Oracle - Greg Egan
Novella
Number of words : 18000
Percent of complex words : 12.1
Average syllables per word : 1.5
Average words per sentence : 19.7
READABILITY INDICES
Fog : 12.7
Flesch : 58.0
Flesch-Kincaid : 10.1
PEOPLE
Robert Stoney
A professor of mathematics.
Peter Quint
A spook, and one of Stoney's captors.
Franza Kafka
Not a Commie, and a writer.
Arthur
Stoney's boyfriend at the time of his trouble.
Mr Wills
A detective at the Manchester CID.
Guy Burgess
A corrupted English spy.
Hermann Weyl
A mathematician.
Chris
A friend at school Stoney was in love with who died of bovine tuberculosis.
Eddington
A physicist.
Hardy
A mathematician.
Newton
A scientist.
Helen
A time travelling multiverse shifting android.
Ealing
A movie director.
Everett
Had a time travel theory that was right.
Feynman
A physicist.
Yang
A physicist.
John Hamilton
Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Also an author of religious defenses and children's fantasies.
Elizabeth Anscombe
A philosopher and winner of a debate with Hamilton.
Aquinas to Wittgenstein
Philosophers.
William Hamilton
John's brother.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Another mathematician that did war work.
Nevill Mott
Made the superconducting alloys for the imager.
Rosalind Franklin
From Birkbeck, helped perfect the fabrication process for the computing circuits.
William Blake
A poet.
Joyce Hamilton
John's dying wife.
Helen of Troy
Ancient beauty.
Huysmans
Basically just a very dim Catholic.
Luke
Assistant and an affair of Stoney's.
Wagner
A composer.
Michael Polanyi
An academic philosopher who agrees to moderate the debate.
Kurt Godel
Austrian mathematician.
Aristotle
Ancient philosopher.
Hamilton's young friend
Has a PhD in algebraic geometry from Cambridge.
H.G. Wells
An author.
Milton, Dante, John the Divine
Writers.
PLACES
Sherborne
A public school he went to.
Thames
A river in England.
Westminster Abbey
A church in England.
Saint Paul's Cathedral
A big church in England.
Cavendish Laboratory
Where Stoney works at Cambridge. A mid-Victorian building.
Cairo
City in Egypt.
Bogota
City in Colombia.
London
Capital of England.
Calcutta
City in India.
Manchester
City in England.
Boston
USA city.
Auschwitz
A nazi concentration camp.
Madras
City in India.
Shepherd's Bush
Where the BBC studios are located.
Guy's Hospital
Stoney knows an oncologist there.
ORGANISATIONS
CID
Police detectives.
Trinity College
Part of Cambridge University.
MI6
English international espionage agency.
Socratic Club
A society that holds debates at Oxford University.
BBC
British Broadcasting Corporation.
Oxford University
In England.
Cambridge University
In England.
TECHNOLOGY
Mark I
A computer.
Spin resonance imager
Used to see inside the human body.
MEDIA
Yang and Mills in '54
A paper that generalised Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism to apply to the strong nuclear force.
Physical Review
A physics journal.
Kingdom of Nescia
Children's fantasies by John Hamilton.
Signs and Wonders
Anti-materialism tract by John Hamilton.
The Broken Planet
Anti-science book by John Hamilton.
Faustus
Devil-dealing character.
Letters from a Demon
Satirical newspaper column by John Hamilton.
Cedric Duffy
A John Hamilton character.
Pendragon
Mythical Arthurian leader.
Tower of Babel
Mythical ancient structure.
Mythopoesis
Essay by Tollers.
Can A Machine Think?
A BBC debate between Stoney and Hamilton.
The Seat of Oak
One of Hamilton's Nescia books.
CONCEPTS
Baudot Code
A character set for telegraphy.
Mercury
Roman deity.
Pan
Woodland deity.
Incompleteness Theorem
Postulated by Kurt Godel.
The Goldbach conjecture
One of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory and in all of mathematics. Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.
Fermat's Last Theorem
About positive integer algebra.
Oracle
A machine that could solve the halting problem.
ANIMALS
Pekinese
A created dog breed.
Hamsters
Small rodents that will fuck anything.
PLOT
Robert Stoney is a professor of mathematics and of interest to MI6 because of the work he could do. He is also exploited by some dodgy spooks because he is gay, and in this decade that is something that can be used against you.
They actually take him to try and torture it out of him at one stage, locking him in a cramped cage. Amazingly, he is rescued by a woman who is a time traveller. Even more than that, an android and a multiversal troubleshooter. Helen stays with him for some time, and they discuss the problems of trying to change the past, and the differing branches. They can't change big things, but certainly can affect minor elements. So they bedevil the spook Quint that tortured Stoney, driving him towards breakdown.
This soon leads him to success as she can point out some shortcuts in research to come up with some technology like a resonance imager, or medical breakthroughs, even if it is not his field.
Others wonder why he is so successful all of a sudden, and he attracks the interest of a religious conservative and anti-science and anti-materialist author John Hamilton. They end up debating on the BBC, which goes ok. Helen accompanies Stoney and Hamilton has a 'young adviser'. Hamilton's wife Joyce is dying of bone cancer, but he thinks Stoney is of the devil and refuses any help.
Something Helen tells John can be accomplished with timeline tricks is a solution to the halting problem, of being able to tell if a computer program will work or not because you can use an infinite number of paths to interrogate it. To be able to solve the halting problem would give you an Oracle machine, as Stoney calls it.
At the end, after his wife has died he is visited by a version of himself from another timeline, which rather freaks him out. He still refuses to accept technological assitance towards his happiness, however and will not go with his visiting self.
4 out of 5
http://www.gregegan.net/MISC/ORACLE/Oracle.html
Number of words : 18000
Percent of complex words : 12.1
Average syllables per word : 1.5
Average words per sentence : 19.7
READABILITY INDICES
Fog : 12.7
Flesch : 58.0
Flesch-Kincaid : 10.1
PEOPLE
Robert Stoney
A professor of mathematics.
Peter Quint
A spook, and one of Stoney's captors.
Franza Kafka
Not a Commie, and a writer.
Arthur
Stoney's boyfriend at the time of his trouble.
Mr Wills
A detective at the Manchester CID.
Guy Burgess
A corrupted English spy.
Hermann Weyl
A mathematician.
Chris
A friend at school Stoney was in love with who died of bovine tuberculosis.
Eddington
A physicist.
Hardy
A mathematician.
Newton
A scientist.
Helen
A time travelling multiverse shifting android.
Ealing
A movie director.
Everett
Had a time travel theory that was right.
Feynman
A physicist.
Yang
A physicist.
John Hamilton
Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Also an author of religious defenses and children's fantasies.
Elizabeth Anscombe
A philosopher and winner of a debate with Hamilton.
Aquinas to Wittgenstein
Philosophers.
William Hamilton
John's brother.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Another mathematician that did war work.
Nevill Mott
Made the superconducting alloys for the imager.
Rosalind Franklin
From Birkbeck, helped perfect the fabrication process for the computing circuits.
William Blake
A poet.
Joyce Hamilton
John's dying wife.
Helen of Troy
Ancient beauty.
Huysmans
Basically just a very dim Catholic.
Luke
Assistant and an affair of Stoney's.
Wagner
A composer.
Michael Polanyi
An academic philosopher who agrees to moderate the debate.
Kurt Godel
Austrian mathematician.
Aristotle
Ancient philosopher.
Hamilton's young friend
Has a PhD in algebraic geometry from Cambridge.
H.G. Wells
An author.
Milton, Dante, John the Divine
Writers.
PLACES
Sherborne
A public school he went to.
Thames
A river in England.
Westminster Abbey
A church in England.
Saint Paul's Cathedral
A big church in England.
Cavendish Laboratory
Where Stoney works at Cambridge. A mid-Victorian building.
Cairo
City in Egypt.
Bogota
City in Colombia.
London
Capital of England.
Calcutta
City in India.
Manchester
City in England.
Boston
USA city.
Auschwitz
A nazi concentration camp.
Madras
City in India.
Shepherd's Bush
Where the BBC studios are located.
Guy's Hospital
Stoney knows an oncologist there.
ORGANISATIONS
CID
Police detectives.
Trinity College
Part of Cambridge University.
MI6
English international espionage agency.
Socratic Club
A society that holds debates at Oxford University.
BBC
British Broadcasting Corporation.
Oxford University
In England.
Cambridge University
In England.
TECHNOLOGY
Mark I
A computer.
Spin resonance imager
Used to see inside the human body.
MEDIA
Yang and Mills in '54
A paper that generalised Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism to apply to the strong nuclear force.
Physical Review
A physics journal.
Kingdom of Nescia
Children's fantasies by John Hamilton.
Signs and Wonders
Anti-materialism tract by John Hamilton.
The Broken Planet
Anti-science book by John Hamilton.
Faustus
Devil-dealing character.
Letters from a Demon
Satirical newspaper column by John Hamilton.
Cedric Duffy
A John Hamilton character.
Pendragon
Mythical Arthurian leader.
Tower of Babel
Mythical ancient structure.
Mythopoesis
Essay by Tollers.
Can A Machine Think?
A BBC debate between Stoney and Hamilton.
The Seat of Oak
One of Hamilton's Nescia books.
CONCEPTS
Baudot Code
A character set for telegraphy.
Mercury
Roman deity.
Pan
Woodland deity.
Incompleteness Theorem
Postulated by Kurt Godel.
The Goldbach conjecture
One of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory and in all of mathematics. Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.
Fermat's Last Theorem
About positive integer algebra.
Oracle
A machine that could solve the halting problem.
ANIMALS
Pekinese
A created dog breed.
Hamsters
Small rodents that will fuck anything.
PLOT
Robert Stoney is a professor of mathematics and of interest to MI6 because of the work he could do. He is also exploited by some dodgy spooks because he is gay, and in this decade that is something that can be used against you.
They actually take him to try and torture it out of him at one stage, locking him in a cramped cage. Amazingly, he is rescued by a woman who is a time traveller. Even more than that, an android and a multiversal troubleshooter. Helen stays with him for some time, and they discuss the problems of trying to change the past, and the differing branches. They can't change big things, but certainly can affect minor elements. So they bedevil the spook Quint that tortured Stoney, driving him towards breakdown.
This soon leads him to success as she can point out some shortcuts in research to come up with some technology like a resonance imager, or medical breakthroughs, even if it is not his field.
Others wonder why he is so successful all of a sudden, and he attracks the interest of a religious conservative and anti-science and anti-materialist author John Hamilton. They end up debating on the BBC, which goes ok. Helen accompanies Stoney and Hamilton has a 'young adviser'. Hamilton's wife Joyce is dying of bone cancer, but he thinks Stoney is of the devil and refuses any help.
Something Helen tells John can be accomplished with timeline tricks is a solution to the halting problem, of being able to tell if a computer program will work or not because you can use an infinite number of paths to interrogate it. To be able to solve the halting problem would give you an Oracle machine, as Stoney calls it.
At the end, after his wife has died he is visited by a version of himself from another timeline, which rather freaks him out. He still refuses to accept technological assitance towards his happiness, however and will not go with his visiting self.
4 out of 5
http://www.gregegan.net/MISC/ORACLE/Oracle.html