(Drivebycuriosity) - - QNTM - the pen name for Sam Hughes, a British programer - belongs to the rising stars on the firmament of science fiction. I was amazed by his novella "There Is No Antimemetics Division" ( my review ) and his short story collection "Valuable Humans In Transit And Other Stories" ( drivebycuriosity). Both books are cutting edge hard science fiction with weird but well developed and plausible ideas.
"Fine Structure" by QNTM is a very ambitious work ( amazon). I am not sure if the book is a novel or a selection of very short stories. Some of the stories are connected, some are not.
What happens when humans play with the laws of physics & mathematics? The author has a lot of fancy and clever ideas, the best what contemporary scifi has to offer, but as usual he also overshoots and becomes bizarre & apocalyptic. Apparently during writing he got intoxicated by his own ideas:
"The Federated Shiftship Kardashev V passes the first advance warning beacon at a record-breaking velocity of almost one hundred and fifty thousand universes per second-- so fast that the second and third warning beacons are warning beacons are dopplering into its wake long before the ship's communications array has had time to decode, process and handle the first warning, let alone present it to the ship's captain for consideration and action".
But I enjoyed QNTM`s slick style anyway: "as the newly-discovered equation is installed into established ones, the delta grows and morphs and squares and never completely vanishes and generally makes a nuisance of itself without ever saying anything useful".
I plan to read more by him.
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