
Greg Egan’s fiction is best known for its hard sf elements: the math, the physics, the computer science, and so forth. In that sense, the recently concluded Orthogonal trilogy (consisting of The Clockwork Rocket, The Eternal Flame, and The Arrows of Time) is a culmination of a progression towards including harder and more rigorous science in his science fiction. An element of Egan’s fiction that has not garnered as much overt attention is his theme of examining free will and its limits. In that sense, the Orthogonal trilogy forms a continuation of a line of thought that has been running through his fiction for over twenty years although it is less of a culmination than a complication.
Consider Egan’s story “Axiomatic,” which lent its title to his first short fiction collection. Published in Interzone in his breakout year, 1990 (which also saw the publication of the more or less instant classic “Learning to Be Me”), the conceit in “Axiomatic” is a neural implant that can temporarily rewire your brain to accept the tenets of any belief system. It starts with a first-person narrator, who gives his name as Mark Carver, heading into an Implant Shop to buy a brain implant. He browses the racks of options with categories such as meditation and healing and languages and technical skills, and titles such as You are Great! and Love Yourself a Billion. These implants can instantly give you a set of skills such as a new language, or they can provide you with an unshakeable belief system, everything from Amish to Zen. “There was even an implant called Secular Humanist (‘You will hold these truths to be self-evident!’)” (Axiomatic 111). They are reversible: remove the implant, remove the belief system. Axioms are mathematical statements that are assumed to be true within a particular mathematical system and cannot be questioned by that system. In this story, you can make yourself axiomatically gay or straight, grant yourself a specific sexual fetish, or give yourself synaesthesia. The implant technology has the potential to veer into creepy mind-control territory, but Carver repeatedly emphasizes that simply changing your beliefs does not affect your free will. You choose the implant, and you choose what to do with the new beliefs that you adopt. In much the same way that someone who likes chocolate need not eat chocolate with every meal, simply neurochemically adopting a belief system like Catholicism doesn’t force you to become a martyr or inquisitor.
Move forward to 1995’s short story, “Mister Volition,” which features a criminal with philosophical tendencies. He is obsessed with free will and the fact that all his choices are his own. “I need not choose violence, but my choices are meaningless if they’re encumbered by social mores and sentimentality, hypocrisy, and self-delusion” (Luminous 107). When he steals an eye-patch implant designed for biofeedback that displays his own brain back to him in real time, he becomes obsessed with visualizing the “I” that makes the decisions—that part of his brain that “is” his free will in some sense. He labels this hypothetical golem inside the brain “Mister Volition.” He picks a victim and aims to shoot him because he can and because he wants to see the choice being made. But in truth (backed up by medicine’s current understanding of neural function), there is no single “I” in the brain—it is a post hoc fiction that humans use to rationalize a choice made all over the brain before we are conscious of making it. This realization sends the narrator into a vertiginous paroxysm of understanding the base materiality of existence—there is no “soul” animating the machine; the machine is all we are. In the story notes for “Mister Volition” in Luminous, Egan points interested readers to the ideas of Marvin Minsky (The Society of Mind) and Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained) for explanations of the models of mind that he dramatizes here.
Then there are the complications stemming from the bizarre-seeming quantum mechanical nature of the universe itself. If one accepts the (still controversial) many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, then every “choice” in the universe causes new worlds representing all possible outcomes to branch off from the original timeline. This event can be something microscopic, such as a photon of light going through one of two slits, or something macroscopic, such as the decision to intervene in a violent beating as in Egan’s 2002 story, “Singleton.” Fundamentally, then, any choice you make could be considered irrelevant since at least some universe has you making every possible version of that choice. If we accept MWI as true, then this is the truth of our everyday reality. Obviously no one acts as if this is true since there are any number of consequences that come from “bad” choices. But Ben, the narrator of “Singleton,” is obsessed (a continuing trend in Egan’s protagonists) with the idea that MWI renders choice meaningless—that for every “you” that gets something right, a huge number of “you” get it wrong and have to live with that. His wife agrees that MWI has perfectly solid physics behind it and agrees that it implies that there are an infinite number of “her” in other branches, but she takes the more pragmatic philosophy that it has nothing to do with her and has no impact on her choices. Still, there is a reason humans place more moral weight on the decision of a free person to act than on a roll of a die. If all roads are taken, is one wise to have chosen a good road or merely lucky to be the “one” version that does so?
Quantum computers take advantage of quantum mechanical effects to compute complex calculations extremely quickly. While a normal computer runs on transistors that can only be in one state at a time (on or off, 0 or 1), a quantum computer can define a problem such that a number of states can exist simultaneously. While the field is still very new, progress toward functional quantum computers is proceeding rapidly. In “Singleton,” Ben makes use of advanced quantum computing technology to create a “quantum singleton processor” or Qusp, a computer which uses quantum superposition but always arrives at a single, classically deterministic answer. Through shielding, it is prevented from spawning multiple worlds with every possible variation of the result. Ben runs this through a number of tests, and eventually he and his wife decide to use this system as the basis for raising an AI child. The child’s brain is programmed into a Qusp and then loaded into a robotic body. The child, Helen, is allowed to grow from literal infancy to adulthood with her body upgraded along the way. At this point, in 2031, AI children are rare but becoming more common. Helen is unique in that unlike the other AIs and unlike normal humans, her choices always end in only one result on a quantum level. If she ever wanted to give up that difference, removing the special shielding on her Qusp would cause her to operate in a branching reality like everyone else. In the end, after a difficult adolescence, Helen says:
[W]hat I have is something almost every person who’s ever lived thought they possessed. Human psychology, human culture, human morality, all evolved with the illusion that we lived in a single history. But we don’t—so in the long run, something has to give. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather we tinker with our physical nature than abandon our whole identities. (Crystal Nights and Other Stories 184–85)
Not everyone is as sanguine about the continuity of consciousness when making the transition to substances other than our organic brains nor so worried about the moral implications of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. Egan’s stories show a continuity of concern about these subjects that refuses superficial answers and instead examines them in depth.
Another story from early in Egan’s career, “The Hundred Light-Year Diary” (Interzone, 1992), hints at the tack taken almost twenty years later in the Orthogonal trilogy. In this rather depressing short, a time-reversed star has been found—the light we receive from it comes from the future, not the past as with other stars. By setting up a shutter system between the Earth and the star, messages can be conveyed from the future to the past (the present of the story). Due to limited bandwidth, every citizen is allocated a certain number of bytes per day of messaging that they can send back in time to themselves. The narrator is a political operative who marries his wife based on both their messages about each other but then embarks on an affair that he had not written to himself about. His lover picks him up by telling him that she knows that he’ll come with her and of course he believes her, because everyone has knowledge about the critical days of their lives. But it turns out that she’s been ignoring the messaging system and living her life spontaneously, something he finds exotically attractive. In the end, his marriage dissolves into bitterness, none of which is reflected in his cheerful, positive messages to his past self. He finds that he can’t change what he’s writing—he can’t deviate from the script of the messages he’s already received. But the messages increasingly bear no resemblance to the life he’s actually living.
This is very similar to the situation faced by the characters in the concluding volume of the Orthogonal trilogy, The Arrows of Time. In order to get there, we tour through a huge amount of speculative world building, physics, biology, and sociology. In the opening volume, The Clockwork Rocket, we follow the single viewpoint character Yalda, who becomes the Einstein of her time. The world Yalda is born into is of a piece with the late nineteenth century: decent understanding of Newtonian physics, inventions such as trucks that are rare and dangerous, and public displays of “science” which lend themselves to the melodramatic. Given her unusual position in her society as a genetic sport, she is able to maximize her university education and eventually work out the mathematical and empirical underpinnings of a deeper understanding of the universe that the characters live in, one much different from our own.
The fundamental change between the Orthogonal universe and our own is a change in the sign of one equation governing relativity. The math that describes our universe has four dimensions: three in space and one in time, and the geometry of the time dimension is very different from the space dimensions. As Egan explains in “Plus, Minus: A Gentle Introduction to the Physics of Orthogonal”:
Nobody is surprised that different paths through space between the same two points can have different lengths. If I drive by the most direct route from Perth to Sydney, while you take a detour to Darwin along the way, it’s hardly shocking to suggest that our odometers will show us having travelled different distances. We now understand that detours in space-time can have an analogous effect on the passage of time. If you “travel” from New Year’s Eve in 2050 to New Year’s Eve in 2060 by staying on the Earth, whereas I, though joining you on both occasions, spend the intervening period traveling to Alpha Centauri and back, I will have aged about six years, compared to your ten.
When only spatial dimensions are involved, we can use Pythagoras’ theorem, where the squares of two sides of a right triangle add up to the square of the hypotenuse. However, if one of the sides of the triangle is in time instead of distance, the equivalent formula involves a difference instead of a sum, such that a person traveling a longer path experiences less time passing than a person remaining stationary. What Egan does is imagine a universe where time is treated with the same mathematics as space, so everything is summed using Pythagoras’ theorem and a person traveling a longer path in space experiences more time than their stationary brethren.
The consequences of this “minor” change rebound fantastically throughout the world building. Energy is produced differently; light has different velocities depending on wavelength, and travel at an infinite velocity is possible. Another crucial consequence: in order for light to behave in a reasonable, bounded way, the structure of the universe must be closed. In other words, the universe must have geometry similar to a sphere or a torus rather than an “open” flat sheet; that way light is constrained by the need to match up reasonably with itself at any point traveling around the closed universe—it can’t be infinitesimally small at one edge and infinitely large at another.
Now, infinite velocities sound mighty impossible, but there’s nothing that extraordinary about them—it all has to do with what your measurements are with respect to. This is dramatized by the Hurtlers, which pose a threat to Yalda’s homeworld. By traveling paths that intersect Yalda’s solar system with vectors of infinite velocity (compared to the homeworld), the Hurtlers have the potential to set the whole world on fire. (Matter in this universe is a bit more precarious than ours, liable to fly apart at the slightest provocation; the chemistry department at Yalda’s university is regularly leveled and rebuilt as the chemists try to learn more about the constituent elements of matter). At first, the Hurtlers are an astronomical rarity, but soon they become a regular feature of the night sky. Yalda and some of her colleagues immediately recognize the threat, but it is not until a neighbor in their solar system, Gemma, is literally set on fire that the public comes to recognize the threat.
At this point, those infinite velocities and reversed relativistic equations come in handy. Yalda and a rich sponsor (her former student Eusebio) hatch a scheme to create a generation starship out of a mountain and launch it such that its vector aligns with the Hurtlers. Traveling with infinite velocity with respect to the homeworld, the crew of the ship dubbed the Peerless can live out generations while only a few years pass on the homeworld—with any luck long enough to work out a solution to the problem before the homeworld goes the way of Gemma.
Peerless is launched, but it has to deal with many initial problems. First, there is a sabotage attempt by Eusebio’s political enemies. Then the crops won’t grow. There’s also a problem with something equivalent to micrometeorite debris. But problems are overcome, if not comfortably, and the mission continues.
It is in the second book, The Eternal Flame, that we start to see the story taking a turn towards Egan’s concerns about free will. Eternal Flame has three viewpoint characters, a biologist, a physicist, and a pilot/navigator. Here the biology of the aliens becomes central. The aliens of the Orthogonal universe possess a malleable body type, able to extrude new limbs at will. Children almost always come in pairs, one male and one female, and this relationship is known as “cos.” When a woman matures, she eventually splits into quarters to become four new children, which her male co then raises. They say that something is “as impossible as knowing your mother,” since the mother is literally erased when she has children. This can happen either as a matter of choice, or, if put off too long, it can happen spontaneously. Contraceptive drugs can reduce the chance of a spontaneous splitting, but they are highly politicized, and at the beginning of the trilogy they are banned. When the heroine Yalda moves to the city to study at the university there, she falls in with a group of women professionals forming the underground base of something like a women’s rights movement. One of their most important tasks is securing and distributing the contraceptive drug. Yalda is not exactly a typical female in her society: as well as pursuing a high degree of learning, she lacks a male co. She is twice the size of a normal member of her species; when her mother started to split there was an error in the process, and Yalda maintained all the body mass while developing a single new personality. This makes her stand out and occasionally causes problems based on stigma and prejudice, but it also makes her less likely to be forced to end her life through childbearing.
On the Peerless, access to the contraceptive drug was supposed to be guaranteed; unfortunately by the time three generations have passed in Eternal Flame, that drug comes from one of the plants that has not thrived in the Peerless environment. Women are reduced to starving themselves, hoping to put off splitting and hoping to only have two children instead of four (because of the need for zero population growth) when the time comes. Carla the physicist is often distracted by hunger and spends most of her time apart from her co, Carlo the biologist, hoping to postpone the splitting as long as possible.
The different viewpoints offer contrasting healthy and unhealthy relationships: Carla and Carlo respect each other immensely and try to prevent accidentally triggering Carla’s splitting through a measured program of fasting and time apart. In contrast, Tamara’s co, Tamaro, kidnaps her in an attempt to prevent her from becoming the first pilot to take a ship to a large body of Orthogonal matter. He believes that she should not be allowed to risk his offspring on such an uncertain undertaking. While Tamara eventually escapes and Tamaro is eventually arrested, one can see that given the biological mandate that women usually split (die) well before men (in order for their co to be young enough to raise the children effectively), Tamaro’s paternalistic sexism is easily ingrained.
Carlo wants to find some other way to inhibit splitting or to guarantee a bilateral split in a way other than women starving themselves. In the course of his research, he determines how the nervous system of his people works with light instead of chemically relayed systems and discovers that light also carries their equivalent of genetic instructions and disease. Through a series of unplanned events, he discovers a way to trigger women to give birth to a single offspring at a time—and to survive the experience. Disruptive doesn’t even begin to describe the technology. It doesn’t take long before factions in the mountain begin to resort to sabotage and violence to prevent this innovation from moving forward.
Eventually, those who would stop the advances through violence are arrested and overruled, and when we get to The Arrows of Time, another three generations down the line, the disruptive technology of women having single offspring has become entirely integrated into society. Now the expectation is that women who choose to “shed” (as opposed to starvers, who limit the food intake of both the male and female co and expect to have two children in the otherwise traditional manner) will have one male and one female offspring, closely spaced, and both will be cared for by their uncle. This book has two viewpoint characters, Ramiro and Agata. Ramiro, a brilliant photonics programmer, is being pressured by his uncle to assume his responsibility to care for his sister’s children, a duty that he resents and resists. Agata, a physicist, is being pressured by her mother to have children before she is ready, while her brother is still young enough to care for them. All of which serves to remind us that as much pressure as exists from biology and society, neither of these rob us of our free will. They may constrain us, but it is still our choice what we do in the face of those constraints, much like for Mark Carver in “Axiomatic.”
In Arrows of Time, however, the physics hews more closely to “The Hundred Light-Year Diary,” and if anything can constrain our free will, it is the cold hand of physics in a closed universe. Unlike the rather hand-waving set-up of “The Hundred Light-Year Diary,” in the Orthogonal universe the geometry is required to be closed. One consequence of this is that you can encounter light and matter that has a vector reversed in time compared to your own. This has the same effect as the time-reversed star in the short story—you can use that to send messages from the future back to the past.
The Peerless is once again faced with an incredibly disruptive technology. Debates are made and votes are taken, and while the mountain is split the democratic decision is to move forward with building a system to send and receive these messages. Not content with this outcome, a faction of extremists blows up the workshop of those building the time-reversed cameras, killing seven people.
Here is where the choice of POV becomes quite telling. Agata is on the pro-messaging side, and Ramiro is on the anti-messaging side. Usually Egan is rather loath to present as a viewpoint character someone he strongly disagrees with. The only exceptions that leap to mind are the cartoonish bad guys of “The Moral Virologist” and “The Extra,” both from 1990 (the first a reaction against those who claimed that AIDS was a scourge of God against gays, the second a Dorian Grey–style character) and John Hamilton from “Oracle” (2000), a dead ringer for C. S. Lewis, who is one half of a (very) fictionalized debate between Lewis and Alan Turing. In Arrows of Time, the issue is so subtle and ambiguous that Egan gives both sides fully fledged and sympathetic viewpoint characters.
After the terrorist attack, Ramiro is locked up as a suspected collaborator. He eventually talks his way out of prison with an audacious idea: he proposes an expedition to a time-reversed planet discovered by the astronomers. If it turns out to be habitable, then if the pro- and anti-messengers can’t live together, the minority anti-messengers can go colonize the planet and live permanently separate from the Peerless. It’s not as crazy as it sounds; just because something is reversed in time compared to you doesn’t make it antimatter. (There is other matter in the Orthogonal universe that does act like antimatter compared to the crew of the Peerless.) Both Agata and Ramiro go on the expedition, removing the focus of the plot from the Peerless for several years, and the scenes of them dealing with the counter-intuitive behavior of the time-reversed planet are appropriately mind-bending.
When the crew return to the Peerless, they find two dilemmas. One is that since the introduction of the messaging system, scientific and technological innovation has come to a standstill. Previously, the crew had moved from barely Apollo-era technology and nineteenth-century biology to control of their genetic destiny via light signaling and the equivalent of high-tech electronics using “photonics” (electromagnetism works so differently in this universe that electrical systems wouldn’t be practical, but light-based systems work well) in less than six generations, not to mention the refinements in understanding space-time and quantum physics. In the 12 years that the expedition is gone, however, they are completely stifled. The messages from the future don’t indicate any advances, so no one believes they can be made.
The other problem is that the messages cut off suddenly at a specific time some weeks after the expedition returns, and no one knows why. There is no knowledge of the future after that point and not enough information for people to guess the cause of the disruption. Many assume that the Peerless will be wiped out by an Orthogonal asteroid. Others think that it is possible that, instead, the messaging system will be shut down by sabotage. Indeed, because of the counterintuitive nature of this universe (as illustrated in more detail on the time-reversed planet), it may be that sabotaging the system will make it less likely for the ship to be wiped out by an asteroid—the disruption must happen one way or the other, so it would be better to increase the odds of it being caused by sabotage rather than ship-wide destruction. At this point, the plot takes on elements of a thriller as all the factions scheme to bring about or prevent different versions of the disruption. Both Agata and Ramiro agree that it should be done but disagree about their tolerance for risk and bloodshed, so they go their separate ways.
At this point, everyone is operating within the constraints of some very limited knowledge—they know the disruption happens, and they know bits and pieces of what leads up to it. Not everyone shares information equally; the terrorist cell that Ramiro works with knows quite a bit more than they let on, and they end up actively deceiving him about their capabilities. Finally, it is not the Council or the extremists who save the day but an ad hoc group of concerned citizens who manage to come up with the solution that fits the constraints with no lives lost. This shames Ramiro even more as he had been starting to empathize with the terrorists’ thoughts about outcomes and abstract ideals mattering more than lives lost—a very telling piece of emotional thinking and writing.
This isn’t the first time that Egan has had characters come to this sort of impasse. Crucial to the climax of the novel Schild’s Ladder (2001), there is a decision to be made which is perfectly binary—it’s all one option or the other with no compromise possible. In Schild’s Ladder, the decision revolves around whether to shrink a huge area of Novum space that was converting our universe into its own type of space (by virtue of physics, not through ill intent) or to leave it alone for further study even while it is advancing at half the speed of light. The posthumans of that book debate the topic and eventually take a vote, and everyone involved is inclined to abide by the vote—except a set of “anachronauts,” more primitive humans from the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth centuries who have traveled into space and into the future by freezing themselves. Only these characters are barbaric enough to resort to violence when the vote goes against their faction. In Egan’s deeply humanistic fiction, there is almost no cause, ideal, or other abstract value that can ever be placed above the value of living, breathing beings, even ones that may not be able to communicate.
So ultimately, even with the messages from the future and the inevitability of a closed universe meaning that the Orthogonal aliens objectively do not have free will (just as in our universe, given that the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, we have free will to make every possible choice in every possible universe—essentially rendering it meaningless), information about “destiny” is still imperfect and manipulated by human beings. This resonates closely with “The Hundred Light-Year Diary” more than twenty years before.
The shift to concerns about free will and politics is especially evident at the end of The Arrows of Time. In the earlier books, physicists were part of the viewpoint cast and important breakthroughs in quantum mechanics, relativity, and optics were foregrounded with extensive dialogue and diagrams. After the messaging crisis is resolved, an important breakthrough into understanding the geometry of the universe is made—off-stage by a nonviewpoint character and relayed secondhand to our actual viewpoint physicist. Instead, the finale looks at the triumph of citizen action over both entrenched political interests and extremist violence, and Ramiro is urged to take a more active role in the direct democratic rule of the mountain if these issues are so important to him, instead of leaving all political action to the extremists.
After everything that happens (the book also begins with the threat of violence by a political minority faction who oppose turning the mountain around and beginning the long journey back to the homeworld), the actual reunion between the generations more advanced crew of the Peerless and those who remained on the homeworld can only be described as rushed. Upon starting the book, I had expected some level of symmetry: roughly two-thirds of Book One was set on the homeworld, none of Book Two, and I thought Book Three might deal with the reunion for at least a third, up to two-thirds, of its length. Instead, that encounter is treated in a few pages of epilogue. Ultimately, the plot of the trilogy is always about physics and the concerns over free will and its limitations; it is never about the threat that the Hurtlers posed to the homeworld. That was an excuse, if you will, to get the characters headed in the direction they needed to go to face the fundamental underpinnings of their universe and ponder what they mean in terms of mathematics, technology, and human society.
It is a fair criticism that some of the physics dialogues in the trilogy are dry, and if the reader doesn’t have a solid grounding in the physics of our own universe, it can be a challenge not to get lost in the back and forth of the Orthogonal scientists. Many aspects of their universe are so counterintuitive as to seem bizarre, and sometimes explanations for those effects are opaque (although those interested can find at least 80,000 words of additional explanation with helpful diagrams and animations on Egan’s website). In much the same way as the autoverse universe in Egan’s breakout novel Permutation City, there are elements of this universe that are drastically simplified compared to our reality; for instance there are only a certain number of identified animal and mineral types (for animals I believe the grand total is worms, lizards, voles, arborines, and the sentient aliens, hardly enough to sustain a functioning ecosystem), and there appear to be no liquids anywhere, only gases and solids. Also, given the amount of matter whizzing around with different vectors of energy and entropy, one suspects that this universe is significantly smaller than our own. Still, there are many rewards here for the dedicated reader, not only from the purely intellectual game of the alternate cosmology (possibly the most comprehensively developed such world that sf will ever produce), but also from the philosophical and societal meditations on free will and its limits. It’s not what people think about when they think about Greg Egan, but this trilogy forms an important knot in a thematic thread that runs through so much of his fiction to date. It will be interesting to see where he develops it from here.
Karen Burnham lives in Denver, Colorado.
Works by Greg Egan Cited in This Article
- “Axiomatic” (1900). In Axiomatic. London: Orion/Millennium, 1995.
- “The Hundred Light-Year Diary” (1992). In Axiomatic. London: Orion/Millennium, 1995.
- “Mister Volition” (1995). In Luminous. London: Orion/Millennium, 1998.
- “Singleton” (2002). In Crystal Nights and Other Stories. Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2009
- “Plus, Minus: A Gentle Introduction to the Physics of Orthogonal.” 2010. <www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html>, accessed March 29, 2013.
- The Clockwork Rocket. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2011.
- The Eternal Flame. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2012.
- The Arrows of Time. London: Orion/Golancz, 2013.
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