If attention to detail is a mark of possible Aspiehood, then David Zindell is quite possibly Aspieish. His series Requiem for Homo Sapiens(Who but an Aspie would think up a title like that anyway) is right up there with Tolkien's writing of a world utterly complete. Only, his books aren't based on the cliched races such as Orcs, Elves, Trolls and Wizards. His is a sci-fi series about the far future where man is greatly advanced in science and mathematics, and fractured into many sub-species and alien races, and even gods.
The following is an excerpt from one of his books:
Quote:
It was a long, dark, terrible sound, perhaps the very sound and fury of chaos itself. And then, in the centre of the chaos, there was a blackness as bright as the pupil of his eye. There were secret colours, bands of brilliant orange encircling the blackness, and then white, a pure snowy whiteness. All the colours of chaos were inside him, and out, and so again he faced his ship's computer and turned his inner eye toward the manifold.
Before him, beneath the stars of the Solid State Entity, within the dark twisting tunnels of a phase space, there was an attractor. It was a strange attractor, he decided: stable, non-periodic, low-dimensional. Its loops and spirals would weave infinitely deep, infinitely many fractal pathways inside a finite space. No path would ever cross or touch any other. Strange attractors, it was hypothesised, were the black holes of the manifold. Nothing that approached one too closely could escape its infinities. For a pilot to enter a strange attractor would mean spiralling down endless pathways into blackness and neverness.
Any sane pilot would have fled such an attractor. Strangely, he felt the attractor pulling him, almost calling him, in the way that the future called all life into its glorious destiny. His blood surged quickly inside him, thousands upon thousands of unseen turbulent streams, flowing, bifurcating, surging, but always returning to the chambers of his heart. If chaos was anywhere, he thought, it was inside himself. And order was there, too. Chaos/order; order/chaos - for the first time in his life, he began to see the deep connection between these seemingly opposite forces.
Chaos, he thought, was not the enemy of order, but rather the cataclysm that gave it birth. A supernova was a most violent, chaotic event, but out of this explosion into light were born carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and all the other elements of life. There was always a place where order might emerge from chaos. To find the hidden order inside, he must first become himself pure chaos. He must will himself to see where pattern is born of formlessness, that pattern that connects.
All his life he had been trained to see such patterns. There was always a choice, to see or not see. Now, inside the attractor that pulled him into its writhing coils, there were patterns. There were ripples and billowings and depthless fractal boundaries like the wall clouds around the eye of a hurricane. The attractor itself swirled with the colours of orange madder and a pale, icy blue. For the first time, he marvelled at the attractor's strange and terrible beauty. There was something haunting in the self-referential aspect of the chaos functions, the way that the functions lay embedded inside one another, watching and waiting and making patterns down to infinity.
There were always an infinite number of patterns to choose from, always the infinite possibilities. There was always a possible future; it was only a matter of finding the right pattern, of sorting, inverting, mapping, and making the correspondences, and then comparing the patterns to a million other patterns that he had seen. Now, as the patterns before him fractured into lovely crimson traceries and then coalesced a moment later into a clear blue-black pool that pulled him ever inward, he must choose one pattern and only one.
In less than a second of time, in a fraction of a fraction of a moment that would always be the eternal Now, he would have to make his choice. There could be no putting it off once it came. His choice: he could be pulled screaming into his fate, or he could say yes to the chaos inside himself and choose his future. This, he remembered, is what the scryers do. This is what his mother must have done in finding the terrible courage to give birth to him. And so at last, when his moment came and time was now and always forever, he chose a simple pattern. He made a mapping into this strange attractor, and then he fell alone into the eye of chaos where all was stillness, silence, and beautiful blessed light.
Standalone novel prior to the "Requiem" series: Neverness
Requiem for Homo Sapiens series: The Broken God, The Wild, War in Heaven.
19 Jul 2005, 9:14 pm
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