Luminous

‘Luminous’ is a science-fiction short story published by Greg Egan in 1995. Starting as a dark thriller, it leads us very quickly on a trail of surprising ideas about mathematics, physics and what we call “truth”.

What if… in the very first seconds of our Universe, truth and logic had fluctuated. A pair of researchers find a defect in mathematics and attempt to map its boundary. It sounds crazy, yet it is hard to say much more without unveiling core ideas of the short story. Just trust me : go to the nearest library and grab this one. It is worth it.

I am usually not a fan of hard science-fiction. As you may know, Greg Egan is a master of the genre. In my opinion, hard SF just feels too much like a lecture. Science fiction is about falling asleep on your textbooks and dreaming. It is not about illustrating some striking aspects of current theories. I was quite surprised to discover in this case that page after page the story flowed naturally and without interruption, despite it playing with non-trivial concepts of contemporary physics and introducing complex, sparkling ideas.

Granted, most science-fiction short stories have surprising ideas. A handful of them however have truly deep ideas, that grow with us without us noticing it. I bet ‘Luminous’ is going to stay with me for a long time.

Note: I have since read the sequel entitled ‘Dark Integers’ and published in 2007. It is always hard to follow up after writing a gem, and unfortunately this makes no exception to the rule.