Gavin's Reviews > Axiomatic

(Probably 5 stars on re-read)

Phenomenal. (Usually not nice phenomena, but always strong phenomena.) Every one of these produced an effect in me, from deep grimace to snort to total pathos. It took me a month to read 18 stories, because it is stressful to encounter characters this vivid in scenarios this brutal.* Every story has an actual logic - often a fantastical one, like the retrocausal literally-hypothetical boddhisatva posthumans of 'Eugene'. He has few peers in thinking this hard and making you feel the thought. What Black Mirror could have been: thought experiments like self-aware spears.

Ranking:

The Hundred-Light-Year Diary
The Moral Virologist. (Nauseating, lyrical evil.)
Into Darkness
Axiomatic
Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies
Learning to be me
Eugene
The Safe-Deposit Box
The caress
The Walk
Seeing
The Vat
A Kidnapping
The Cutie
Closer
The Infinite Assassin
Appropriate Love
Blood Sisters


The worst of these is still well above average for sci-fi - clever, satisfying plot, sympathetic characters, moment of awesome. (I tested this here; Egan's entry, weak for him, was still the best in the collection. It would be last, here.)

doing whatever it was designed to do. Enabling multiple orgasms of the left kneecap. Making the colour blue taste like the long-lost memory of mother’s milk. Or, hardwiring a premise: I will succeed. I am happy in my job. There is life after death. Nobody died in Belsen. Four legs good, two legs bad . . .

The next rack contained a selection of religions, everything from Amish to Zen. (Gaining the Amish disapproval of technology this way apparently posed no problem; virtually every religious implant enabled the user to embrace far stranger contradictions.) There was even an implant called Secular Humanist (‘You WILL hold these truths to be self-evident!’). No Vacillating Agnostic, though; apparently there was no market for doubt.

I could write something about each of these; sometimes hundreds of words. Next time.

* It is probably best to treat this book as 2 or 3 small collections, for savouring and emotional rest.

---


How does it do as serious science fiction?

Social development: A great deal. Personal identity is twisted and torn a dozen times, and he sketches the social structures which would have to arise when there are two of you, none of you, half of you, chimeras. The Ndoli devices illustrate that social consensus replaces philosophy for most people. When perfect cloning and brain transplants are available - when medicine's grasp over injury is total - he still brings it back to hard economics, the small print. Better on this than Chiang, his great peer.

Software development: Not a huge amount but enough. He knows that brain transplants couldn't work without software, and the Ndoli devices are an excellent picture of machine learning, even 25 years later, after the field became more than a toy.

Actual Science: Half of these stem from an extrapolation of current science (transplants, brain editing, cloning, brain emulation, BioArt), rather than say the apriori thought experiments of Chiang. And not just science: combinatorics! Actual probability! But even his flights of fancy (like the programmable wormhole with bizarre physics of 'Into Darkness') are internally consistent, and display serious attempt to take physics or biology seriously.