Finishing a novel while doing an MD and a PhD at Harvard Medical School has been a lot like mowing the lawn while buying stocks and getting a root canal all at the same time. In other words, I’m not contacting the publisher anytime soon. So I’ve decided for now to take a path that many other would-be novelists have taken when they realized that the novel might be at least a decade away: Recrafted their ideas in the form of short stories.
I’ve received some useful comments on the sci-fi novel I’ve been piecing together for a while. I just don’t think I can pull together a fully polished work while juggling all my med-school responsibilities (as well as my book of historical articles, which is more advanced), so I’m assembling some short stories derived from writing I’ve already undertaken, based on feedback on the ideas in the novel that folks have found most interesting. I guess brainstorming has become a more collective effort since the advent of the World Wide Web age, and there are three potential plotlines I’d been assembling for my novel which people have shown particular interest in:
(1) The notion of planned universes, constructed and generated in “vacuum engineering” classes in some 23rd century university, seems to have tickled enough cerebra among you readers out there that I’m pursuing this further for a short story. I’ve been interested for a while in Max Tegmark’s ideas of multiple spacetimes, so long as they’re consistent with some self-contained mathematical system, as not only being possible but physically existing in some empirically verifiable manner. (Roughly speaking, when something exists at any point in time, it always exists, since in principle it fits within a mathematical system that could be easily retrieved.) I’ve also combined Tegmark’s notions with those of Lee Smolin, who’s posited a “background-independent” basis for nature in which everything with which we interact consists of independent elements which can be defined relative to each other. (That is, both matter and the vacuum of space in which matter is suspended are “things,” i.e. mathematically specifiable quantities.) Thus in Smolin’s conception, nature consists fundamentally of interacting elements of different flavors of information. Just as Einsteinian General Relativity expressed Newtonian action-at-a-distance forces (like the gravitational force) in terms of spacetime geometry, Smolin’s conception would express such geometry, and the complicated gauge relationships of subatomic particles, in terms of quantities of information that behave according to a series of evolving rules. Something like the notion that we’re the “executable programs” of a massive computer, except that Smolin goes far beyond this—there’s no separate “code” and “program,” just the information that interacts as the matter we see before us every day. On top of these more cerebral musings, the notion of generating new spacetimes—with all kinds of variations in the physical properties or even in the very procession of time, as well as the manner in which conscious beings experience such realms—provides a virtual cornucopia for a science fiction writer.
(2) People liked the idea of futuristic, advanced civilizations constructing their own “heavens” and “hells” (or “purgatories”) as a way to judge individuals on the earth in the 20th and 21st centuries. If you posit that our consciousness can be obtained independent from the body like the traditional notion of a soul, then “backed up” in a little spacetime bubble and retrieved later by a society with enough technology—well, you’re either starting a new cult or you’re a sci-fi writer. I’ve never been one to stand up in front of people and claim divine inspiration (somehow I never felt prompted to list “cult leader” among my career ambitions), so I guess I fall into the latter category. Having the future civilization then judge these retrieved consciousnesses (don’t usually see that word in the plural form) seems to be just too good a short story idea to pass up, and you folks out there seem to agree.
(3) The
third hotshot idea so far, from all your comments, seems to be the notion of a
constantly evolving intelligence, organized in part by sentient, intelligent
beings (like humans and any ETs out there who might
be just as confused as we are), with people using themselves as “templates” on
whom to engraft further neural advances through the old-fashioned staple of
cybernetic additions, and “external” cerebra that they can temporarily plug
into to solve advanced problems and work on more advanced mathematics. I’ll let you know in case I get calls from
That’s all for now. I always appreciate feedback and I like audience participation when I craft my stories, so Email me with any questions or comments.
-- Wes Ulm
bravenet.com