Wang's Carpets

by Greg Egan

Far in the distant, post-human future, the Cater-Zimmermann community set out to refute the theory that the universe is created exclusively for mankind by cloning themselves a thousand times over and sending each copy to a different star within the galaxy. One of the copies of Cater-Zimmermann, Paolo Venetti, arrives at Orpheus; a water-world inhabited by floating mats that perform as a Turing machine.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Hard Science Fiction

35 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Greg Egan specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind transfer, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism over religion.

He is a Hugo Award winner (and has been shortlisted for the Hugos three other times), and has also won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. Some of his earlier short stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror, while due to his more popular science fiction he is known within the genre for his tendency to deal with complex and highly technical material (including inventive new physics and epistemology) in an unapologetically thorough manner.

Egan is a famously reclusive author when it comes to public appearances, he doesn't attend science fiction conventions, doesn't sign books and there are no photos available of him on the web.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Andreas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Synopsis: Humans are now virtualized, and can materialize in any wished form. One suche colony sends out their clones on a mission to find life in the galaxy and to proof their understatement that the universe was NOT created solely for mankind. The main protagonist’s voyage leads to planet Orpheus, circling the star Vega, finding life in form of large carpets in the ocean. A longer discussion between “wait for a couple millenia” or “risk the danger of contamination for a closer analysis” leads to the vote for researching those carpets using nanobots. First finding is that they happen to be a single long carbohydrate molecule which doesn’t qualify as intelligent life. But then, one of the scientists finds out, that those carpets build an equivalent to Turing machines using the theory of Wang’s tiles (with each carpet being one tile) building effectively a kind of computer or brain.

Review: The author included the novelette as part of his novel Diaspora. It is a brillant piece of Hard SF in a posthuman universe that might be categorized as MathFiction. The philosophical and mathematical debates are probably hard to get for people outside of theoretical computer science (and would be worth one or two stars less). As my specialized field of study once was exactly that theory, I just felt at home and found it mind-blowing how the author applied the theory to a first contact story. I praise it just for the genius application of the idea and its discussion in posthuman communities, disregarding its lack of action or character evolvement.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

2019 reread. I liked it much better this time. And I was just struck, reading an article in SciAm on the Ediacaran fauna, that Egan likely modeled his alien critters on Dickinsonia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickins... , first found in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. They got pretty big, up to a meter in diameter, and are still enigmatic. SFAIK they aren't thought to be Turing machines! But their bodies show fractal architecture, and they are among the first well-preserved fossil animals.

Greg's review, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... will give you an idea about the story. You may find, as I did, that you will need to read the thing 2 or 3 times before you get it. Worth the extra effort, I think.

Many reprints: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...

[Elchamaco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una novelilla corta increible. No me extraña que después haya libro por todos los conceptos que plantea. Transhumanismo a tope.

[Neko~chan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very short, interesting premise. The art isn’t particularly in the prose

[Nelson Minar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read in an anthology. Excellent short story on the existential despair of a transhumanist future devolving in to solipsism. Also fun speculative hard sci-fi.

[Sara Wofford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Came across this in the Hard SF Renaissance Anthology and liked it so much, I had to review separately.

I love SF for a lot of reasons, but it's especially exciting to trace recurring ideas over decades as they pass from one author to the next. And this short story was clearly influential on a lot of later SF works! I thought Greg Egan's exploration of Wang aperiodic tiling was really interesting to compare to Penrose aperiodic tiling that Neal Stephenson put at the center of Anathem. I'm now deeply curious if Anathem was inspired at all by Egan. I really like the direction Egan took it, with the organic Turing machine.

There's also the inclusion of a sect of people that believe that life in the universe inevitably tends towards humanity, which we also see at the heart of that recent Tchaikovsky novel Alien Clay.

Not to mention, the story is set in the often-explored setting of a transhumanist society. Not too remarkable, save for laying the groundwork for my favorite excerpt:

“I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can’t guide us. Evolution can’t guide us. The C-Z charter says understand and respect the universe . . . but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all – and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Flesh humans used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ‘competition’ . . . as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

“Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That’s why we need to find alien life – not just to break the spell of the anthrocosmologists. We need to find aliens who’ve faced the same decisions – and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.”

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly, fiction of an Idea. A thought experiment fleshed out as an alien mind construct derived from a mathematical construct.

The far future post-humanity worldbuilding really hammers it down that we might not be the end-all of anything. :)

A rather classic story. Egan is fantastic for the hardcore SF fan.

[Molly · Rating 2 out of 5]

much too confusing for me and i found the excessive use of technobabble borderline insulting

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another mind bending work from Greg Egan .

[Anna]

I kept expecting some tragedy to come from the microprobes, then it didn’t. It was a relief! But the tension was almost choking.

[Clora · Rating 5 out of 5]

mind-exploding, perspective-altering, earth-shattering, society-upheaving,

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Egan - come up with a profoundly bizarre and fascinating idea and then wrap a not bad or better story around it. Tempted to take on Diaspora again now.

[Elaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not smart enough for this story. There was too much work looking up words.

[Ann Rivera · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and provocative read. Egan creates a world that interrogates questions of humanity and perception through his depiction of a posthuman society looking for alien life.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of interesting ideas, but I would recommend this story for fans of (very) hard science fiction only!

[Damion Reinhardt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hardcore transhumanist far futurist novella about the countless possibilities which arise once we consciously decouple from fleshly substrates.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good short story but far better as the novel Diaspora

This is a great short story -- some of the most extreme sci fi ("hard sf") written, and interesting both as tech and story. However, it packs too many concepts into a short story -- works far better as the novel Diaspora which Egan then wrote. If you've read Diaspora there is little reason to read this short story separately.

[Sumayyah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not smart enough to really have understood this short story, but I found it interesting and staggering and sad and lovely anyway. It seemed strangely lonely and desperate too, somehow. I'm definitely not going to write an essay or my exam on it, but it was something different to read that I'm glad I did.