Reviews and Comments

An average issue with interesting stories by Gregory Feeley, Cao Baiyu and Natasha King.

• "Symbiosis" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires: in the future, only selected individuals can become pregnant. This particular mother is initially aghast at being selected. But as the pregnancy progresses, she becomes attached to the foetus; perhaps too attached.

• "The Fortunate Isles" by Gregory Feeley: in the far future, an unknown narrator tells the story of a time when humanity has ventured to Neptune and is now preparing to enter its depths in search of places to live.

• "Anais Gets a Turn" by R.T. Ester: a story of a woman who, due to apparent bad luck, loses a contract as a graphics designer and later her job. It then turns out that it may not be bad luck, but the workings of a latent 'world intelligence' that had involved her in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe, as explained to her by a worker for a corporation she meets. And now she has a chance to affect what the intelligence may do by being involved in the next interation of that game.

• "Zhuangzi's Dream" by Cao Baiyu, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu: a man, who would be a famous philosopher in the future, goes to sleep, and we see the fantastic dreams he has. But the last part is the most fantastic, as a butterfly from the future visits and possibly changes the past; or does it?

• "Sharp Undoing" by Natasha King: in a future where information and memories can be transferred by 'slots', killing the slotted person, one such person is pursued and captured by a local gang leader eager for the information being held. Little does the gang leader know that this particular person has a different kind of slot personality that would change who is in charge of the outcome of the slotting procedure.

• "Pearl" by Felix Rose Kawitzky: in an observatory looking for dark matter, one lower class person in charge of maintenance lets loose slugs that appear to be able to concentrate dark matter, leading to consequences that would blur and sharpen what can be seen of dark matter.

A fascinating and entertaining book about living on a world in a universe where people can come in different scales. Here, there are eight of them, each one half the size of the previous scale. This comes about because there are eight different kinds of leptons (like electrons) with different masses, causing the atoms they make to have different sizes. Egan explores the possibilities this difference in sizes causes to mass, biology, physics, chemistry, etc. to come up with a world where people of different sizes have learned to live next to each other.

But all may not be well. At the start of the book, a private investigator is hired to find a missing sister. His investigations would lead his to discover a secret being hidden by some people from a smaller scale. As he passes on his investigations to fellow investigators from the smaller scale, what they find would lead to the discovery of a secret that will alter the delicate negotiated balance the people of various scales have agreed to on how to share their environment. And now, the race is on to find a solution to avert a possible crisis that may involve weapons of unimaginable power being used on the peoples of other scales.

Egan expects the reader to be able to pick up the physics of the world from the situations and characters presented in the book, without much exposition being dropped in by him. If you find the consequences of living at different size scales puzzling, then this might not be a book for you. Otherwise, the reader will find living in a world where people are of different scales to be a fascinating experience.

Egan also gives a thoughtful and rational look at how people of different scales interact with each other and what can happen if people of one scale discover they have the ability to radically change the balance of the relationship between themselves and people of other scales: a rough equivalent would be people of different cultures on our world interacting with each other to share a common environment. The debates and arguments that ensue show the different possible reactions, and it is left to the reader to discover which option will be the one that will determine the future of all the people at various scales.