4 out of 5 ain't bad: the multiverse and all that

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, anthologies, collections, short stories

In the past couple of days I read four more stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke, and skipped one.

Going first to the fourth one I read, "Solidity" by Greg Egan, it seems to explore consequences of the Multiverse, should the parallel universes begin to overlap or even trade characters.

Imagine waking up in your room, but it isn't really your room. The poster on the wall is different, the sheet and coverlet have changed, and familiar furniture has a different style. The clothes in the closet fit you, but you remember none of them, and you wonder where your familiar togs are. The phone on the bedside table looks the same but your password doesn't work. Somehow, the key in your pocket still opens the door to your place.

It is a story of the almost-familiar but frequently changing accoutrements of—and persons in—the protagonist's life. People find that as long as they keep someone in sight, that person doesn't get "changed out" for a similar one. It is a deeply unsettling story, and ultimately a touching one, of people learning how to cope with such changes. It ends in hope with no resolution.

I have written elsewhere about how ridiculous I find the notion by some physicists that new entire universes are created by every quantum choice; ultimately, it boils down to an entire new universe, billions of light-years across, created in full (with that solitary quantum difference) every time literally anything happens to any of the trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions of electrons, protons, etc., etc. in the universe, a gajillion times per second. And they say that believers in God are crazy somehow…

Let's hope, if the notion is in any way true, that all those extra universes flitting about don't affect one another.

The first two stories ultimately explore different versions of machine recording of human personalities. In "Things to Do in Deimos When You're Dead" by Alistair Reynolds, a man finds himself in an unfamiliar place, and eventually finds that "he" is a recording that was made when he died, a recording that was supposed to be disassembled for salable skills in the AI world, but somehow escaped that fate intact and is running "in the background" on a supercomputer on Mars's moon Deimos. He is found by a couple of other stray personalities, and learns of something useful he can do. It is ultimately a sad story.

I tried to get different image generators to produce something useful from prompts such as "Accidental ensiliconment". This one made by Dall-E3 is quite off the point of the story, but is rather cute.

The second story is "A Dream of Electric Mothers" by Wole Talabi. A system of recorded personalities of the wise female ancestors can be consulted by a tribe's ruling assembly. We are left wondering if such "tribal memory" efforts have more use than more ordinary ways of consulting history, that is, books.

A different kind of recording with a more focused aim is found in "By Those Hands" by Cong Yun 'Mu Ming' Gu. Much of the story is a long tale of skills, having been painfully acquired, going out of use. Think of skilled craftsmen that once made buggy whips, now that there are no buggies outside of Amish country. But the story takes a positive turn when a scientist seeks to record the diligence of such skills and apply them in other areas, such as microsurgery.

This led me to think of how much of our brain power is in our embodiment. Some 75%-80% of the total number of neurons in our brain are found in the smaller "little brain" tucked down and behind, the cerebellum. Although I have a talent for playing guitar and similar instruments (but not violin!), I spent years developing the talent into a cluster of musical skills. The human brain is larger than that of other animals our size. More resources can be devoted to specific skills, compared to our animal cousins.

For example, a chimpanzee will throw dung at you if you anger it (and are outside a cage so you can't be physically attacked). Occasional news accounts may mention the "accuracy" of the animal's throwing. However, the distance is only 10-20 feet. Put the chimp on a pitcher's mound, and the target of its ire 66 feet away at home plate, and there's no way the critter can come close to the strike zone…or you. Almost any pitcher or fielder aged ten or more can bean you with a baseball at that distance. Bigger brain equals more neurons devoted to accurate throwing.

A fifth story was started, and then skipped. Its genre is "mean streets" and I declined.

There are just eight stories remaining. More later!