{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/6623", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 6623, "subject": "Short Story 93: Procreation", "messages": 6, "voices": 3, "first": "2014-08-15T10:38:17+00:00", "last": "2014-10-08T14:30:19+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Marc Aramini", "address": "marcaramini at gmail.com" }, "date": "2014-08-15T10:38:17+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Short Story 93: Procreation", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Procreation\n\nProcreation first appeared in its entirety in 1985 in The Fourth Omni Book\nof Science Fiction and is recollected in *Endangered Species*.\n\nSUMMARY:\n\nSection I: Creation ?\n\nThe story place as Gene’s journal over the course of a week, starting on\nAugust 1, a Monday, as Gott’s remarks on the universe containing only one\nmonopole inspire Gene to shoot particles at “Nothing” in an electron\naccelerator, at which point he produces something. By the third day he asks\nhis wife and sister how they would feel about being related to a Nobel\nLaureate, and he returns to the lab to discover that gravity separates\nmoisture from solids in the pyramidal shape that has formed in the\nmicroverse he created. He seeds it with scrapings from the apple his sister\nput in his lunch, and then from tissue samples from the biology lab. The\nnext day Gene sees large microorganisms and spore pods in his creation and\neven puts a scraping of himself into the microverse, then scrapes the\n“little critter” that resulted to produce another, “much the same”. On the\nseventh day, a Sunday, Gene opts not to go to the campus and is nagged\nabout church by his wife. Instead, he sleeps late and watches baseball. His\nsister makes drawings to describe how the microverse originated, “starting\nwith the arc discharge and ending with me watching the Yankees drop one to\nthe Angels.” They reduce it with a copier, and as he goes to place the\ndocument in, he sees that the “critters” are eating the spore pods, so he\nscares them off by putting a fruitfly in the microverse. They write their\nnames on the cover of the book they create, “Gene” and ?Sis?, before\ndropping it in.\n\nSection II: Recreation\n\nThe journal of Gene picks up on the 1st of September. He turns the\nmicroverse over to Dr. Ramakrishna of the astronomy department, and says\n“we will eventually have to draw some sort of line between their claims to\nnew universes and ours.” The astronomists say the new universe is outside\nthe solar system and headed to Vega, even showing a red shift (see\nscientific allusions below). The next day he receives an airmail letter\nfrom Dr. John Cramer saying that Gene might have created a net magnetic\ncharge — that if Gene-eration (which Gene calls his microverse) was seeded\nby a north monopole, there must be a south monopole. He calls it\n“Sis-eration” after his sister, who he claims “was [his] sounding board for\nthe first one.” He says it is apt because “sis” is a palindrome running the\nsame forwards and backwards, and the time in Sis-eration might run\nbackwards, destroyed at the moment Gene-eration was created. On Saturday he\ngoes to look for Sis-eration and says that his own universe was seeded by a\nmonopole, with a resulting net magnetic charge, so Sis-eration is mythical,\n“the Atlantis of physics”.\n\nOn the next day as he is at church with Martha, he has a “waking dream”\nduring the sermon and remembers a vision he had the previous day of a\nfloater in his eye, and saw it explode into the Big Bang, calling it the\n“primordial supersun the old philosophers called the Ylem — saw it open\nlike a milkweed pod and scatter the galaxies.” He realizes that he did not\nremember it until he was sitting in church — “my subconscious must have\ndecided it was irrational and blocked it out completely.” He considers what\nelse he might have lost because of it. The fifth day he considers how\nmatter and anti-matter could be separated, thinking that perhaps their\ninnate physical properties would create the separation, ultimately\nproducing a surplus of hydrogen, with its single proton. On the sixth day\nRamakrishna tells him that Gene-eration has shifted into the infra-red. He\ntells Ramakrishna to think of the Big Bang like a Big Blossom, with matter\nslowly picking up speed as it accelerates from its origin. On the next day\nhe remembers visiting Sis-eration as a child, something he couldn’t\npossibly have forgotten, and it disturbs him. “It was created when I\nperformed my experiment, and it’s propagating through our past. What will\nit do to us” Got to talk this over with Sis. But I can’t — what if I’m\nreally crazy?\n\nSection III: The Sister’s Account\n\nHere, Gene’s sister reveals that she and Gene have visited a different\nuniverse several times, once when they were children on a camping trip in\nthe Sierras as they searched for a spring, suddenly seeing land masses\nthrust above a desert landscape, until they came to water, where Sis saw\ntheir tent and family reflected on every wave. They return to the “real”\nworld, and later, in high school, they are exploring tide pools when Sis\nsees giant trees under the water, and the tenth one opens to reveal a\nbeckoning family consisting of a husband, wife, and child, who try to\ncommunicate through some kind of drawing or paper. Sis believe the father\nis trying to explain that they live underneath the surface so that the\ntrees and deer can exist above ground, and then the woman opens up a\ncrumpled mirror that allow Sis to see the real world reflected again, so\nthat they can return. As an older woman, “when Gene had married and it was\nclear [Sis] never would”, she once again visits the world by peering\nthrough the vanity in her bedroom beyond her reflected face to see the sea.\nThe sun is hotter than before, with life on the beach, and she “understood\nthat all three had been one world, and that in [her] own short life [she]\nhad seen its senility and flower, and now [she] saw its beginning.”\n\nShe sees her bed reflected in the pools, the coverlet spread for the repose\nof her rag doll. In the present of her story, she finds the letter from Dr.\nCramer warning of the dangers of the net magnetic charge, saying there must\nbe a second universe. She believes Dr. Cramer is correct, but now when she\nlooks in the mirror she sees only her own face, for Sis-eration disappeared\nat the creation of Gene’s universe. She concludes by thinking that perhaps\nthe second universe was “ours”, “and it is we who are gone, leaving as our\nonly trace these words upon a printed page.”\n\nCOMMENTARY: There is a kind of eclectic catch-all nature to procreation\nthat throws religion, science, metafiction, myth, and even a kind of bitter\nirony at play throughout “Procreation”. At the end, there are a few major\nthematic questions that we are forced to ask: is the universe that Gene\ncreated actually distinct from ours even though it exists “within” it?\nBefore we confront this level of the text or get into the easier mapping of\nreligious allusions to the first section, we should comment that the final\nsubjective section, “The Sister’s Account”, varies significantly from the\nprevious two, as it covers three events over the course of her life which\nsound much more like the fantasy or myth than the journal entries.\n\nEach visit to the strange world which Gene has “forgotten” involves either\nwater or a reflection of Sis that serves as the gateway in both directions,\nas once Sis is inside the other reality she can see the “real” world in\nreflections. While at first I wanted to explore the idea that there was\nsome kind of waveform representation of reality moving through the other\nuniverse, the mirror that she uses to transport herself the final time\nprompted me to believe that it is the reflective property itself which\nallows her to be aware of the other reality, and that every trip involves\nSis looking at these reflective surfaces. When Sis is young, the world is\nold. When Sis is old, the world is beginning. In this way, it seems that\nSis is actually one side of the monopole that joins the creation of Gene\nwith this universe. (Whether they were actually travelling into Sis-eration\nor Gene-eration is a bit confusing, and we will return to that question).\nWhen Gene calls Sis-eration mythical, the Atlantis of physics, it rings\neerily true — the presentation we get of a lost world seems extremely\nmythical in nature, with tree spirits and weird reflective mirrors and\nwaves that serve as conduits to the real world. Ultimately, it seems that\nSis is the conduit to this world, and it is entirely possible that Sis,\ntoo, has been created in Gene’s Gene-eration, giving him a sister that\nserves as the opposite monopole to his creation backwards in time. Indeed,\nthere is a throwaway line in the first section, that Sis someday plans to\nput her own genetic material into the microverse - perhaps the presence of\nSis in the universe proper is the result of this insertion in a strangely\ntwisted fashion.\n\nThe first section, “Creation”, is straightforward enough, with the mapping\nof the Biblical story of Genesis onto Gene’s experiment. While this\nfictional Gene might bear some resemblance to ours as a creator of vast\nuniverses, the metafiction at play here is distinct from “The Last\nThrilling Wonder Story” — this time Gene seems to succeed in being the God\nof his universe. (Obviously our Gene Wolfe never had a wife named Martha,\nnor a sister, though I think the presence of the sister is a bit more\nmysterious than a first reading indicates.) The wife, Martha, whose name\nimplies bitterness (pretty consistent pattern in Wolfe’s work in the 1980s)\ncriticizes everything, while the sister supports him.\n\nThe second section seems to describe the cosmological complications of\nphysics and science in the tale of creation, thus the name “Recreation” —\nthe microverse is placed in the universe itself, and the concept of ylem\nand the scientific explanation of a Big Bang/Big Blossom are confronted. No\ndoubt this mirrors some of the problems religion faced when science became\nsufficiently advanced to offer alternative explanations for the existence\nof the universe.\n\nCreation is the easiest section to explain — after being inspired by\nphysicist named Gott’s work about the monopole (Gott means “good” or ?God?,\nbut almost certainly refers to the real astrophysicist J Richard Gott),\nGene creates his universe in seven days which map to the days of creation.\nOn Monday, Gene has a “flash of insight” — this is analogous to the “let\nthere be light” concept of the first day. He shoots electrons at “Nothing”\nto see if there is attraction or repulsion, and gets electrons and a few\npositrons. On day 2 a dark spot of water with heavy stuff settling mirrors\nthe separation of the waters above from the waters below in Genesis. On day\n3, the gravity of our universe separates the sea from the land. On Day 4\nthe light that Gene rigs in his lab is the light of the sun and celestial\nbodies, and the spherical shape is the earth taking shape as a sphere.\n\nGene determines that even though gravity is shared in the universes, space\nis relative — the microverse grows and develops but takes up no more space\nin his universe. The scrapings on day 5 are of course the vegetable and\nanimal species which will populate the earth in Genesis, and on day 6 Gene\nscrapes his own wrist to create another Adam in his image before taking a\nculture from it and producing its mate, as Eve was taken from Adam. This is\nwhere the story conflates the two separate creation myths present in\nGenesis (one with the celestial breakdown of the days found in Chapter 1\nand the other with the personal story of Adam and Eve and their trespass in\nthe Garden which begins in Chapter 2). The idea of a fruitfly as the\ncherubim keeping Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden is one of the more\nmemorable conceits of the story, and it is equally absurd that the deity of\nGene-eration “rests” from church by catching a game between the Yankees and\nthe Angels. We should think about the title of the universe and the story\nas a whole: a play on generation and procreation, which usually involves a\nseed and an egg to quicken into life.\n\nThe constant multiplication of dimensions, from a pyramidal to cubical\nshape to one that is spherical, might also prompts the inception of time\ninside the closed system as well, and it is clear that the microverse, even\nthough it grows, always takes up the same amount of space in the universe\nof Gene, though it exhibits relativistic effects on anything which enters\nit (affecting the size of the ruler, for example).\n\nThe presence of Sis at home with Gene as he watches baseball while his wife\ngoes to Church seems odd, and she seems to live with Gene as well. Martha\nand she are parenthetically paired early in the first story: “Told Sis,\nMartha, How'd you like to say, 'My brother (husband) the Nobel Laureate?'”.\nLater, he thinks, “Suppose somebody (Martha) finds this” I'd be locked\naway, after which he is certain that he can't speak to Sis about it.\n\nSection II, “Recreation”, complicates the rather simple pastiche of Genesis\nthat adequately explains the first section. Gene turns over his universe to\nthe physics department under Dr. Ramakrishna where “We will eventually have\nto draw some sort of line between their claims to new universes and ours.”\nIn addition to representing the scientific view of the universe and its\ninception which challenged the accepted creation story historically, the\nallusions become rather heavy in this section. Ramakrishna’s name itself is\ncertainly famous — Ramakrishna is the 19th century Indian mystic and\nspiritualist who ultimately said that all paths led to God. The red shift\nof the universe shows that it is retreating, but the changing wavelength\nmay also have something to do with the representation of waves as a conduit\nbetween the mythical and real world found in “The Sister’s Account”.\nSection II is primarily concerned with Gene’s search for Sis-eration and\nrealizing that his memories are faulty, but it also deals heavily with\nphysics and physical reality. Day 5 talks about atoms and anti-atoms,\nconsidering how they might interact and segregate themselves, while when an\natom meets another of the same type “there’s no bounce”. Somehow the\nrelationship between Gene, Sis, Gene-eration, and Sis-eration must be\nrelated to this talk of matter and anti-matter.\n\nThe sister’s account reverts to a more personal, fantasy story that has\nnone of the scientific objectivity that the first two portions contained.\nGene’s explanations mirrored religious and scientific concepts of the start\nof the universe, but the sister’s account is entirely personal in nature,\nresembling the fantasies that it mentions at the start. However, it does\npresent a waveform vision of reality: Sis can see her parents “quite\nclearly in the lifted surface of every wave — just as if I were seeing the\nsame picture again and again in the TVs in a department store.” This\nwaveform concept of reality is repeated when they look at their footprints:\n?all the footprints pointed away from the tent, as though we had walked\ninto the spring and swum into the earth. Later, in a high school trip to\ntide pools, Sis looks into waves and sees something that seems like trees\nbeyond the bottom of the pool she found. In the tenth tree that they pass,\na man comes out and beckons them into his underground lair. They return to\ntheir own existence when a crumpled mirror is opened and they see\nthemselves in it. Any reflective surface winds up being a gateway through\nthe universes for Sis.\n\nIn the final analysis I think the hint that Sis plans on putting her own\nmaterial into the creation of Gene, along with the final musing that the\nuniverse created was somehow ours, not only plays with the metafictional\nawareness that Sis and Gene are in fact in Gene's story, but with the\ncosmological idea that, at least in the story, somehow the magnetic\nmonopole has created a universe which might even be the one contained\ninside it, with Sis' existence acting as the seed of another, opposite\nuniverse — perhaps even propagating her existence backwards into Gene's\nreality.\n\nSCIENTIFIC REFERENCES\n\nScientific references abound in this one, and some research into them is\nactually quite astonishing.\n\nThe monopole is simply the idea that, even though in nature magnets have a\npositive and negative side, even when broken into smaller pieces, charges\nexist in subatomic particles — the monopole would always have only a\npositive or negative charge no matter how it was split.\n\nJohn Cramer is a real professor of physics at the University of Washington\nwho also occasionally writes a column for Analog, and fascinatingly enough\nhe proposed (as far as I could tell in 1986) quantum exchanges and\ninteractions as a wave formed by both “forward-in-time\" retarded waves and\nadvanced \"backward-in-time\" waves. The fantasy section of ?The Sister’s\nAccount” seems to play with the idea of waves going forward and backward in\ntime in that fashion, perhaps entering a quantum universe, and her account\nends by quoting a fictional letter from Dr. Cramer to Gene: “You must\nsurely have made a pair, a ?north” monopole and a “south” monopole.\nOtherwise you would have created a net magnetic charge, which is a no-no. —\nThe one you describe must be like ours, but the other should contain\nantimatter and have time running in reverse. Since this story was at least\nstarted in 1983 before being finished in 1985, perhaps the waveforms moving\nforward and backward in time that are given artistic expression as the\nreflection of Sis are merely coincidence, but it is a rather striking one.\n\nThe ylem that Gene remembers seeing on his eyes while he is at church was\ncoined as a concept in the late 1940s, a kind of primordial plasma\nundergoing a kind of synthesis into matter besides Hydrogen. The radiation\nreleased from this Big Bang can still be seen as cosmic microwave\nbackground radiation, a pervasive light that does not originate from\ncelestial bodies, but rather from the inception of the universe.\n\nThe redshift that the microverse creates happens when light or other\nelectromagnetic radiation increases in wavelength, become “redder” by\nmoving towards that end of the color wavelength spectrum. This is\nequivalent to a lower frequency and photon energy, which might have some\nrelevance since Sis sees reality repeated through the waves of the ocean on\nthe other world.\n\nThe question is whether the Gott referenced in the text is actually the\nPrinceton astrophysicist J Richard Gott, who had published several papers\nby the 1970s, or merely a play on the meaning of Gott — God. I believe the\n1982 paper in *Nature* titled “The Creation of Open Universes from Desitter\nSpace” attracted Gene's attention. Gott’s science would be particularly\ninteresting to Wolfe, because he explores the possibility of time travel,\nand even states in an interview, “Certainly in the subatomic world,\nparticles called positrons look like they might actually be electrons\ntraveling backward in time.” This is fascinating in light of the first day\nof the experiment, when Gene shoots the electrons at nothing and produces\nelectrons and a few positrons — has he locally reversed the flow of time?\nIt also seems that the transformation of the pyramid into a sphere might be\nan exploration of skew polyhedra, which Gott wrote a paper on as well in\n1967.\n\nGene writes articles for Physical Review C, which is the journal of Nuclear\nPhysics.\n\nUNANSWERED QUESTIONS:\n\nEven though Gene’s wife in the story is named Martha rather than Rosemary,\nthere is something about the idea of the Sis universe propagating through\nthe past of this one that leaves me to wonder if we are to infer that the\nunnamed Sis, who he speaks to at the same time that he speaks to his wife\nand for some reason knows that she herself will never marry, has always\nbeen real, especially considering that her name is “Sis”. Has his creation\nof the monopole created a sister that never existed before (especially as\nour Gene Wolfe is an only child)? Is this why the story is called\n“Procreation” — the seed of Generation creates a sister, rather than Gene\nand Sis coming together to create a universe?\n\nDo the waveform reflections of Sis constitute the entrance to Siseration?\nWhy is her name actually “Sis” if she was always real?\n\nThe most difficult interpretive task is questioning the microverse?s\nrelationship to our own universe. Are both Generation and Siseration\nseparate from our universe, the complementary positive and negative\nmonopoles? The ending of Sis? account complicates this: [The other\nuniverse] is gone now, so that when I stand before my mirror, I see only my\nown face. Or perhaps that second universe was ours, and it is we who are\ngone, leaving as our only trace these words upon a printed page. I feel\nthat this is a bit more philosophical than the simple metafictional\nexplanation that Gene and Sis are creations of our Gene Wolfe, just words\non a page.\n\nOnce again, there is a mystical association with trees — in the reflection,\nSis sees a family living underground inside a giant tree, so that the tree\ncan live on the surface. When she sees the continents rising up in the\napocalyptic vision of her youth, they are “as high — as large trees”.\n\nCONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:\nThe light-hearted hubris on display here is slightly more pronounced than\nin “The Last Thrilling Wonder Story”, and the idea of artificial universes\nwithin other universes seeded by a simple moment that serves as the first\ncause that complicates cosmology beyond most rational attempts to\ncategorize it are of course Borgesian in its convolutions.\n\nThe female characters have names which imply \"bitter\" became an\nincreasingly common trend in Wolfe's fiction of the 1980s.\n\n In some ways the repeated cycles of the New Sun books plays with many of\nthe same themes, and the incorporation of religion, science, and myth are\nhallmarks of Wolfe's preoccupations throughout his entire career, though\nthis story is exceptionally “hard” in its use of physics.\n\n\n Cramer, John. “The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum\nMechanics.” *Reviews\nof Modern Physics* 58, 647?688, July (1986)\n\nGott, J Richard. “Creation of Open Universes from DeSitter Space.” *Nature*\n295, 304-307, 1982.\n\nNiemark, Jill. “J Richard Gott on Life, the Universe, and Everything.”\nScience and Spirit Magazine, 2007." } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Robert Pirkola", "address": "rpirkola at hotmail.com" }, "date": "2014-10-07T20:50:30+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Short Story 93: Procreation", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Marc Aramini wrote: \"Gott’s\nscience would be particularly interesting to Wolfe, because he explores the\npossibility of time travel, and even states in an interview: 'Certainly in the\nsubatomic world, particles called positrons look like they might actually be\nelectrons traveling backward in time.'\"\nWhat interview are you quoting from? \t\t \t \t\t " } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Marc Aramini", "address": "marcaramini at gmail.com" }, "date": "2014-10-07T20:56:29+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Short Story 93: Procreation", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "header", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Wolfe makes the same statement in Seven American Nights about the\nforward/backward temporal nature of protons and electrons but I think the\ninterview is cited at the bottom of that write up... Will check." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "On Tuesday, October 7, 2014, Robert Pirkola wrote:\nMarc Aramini wrote: \"Gott’s science would be particularly interesting to\nWolfe, because he explores the possibility of time travel, and even states\nin an interview: 'Certainly in the subatomic world, particles called\npositrons look like they might actually be electrons traveling backward in\ntime.'\"\n\nWhat interview are you quoting from?" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes", "address": "danldo at gmail.com" }, "date": "2014-10-07T21:06:56+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Short Story 93: Procreation", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "header", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Wherever the interview is, Wolfe is quite correct; in quantum mechanics a\nparticle travelling in one direction in time is the same thing as its\nantiparticle travelling in the other direction in time. In the QM universe,\ntime's arrow seems not to apply...any given event can happen in either\ndirection. But decoherence gives us a meaningful entropy and so a\nunidirectional time..." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 1:56 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:\nWolfe makes the same statement in Seven American Nights about the\nforward/backward temporal nature of protons and electrons but I think the\ninterview is cited at the bottom of that write up... Will check.\n\n\nOn Tuesday, October 7, 2014, Robert Pirkola wrote:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 2, "text": "Marc Aramini wrote: \"Gott’s science would be particularly interesting to\nWolfe, because he explores the possibility of time travel, and even states\nin an interview: 'Certainly in the subatomic world, particles called\npositrons look like they might actually be electrons traveling backward in\ntime.'\"\n\nWhat interview are you quoting from?" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "_______________________________________________" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Marc Aramini", "address": "marcaramini at gmail.com" }, "date": "2014-10-07T21:17:50+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Short Story 93: Procreation", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "header", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "It is the one cited at the very end by Jill niemark, \"J Richard Gott on\nlife, the universe, and everything\"" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "On Tuesday, October 7, 2014, Robert Pirkola wrote:\nMarc Aramini wrote: \"Gott’s science would be particularly interesting to\nWolfe, because he explores the possibility of time travel, and even states\nin an interview: 'Certainly in the subatomic world, particles called\npositrons look like they might actually be electrons traveling backward in\ntime.'\"\n\nWhat interview are you quoting from?" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Robert Pirkola", "address": "rpirkola at hotmail.com" }, "date": "2014-10-08T14:30:19+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Short Story 93: Procreation", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Sorry, for some reason when I was reading the passage it sounded as though you were saying Wolfe made the quoted statement in an interview. Thanks for clarifying. \t\t \t \t\t " } ] } ] }