a thought experiment, which, within the novel, is a literal experiment on thought.

Durham’s copy is conscious. That much can be granted; if consciousness is a byproduct of brain activity, there is no reason for it to not be present in a simulation of the brain.

(Egan is fairly conservative with the technical specifications of the copies; it is mentioned that the brain simulation is not accurate down to the quantum level, and that time for a copy proceeds in discrete time intervals of one millisecond of subjective time. Some might argue that continuous time and/or quantum-level simulation might be necessary for consciousness, but this is a topic that Egan wisely avoids.)

Next, the speed of copy-Durham’s subjective time can be slowed down and sped up by will, simply by changing the rate at which the simulation computes itself. This can be taken even further - if Durham’s copy were simulated only in bursts once every day, or at random intervals, or one frame today and the next frame in a thousand years, copy-Durham would feel no difference.

We can easily stretch the relative times of copies and the real world, but can we break any connection whatsoever between the two experiences of time? Permutation City assumes yes: the frames of the copy’s simulation can be sliced up and rearranged, and the thread of subjective experience will still continue from the perspective of the copy as if nothing were happening even when the simulation is hopping back and forth from one time to another when viewed from the external world.

This is the critical step, and, I think, the weak link. To be able to slice up the copy’s time, the simulation must be able to set itself to, say, the frame at time t=2, and then later to the frame at t=1.

But how can the simulation know the contents of the frame at t=2? It must first compute all preceding frames. After it has done so, of course, there is no obstacle to the simulation loading one frame into memory as the current state, then another and another, all out of order. But is this arbitrary procedure of loading frames into the simulation’s memory what causes the experience of consciousness for the person being simulated? Or would the initial computation of the states be the key?

At one point copy-Durham wonders what his subjective experience of consciousness really is: the current time slice loaded in the simulation, the computation of those time slices, or something else? The novel’s answer seems to the first option.

This raises some very interesting questions. If we reject this premise, the other alternative seems to be that it is the process of computation of frames that causes them to “occur” in the simulation, at least from the perspective of conscious beings in the simulation. This is an interesting topic, and raises many questions. Might the real world, then, be thought of as a computational procedure, in the sense that it is the “computation” of the next moment that makes it happen?

If that sounds like too much to accept, consider what it would mean for the view in the book to be correct: consciousness can thread its way through the disconnected slices of the simulation and therefore the subjective time within the simulation is entirely independent of real-world time. Egan then adds a dose of solipsism: the thread of consciousness of the simulation is real, for the experiencer, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with the “real” time of the outside universe. It has, in other words, somehow “assembled itself from dust”, as Egan likes to repeat, including the italics.

If copy-Durham can assemble itself from the dust despite the time slices of his simulation being scrambled, then why couldn’t other things assemble themselves from the dust?

Extrapolate this further. Imagine a universe of nothing more than an arbitrarily large space of random fluctuations; some of them would, by chance, form sequential, coherent timelines containing conscious entities, which would then be experienced by those entities. Our reality, in the solipsist universe of Permutation City, would just be one of these sequences.

And that’s only the first fourth of the book.


Immortality = cellular automata + solipsist cosmology

What applications could the idea of assembling from the dust ever have? Eternal life and near-omnipotence, apparently.

The other main character, Maria Deluca, is a software engineer who spends a lot of the time she should be working on playing around with the “Autoverse”, a massively complex cellular automata with its own system of chemistry that mirrors real-world chemistry, except without quantum effects (I get the feeling Egan is not fond of quantum physics). Egan spends a lot of pages on the Autoverse, but it is worth it; I found myself wishing for a real one.

After Maria gains some success with getting Autoverse bacteria to mutate, Durham enlists her to design a program to produce an entire planet, complete with primitive bacteria, in the Autoverse. There is not nearly enough computing power, even in Egan’s world of 2050, to run an entire Autoverse planet, but that’s not the point.

Durham’s idea is to simulate the first few minutes of a self-replicating cellular automata computer on a computer, and then stop. The continuation of the self-replicating computer represents a coherent timeline and by the logic of the novel’s solipsist universe, it will simply assemble itself from the dust and continue to exist from the perspective of the wealthy clients who paid to have their copies put on the thing. Thus Durham, and his clientele of billionaires, escape our reality into an alternative universe consisting of an ever-expanding computer that simulates their copies in addition to the Autoverse planet.


Solipsism!

If this weren’t speculative enough, Egan turns the solipsism up to eleven in the second part of the book.

Without revealing too much, the basic idea is that the Autoverse planet has developed intelligent life, which has its own theories for the origin of their universe that do not include being a simulation inside a simulation that was launched by a simulation made by a crackpot theorist and a dozen billionaires hoping for eternal life.

Reality in the universe (or should I say, space of random states) of Permutation City is a subjective thing, and so the logically coherent theories of the simulated lifeforms eventually become more real than the version of reality Durham and the other copies believe in, with destabilizing effects on their apparently-not-quite-eternal universe.

Brain emulation is already a topic with plenty of philosophical questions to explore. Egan, though, is not content with remaining in that territory, and instead takes the reader on a philosophical roller coaster through the consequences of ever wilder and wilder solipsism.


I was told you have to mention literary features when discussing literature …

… but Permutation City was written more for its concepts than its literary merit.

Egan does portray a reasonably diverse cast of characters. We have an eccentric and determined theorist, a software engineer with a terminally ill mother and time-consuming hobbies she cannot bring herself to quit, a remorseful billionaire struggling with past crimes, and a survival-oriented virtual slum -dweller. Many of them struggle in a genuine way with questions of identity and morality in the copy-filled world of Permutation City, and some scenes were touching, but none of the characters were particularly memorable.

Many of Egan’s chapters (not all are named) have names that are anagrams of "Permutation City", an allusion to the slicing of copy-Durham’s simulation. “Remit not paucity” is the most common chapter name. As far as I can tell, it seems to be a warning against trying to eliminate all scarcity from life, as Durham’s flawed universe does. There is also a disconcerting heavily anagrammatic poem at the front of the book, indirectly attributed to the main character Paul Durham. If it has meaning besides building atmosphere, I can’t figure it out.


Meaningful answers?

Permutation City is far from the only work of science fiction to explore esoteric philosophical themes. Peter Watts’ Blindsight (main point: how useful is consciousness; what if a space-faring civilization did not have it?) and Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (main point: uhhh …) also deal with the philosophical questions surrounding consciousness.

However, Permutation City is exceptional in the extent and scope of its speculation. It is also structured well in this regard; Egan gradually ramps up the level of speculation throughout the work, allowing the reader to update their knowledge of how the novel’s world works after the introduction of each speculative leap, and helping to maintain immersion by showing the internal consistency. It also, probably not coincidentally, lays bare Egan’s chain of reasoning, exposing it to readers for easy analysis. The book definitely succeeds in provoking questions.

As to whether the book’s big ideas are anywhere close to being correct, I think Isaac Asimov’s fictional computer in The Last Question put it best:

"THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER"