The Zone and the Axiom

Real-world notes on two writers, discussed by name and not quoted. Their books are in copyright, so this record's rule for fiction allows them here and nowhere in the Codex. The names here are from our century, and the Archive's own pages name none of them.

The question was which science fiction is harder than this record but less hard than real physics, and the honest answer was that hardness is not one scale. On a list of what each book refuses, this record comes out harder than most. It has no antimatter power, no space elevators, no universal translator, no quantum oracle and no message faster than a hull. On a list of what each book adds, it comes out softer than many, because it has a layered cosmology above its physics. Measured by structure, two writers stand nearest: Vernor Vinge and Greg Egan.

Vinge: physics that depends on where you are. In A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and A Deepness in the Sky (1999), Vinge divides the galaxy into Zones of Thought. Toward the core, in the Unthinking Depths, minds can barely function. Further out, in the Slow Zone, where our own region lies, there is no travel faster than light and computation has hard limits. Beyond that, in the region he calls the Beyond, faster-than-light ships and interstellar messaging work. Outermost lies the Transcend, home to intelligences far above any person's. The boundaries between zones are not fixed, and a shift can strand a ship or a civilisation.

Three things are shared. The first is physics as regional fact. Vinge's real-world physics is the physics of one zone. This record's real-world physics holds within one Concordant, one membrane and one family of universes, and The Scope of Physical Law files every law at that width. The Counterpane page's remark that chance itself is provincial is the most Vingean sentence the record holds. The second is the edge as the place where the story happens: his zone boundaries, and the record's boundary zones where instruments disagree without any fault. The third is minds made of many. Vinge's Tines are single persons spread across packs of several bodies. The record's plural minds are the inverse, many persons sharing one body. Both take seriously that a person and a body need not match one to one.

The differences go deeper than the likenesses. Vinge's zones govern thought itself: how intelligent a mind can be depends on where it is. The record's regions govern physics and its Etheric extension, but every mind a reader can meet is bounded wherever it stands, and no character is all-knowing. Vinge allows messages faster than light in the Beyond, which this record refuses everywhere, carrying time physically by courier instead. He has intelligences far beyond any person, including a malignant one. This record has no mind of that kind and no maker of evil kinds, and it binds every made mind under the AI Safety Kernel. His register is galactic war; this record's present is peaceable by design.

What this record can learn from Vinge is restraint. He never says why the zones exist, and the books are stronger for the silence. The record does the same thing in its own voice whenever it files a question of intent as insufficient basis for any finding.

Egan: change one axiom and derive everything. Egan treats a licensed departure as a theorem to be worked. In the Orthogonal trilogy (2011–2013), he gives his universe a geometry in which space and time are of the same kind, Euclidean rather than the Minkowskian geometry of ours. He then derives the consequences, from optics and heat to how stars burn and how a people does physics, and publishes the working on his website. In Schild's Ladder (2002), an experiment creates a region of new vacuum with different laws, expanding into ours at half the speed of light. Diaspora (1997) builds on an invented unified theory with extra dimensions. Incandescence (2008) follows a people who rediscover general relativity from inside their own world, without a sky to look at.

The likenesses are again real. Schild's Ladder and Counterpane are both neighbouring physics with a measurable edge. Egan's is dangerous and spreading. The record's is reachable by fold and stays where it is, which keeps the record's boundaries from becoming one universal threat. Incandescence is the long form of a rule this record keeps on Mathematics and Its Notations: the theorem is discovered by everyone, and the road to it belongs to a people. And Egan, like this record, makes time and causality matter to the plot. The last Orthogonal volume turns on messages from the future and on what consistency demands of a history that contains them.

Here the record parts from him at a principle. Egan derives his departure, and the equations are its canon. This record specifies its departure, bounds it and gives it a scope, but does not derive it. Egan explores loops in time and asks what consistency requires. This record refuses them outright, so its route is prevention, not consistency. For Egan, science solves the mystery and the discovery is the plot. In this record the endings are recognitions, and some shadows are kept shut. And Egan's universes have nothing above their physics, while this record has a layer it says plainly no instrument can reach.

What this record can learn from Egan is that a departure can be computed, not only stated. Two Codex papers filed the same day take small steps in his direction. Ansel Thale's Coherence Debt as Quantum Interest works out what real physics demands at a fold's aperture. Hester Quaile's On the Simultaneity of Folds works out what it demands of a fold's timing. Both leave the fold itself untouched. That is the Egan method applied at the edges of a departure the record keeps specified rather than derived.

Three methods. Vinge states a structure and leaves it unexplained, which buys narrative freedom while keeping the physics inside each zone mostly ordinary. Egan changes an axiom and derives the consequences, which buys rigour and makes the science the story. This record specifies, bounds and scopes its departure, and then adds what neither of them attempts: a layer above the physics that it declares beyond any instrument, together with an argument inside the record about that layer. The Institute accepts the instruments and declines the cosmology. The Fellowship of Light accepts the record whole and refuses to read a finding about mechanism as a finding about meaning. Both argue over the same evidence under a rule that the argument may never leave the reader less sure of what is true.

Vinge's Transcend is not a layer of that kind: its intelligences act, as part of the world's mechanics. Egan's universes have no such layer. What this record attempts that neither does is a cosmology with an honestly marked edge to what can be known, and two institutions arguing across that edge without either being allowed to win by default.

In a line: this record has Vinge's structure, with Egan's discipline brought steadily to its edges, and an account of meaning that neither attempts.

The books, for anyone who wants them: V. Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and A Deepness in the Sky (1999); G. Egan, Diaspora (1997), Schild's Ladder (2002), Incandescence (2008), and the Orthogonal trilogy, The Clockwork Rocket (2011), The Eternal Flame (2012) and The Arrows of Time (2013). Related entries in this Journal: Every Law Known, One Question Open and What Would Count Against It.