Fiction 25 Jul 2004 09:07 pm
Schild’s Ladder
Schild’s Ladder
Greg Egan
Egan is one of the most imaginative SF authors out there nowadays. This book comes from the same branch as “Permutation City” and “Diaspora” (and, in fact, I believe those two are required reading before this one). In the future he depicts, humans are no longer flesh-and-bone creatures, but software, running on quantum processors that may or may not live inside actual bodies. The main implication of this is that humans become, in essence, immortal: even if a body and/or a processor gets destroyed, most people keep regular backups of their mind, and will simply lose a few hours worth of memory upon being restored. Death ceases being a problem, as does distance: to go to distant places, you simply transmit your mind by radio, and your body is recreated on arrival, to your specs. Sure, it may take centuries to get to far away places, but you will have time. And you also get several benefits, such as a self-healing body, helper software, other means of communication etc.
In this particular book, set some 20,000 years in the future, a physicist trying to understand better the quantum foundations of the universe accidentally creates a second universe, which begins to aggressively “digest” our own, becoming a sphere that grows at half the speed of light in each direction and forcing several worlds to be evacuated. Six hundred years later, the scientists are still trying to understand what happened, and are split in two factions: one wants to destroy the “novo-vacuum” as soon as possible and at all costs, and the other wants to study it, and will concede at most that its growth is contained, if possible. As new discoveries are made, the gap between the factions widens and starts threatening twenty millennia of peace among humans.
As in other books by Egan, this one is at least partially set in real scientific theories (namely, loop quantum gravity), and the “humans are software” part of the story is just a background against which the real events happen. However, this is probably the most exciting part of the story, as it is the means to reach the “great prize” of science: immortality. Of course, living as software, with the means to control how (or even if) you perceive and interact with the environment around you, raises big questions about the actual meaning of identity: if “you” can be backed-up, copied around, cloned and modified at will, then what exactly makes you “you”?
