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    Ideas and Entities
    Ideas and Entities
    Ideas and Entities
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    Ideas and Entities

    By Andrew Hickey

    ()

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    About this ebook

    In Ideas and Entities, Andrew Hickeyasks such questions as:

    What if the singularity was brought about by social media gaming?
    Who really wrote Shakespeare's plays?
    What should you do if you accidentally defame a werewolf?
    Are physicists keeping the secret of time travel to themselves?
    And is it possible to have people agree with you too much?
    These and other questions are answered in the ten science fiction and fantasy stories found inside.

    Contains the short stories:
    Jeeves and the Singularity
    Monologue
    The Shakespeare Code
    Occupational Elf
    Bubble Universe
    Print the Legend
    Boltzmann and Boltzwomann
    The Singularity
    Free Will and Testament
    Rite of Passage

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAndrew Hickey
    Release dateFeb 12, 2018
    ISBN9781386173427
    Ideas and Entities
    Author

    Andrew Hickey

    Andrew Hickey is the author of (at the time of writing) over twenty books, ranging from novels of the occult to reference books on 1960s Doctor Who serials. In his spare time he is a musician and perennial third-placed political candidate.

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      Book preview

      Ideas and Entities - Andrew Hickey

      Introduction

      This is my first full-length story collection, so I suppose I should say a few words about the stories, and about the themes running through them. Feel free to skip this bit if you prefer stories to speak for themselves.

      I’ve been fascinated for a long time about the idea of personal identity, and how our intuitions about it (or, more properly, those cultural conventions about the notion of identity which we have internalised) seem to be opposed to everything we find out when we investigate these things scientifically. We feel like we are individuals, but if even one of the many multiverse hypotheses presented by modern physics is true, then there are a near-infinite (or actually infinite) number of copies of all of us. We feel like we have free will, but if effects truly follow causes we are as deterministic as a clock. Is it possible to reconcile these things, to keep those things we value while still recognising reality? In one way or another, all these stories touch on themes of identity, at least tangentially.

      Jeeves And The Singularity is my attempt to write something science-fictional in the style of P.G. Wodehouse, an affectionate parody of a writer who was the greatest prose stylist the English language has ever known, but whose characters all lived in an increasingly-absurd fantasy of the recent past.

      Monologue is me trying to understand the motivations of the megalomaniacal villains who populate so much of televised SF, while also looking at a piece of scientific speculation which, were it to prove true, would be one of the most horrific possibilities I could imagine.

      The Shakespeare Code came to me in a dream.

      Occupational Elf is a fantasy story featuring the members of Peculiar Branch, a branch of the British police devoted to enforcing the laws of nature. Peculiar Branch will be appearing in a novel which I hope will be out before the end of 2012.

      Bubble Universe was inspired by the way we increasingly live in ‘filter bubbles’, where we only hear the news and opinions that reinforces our own prejudices.

      Print The Legend is the flip-side of that, in many ways. Both stories look at what would happen if our perceptions started to influence reality. But Print The Legend is funnier.

      Boltzmann And Boltzwomann is, again, closer to real scientific (or philosophy-of-science) speculation than one might think at first reading. Like many of the stories here, this was very influenced by Frederik Pohl, whose short-short, idea-driven stories are some of the best SF ever written.

      The Singularity is how I expect any artificial intelligence development to actually come about, if it ever does. At least one aspect of this story became reality after I wrote it (I won’t say which bit).

      Free Will And Testament is a time-travel story. I bet the physicists

      are

      keeping all the good stuff to themselves. I wouldn’t put it past them.

      And Rite Of Passage is the creepiest, scariest idea I ever had. More and more, these days, we are offloading unimportant bits of our cognition onto machines – no-one I know remembers ’phone numbers any more, they all have them stored in their mobiles. This takes that rather past the logical conclusion, and to somewhere quite unpleasant.

      I shall now leave you in the hands of Mr Bertram Wooster, who will tell you about his most unusual adventure yet…

      Jeeves And The Singularity (after P.G. Wodehouse)

      Now, it’s a rummy thing about my man, Jeeves, but while he’s the best valet one could ask for – absolutely top-notch, in my opinion – he does have certain… opinions. In particular, on the matter of hosiery, he can be quite forceful.

      It so happened that I had recently picked up a rather natty pair of socks a brightish blue, with pink stripe with which I expected to cut quite the dash. Jeeves, however, had made some disparaging comments along the lines of them being akin to the worst monstrosities conjured up by Monsieur Gaultier’s fevered imagination, which I thought was a tad on the harsh side.

      Now, we Woosters are never ones to let a valet, however valued, come between us and our personal style, and I told him so in no uncertain terms.

      Jeeves, I said, a man’s person may be battered and assaulted, his mind may be changed by reasoned argument, his very soul may be taken from him. But his socks – his socks are sacrosanct!

      He’d said no more about the matter, but one could tell it rankled, and I noticed that for the next few days the mid-afternoon pick-me-up was rather lighter on the w. and heavier on the s. than was the norm. I said nothing, however. One has to be gracious in victory.

      A couple of weeks after Jeeves had started emitting this air of

      froideur

      , my old friend Bingo Little turned up in town. This was a rather infrequent occurrence of late, young Bingo having made a bit of a name for himself as a venture capitalist, having had the luck (or, as he would call it, foresight) to take a punt with his uncle’s money on one of these newfangled Web 3.0 startup whatsits, and having relocated to Silicon Valley.

      Never let it be said that Bertram Wooster is a Luddite – no-one is more bucked about the White Heat of Technology than I – but I must admit that I’d never understood exactly what Bingo’s company actually did, other than that it was something to do with computers. However, some things never change, and despite Bingo having become a billionaire techno-capitalist, he was still, not to put too fine a point on it, a chump. Remind me to tell you sometime about how Jeeves saved his bacon after he sent all his money to some African Johnny.

      The point being that while he may have made some money off the things, one should no more trust Little, R.P., near a computer than one should hand a rifle to a three-year-old. However, this time, as soon as I saw Bingo

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