Dark Integers and Other Stories by Greg Egan
Subterranean, $25, 232pp, hc, 9781596061552. Science fiction collection. Publication date: March 2008.
I like hard science fiction, good fiction that is based on known science and rigorously extrapolated to what might be. But it’s not just the idea—the story has to be good, too. Most hard sf uses the common hard sf sciences: physics, astronomy, biology, mechincal engineering, and so on. But I also seek out hard sf involving the less common sciences (that’s why one of the first stories I published in Artemis Magazine involved library science).
And that’s why I was captivated with this book from Greg Egan’s introduction. What science can be more basic—and yet more rare in sf—than mathematics? Yet Egan is able to extrapolate it and wrap it in good fiction.
Warning: here there be spoilers. Skip down to “end of spoiler space” if you’d prefer to not know much about the stories.
The book has two pairs of linked stories and one stand-alone. The two mathematics stories, “Luminous” and “Dark Integers,” deal with the fact that there may be quite a bit about these “simple” sciences we don’t yet know. Why, for example, should two plus two always equal four? Egan asks a very similar question, and then postulates why it might not always be so, and what that would mean for the world as we know it. In “Luminous,” a seemingly ludicrious postulation, that two plus two doesn’t always equal four, sets in motion the greatest discovery of all time, and the race to keep it from becoming the greatest weapon. In “Dark Integers,” it’s ten years later, and a dynamic stalemate has evolved. Unfortunately, when such a great secret is shared by so few, there’s always the danger of it being learned by more, or forgotten by all. What to do to keep it secret, and yet protect humanity from forgetting two and four?
The common link in “Riding the Crocodile” and “Glory” is the Amalgam, the galaxy-spanning civilization that is our thousands- or millions-of-years successor. In such a large society, there is ample room for untold numbers of stories having nothing to do with each other, and these are just two of them. “Crocodile” tells of the exploration of the Amalgam’s (perhaps) last great frontier: the bulge in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and wonders why, after all the thousands or millions of years people have been circling it, why has there never been any communication from the beings living in the bulge. A couple, intent on finding a meaningful time to end their lives, attempt to find out. “Glory” also deals with mathematics, wonderful proofs, and lost civilizations, as a non-member species is contacted. But is learning all there is to learn necessarily a good thing?
Perhaps the weakest story in the book is the last (and the only stand-alone), “Oceanic.” Twenty thousand years after people have come to Covenant, there is debate over what form of religion is true, and another debate over whether there is any supernatural agent at work or not. Can it be that there is no god, and the angels were just as fallible as people? A crisis of faith leads to serenity, and then to discovery.
End of spoiler space
Egan doesn’t write thrillers. The action here (including an interdimensional war, an international war, and other things) isn’t told at a frenetic pace. The stories proceed calmly, leisurely, giving the reader time to absorb the really deep, often complex ideas Egan is throwing out. These are thinking stories with real people in seemingly unreal situations. They’re nothing like you and me, but we can relate to them. This is what science fiction once was, but updated with modern sensibilities and new concepts. Recommended.