Robert L. Forward's DRAGON'S EGG (Narr by Todd McLaren)

One of the extra and unintended joys of reading vintage/older science fiction (in the case of Dragon's Egg, physicist Robert L. Forward's fiction debut, dating to 1980) is, when one sees a particularly egregious forecasting error on the part of the only kind of author whom the reading public routinely expects to predict the future, imagining what would have to have happened, to have always been true, for one of a novel's more noticeable conceits to be plausible. 

In the case of Dragon's Egg, for instance, the Soviet Union and the Cold War are both still very much real and unignorable facts in its fictional 2020 -- but that's not the interesting thing to think about really, at all, at least as far as this novel is concerned: the Iron Curtain is treated as a throwaway bit of background noise in the idle thoughts of a character and that's pretty much that. 

But what is interesting to think about in terms of this novel and how it differs from our reality is its assumption that the early economic and, possibly, physical realities of how digital computing power is allocated, used and accounted for would have continued to very much resemble how such matters were understood and employed in the earliest days of electronic computing. 

In Forward's 2020, we can't be sure that computers haven't gotten much smaller than the enormous room fillers of the 1960s and 70s, but it is a fact integral to the earliest developments of Dragon's Egg's plot that computer time is expensive and thus must be rigidly controlled and accounted for, to the degree where, as we first come to meet our first point of view character, Jacqueline, the completion of her doctoral thesis research is suddenly threatened by the international currency markets! Her advisor is Russian and his work is funded by his government, his lab's computer time paid for in rubles. If the value of the ruble suddenly plummets, its purchasing power does, too, and so the amount of computer time budgeted for a given piece of research shrinks unless a fresh infusion of rubles is diverted toward that resource.

We can smile indulgently at this notion, of course, treat it as a quaint aspect of a novel written just before most of us had ever heard of Moore's Law, but is it really that goofy? We consider computing power to have gotten cheaper, but I suspect that most of us who think that don't consider much beyond the cost of the materials that make up the machines. As chips got smaller, they required less stuff to manufacture, so of course they got cheaper, but did they? How many rare earth elements went into the IBM behemoths from the punch cards days versus the nosy little snoop machine broadcasting all of your data from your pocket? And what are the environmental costs of acquiring the materials in such a manner as to keep them cheap? How many workers in the supply chain are barely making a living wage? To say nothing of the energy consumed in mining, manufacturing, shipping, marketing and then finally running your jeejahs?*

What if Forward's alternate 2020 is just as technologically sophisticated as ours but is more upfront and honest about the tech's actual cost and makes everybody involved actually pay their fair share to employ it? Then it's not so very inaccurate about the actual 21st century as we might have first assumed, eh? See, this is way more fun than just pointing and laughing at how William Gibson didn't anticipate cell phones or whatever.

But now I'm way out in the weeds as far as this novel is concerned, which is not about economics or social justice or the evolution of the tech sector, but about an exceptionally cool and fairly uncommon idea or set of ideas about what space aliens might actually be like!

Spoiler: they're really, really not like us, and they're really, really not that easy to think about. We're in Greg "Clockwork Rocket" Egan and Neal "Anathem" Stephenson and Peter "Blindsight" Watts territory, here. As in hard science fiction, but hard science fiction that is a lot more than "we're going to throw orbital mechanics or fuel calculations or subatomic particle physics at you for a few hundred pages so you don't notice that it's really just cowboys and injuns in spaaaaaace."

Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

Anyway, Jacqueline's work employs a space probe that is humanity's first to travel orthogonal to the elliptic of our solar system, meaning that, if we regard the sun and its planets and other rocks and clots of stuff as all on one flat plane, as we do, this is our first probe that has gone up "above" it to examine it from the new angles that position affords. The Sun presents a whole new face to us when viewed from there, for instance. 

While Jacqueline is looking, not so much at images as at the kind of massive streams of raw data that NASA and Co. use to generate those (simulated and cosmetically enhanced) images, she has found some weird distortions in the numbers. And, because she is brilliant (but also pretty, slim, young and French), she manages to commandeer the probe to take a closer look and maybe determine what's really going on up/out there. 

And before you can say Big Ben, Jacqueline and her new friend/admirer Donald have found that there's a pulsar plowing through our neighborhood!

But wait, there's more!

Honestly, I can understand where a lot of readers would be all but tapping their feet and checking their phones with increasing frequency through these early chapters, but I would have been perfectly happy with this stuff as the whole novel. I am a scientific washout as a person, having flamed out in grad school because I kept getting distracted by various opportunities to learn new languages (which should have been my course of study in graduate school, but was not), but I still absolutely love the kind of minutiae of discovery described here, the process of applying reason and precedent and new intuition to the interpretation of the massive dumps of indirect data that we use to make up for the vast inadequacies of our own evolved kluges we call our senses. Like, we can't see, for instance, X-rays, but we can cobble together machinery that measures them anyway and work from the numbers that generates to concoct an approximation of what it would be like if we could see them, and then monitor changes in that approximation and extrapolate from that more about the nature of other things we can't "see" and build up a considerable body of pretty good information about the rest of the world we can't directly perceive. And from that we can sometimes manipulate these unseen things into doing work for us or answering questions like "Is this lady's collarbone broken?" or "Does that star that is so far away from us that we're actually only seeing what it looked like thousands of years ago, have some planets orbiting it? Planets like ours?"

I mean, come on!

Interconnected between the chapters detailing the discovery of the pulsar and, as the novel's time frame races ahead, the arrival of a crewed spaceship in orbit around the pulsar waiting for robots to build the infrastructure that will allow the crew (including a son of Jacqueline's named Pierre) to explore its mysteries, are chapters that give us glimpses of another community. At first they seem very like us and to inhabit a world like ours, as a point of view character tries to catch a swift. It's only after we've enjoyed a few moments of failed swift-catching efforts that we discover that the swift is not a pretty little bird flying around, and that our new character has a body even less like ours than the swift's is like a specimen of  Apus apus! We're not in Kansas anymore; our guy has many more eyes than you or I do, and has a much more protean body. Oho!

As more chapters unfold, we watch this other population develop culturally through the discovery of things like agriculture, and mathematics and optics, and begin to cultivate a much more sophisticated understanding of their world and how it works, through processes of investigation and discovery that are as enjoyable to observe as Jacqueline's and Donald's have been. Forward shows here a talent for speculative biology, sociology and, yes, physics that I would compare to many better known writers.

Here I'm going to digress again, because while I'm never one to scream about spoilers and would remind my readers once again that this here blog carries a "ware spoilers" up there in its header, but man, this novel would have been even more fun if the jacket copy didn't give away the nature of this other community, so that I didn't know in advance how these two narratives actually fit together. I would love to have been surprised by the answer, so I'm not going to spoil it for you, either. And if this post has already made you think about grabbing a copy of this to enjoy, I'd urge you to do your best to avoid the blurbs and marketing copy so that you can enjoy the discovery the way that I think Forward actually intended you to. I mean, it's still great anyway, but file this story's secrets under "would have been more fun to uncover alongside the characters instead of just getting to watch them figure out what we already know." Le sigh.

And now, excuse me. There is a sequel to this called Starquake, but it appears to be out of print, or at least not yet published in digital form. But hey, I've been looking for an excuse to visit my local used paperback store again anyway!

*By the way, though, even this point about allocating scarce resources vis a vis scientific research isn't necessarily all that retro-anachronistic, because Jacqueline's work doesn't just require computational power but also employs one of six existing-in-her-universe X-Ray telescopes. I'm sure that, even in that age which Forward depicts as even less interested in astronomical observation and study than our actual 2020s are, there are probably lots of graduate student types and senior scientists, too, jockeying for telescope time, just as they are in our world.