"Wang's Carpets" is a 1995 science fiction novelette by Greg Egan. It is about a group of cloned beings who discover an amazing life form on a planet orbiting Vega.
Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell:
In a far future Earth the majority of citizens are software clones of humans who live in communities know as polises. One of these polises, Carter-Zimmermann, copies itself a thousand times and sends each copy to a different star in the galaxy. They are searching for extraterrestrial life to help disprove a theory that the universe was created solely for mankind. This story follows one of the copies of Carter-Zimmermann that arrive at Orpheus, a watery world orbiting Vega, where they discover one huge, thin life form that ends up being more amazing than anyone ever imagined.
Vega's sole planet, Orpheus, had been a featureless blip to the best lunar interferometers; now Paolo gazed down in its blue-green crescent, ten thousand kilometers below Carter-Zimmerman itself. Orpheus was terrestrial, a nickel-iron-silicate world; slightly larger than Earth, slightly warmer - a billion kilometers took the edge off Vega's heat - and almost drowning in liquid water. Impatient to see the whole surface firsthand, Paolo slowed his clock rate a thousandfold, allowing C-Z to circumnavigate the planet in twenty subjective seconds, daylight unshrouding a broad new swath with each pass. Two slender ocher-colored continents with mountainous spines bracketed hemispheric oceans, and dazzling expanses of pack ice covered both poles - far more so in the north, where jagged white peninsulas radiated out from the midwinter arctic darkness.
My Two Cents:
• The good:
- This is a very hard science fiction story - if you like heady stuff written for smart people then you'll love this one.
- There are some very cool ideas in this story: software entities cloned from real humans, using copies to travel the huge distances between stars and, of course, the brilliant carpets.
- This is a story that will make you think; it will stretch your mind with nifty ideas and push you to the limits of your understanding of biology and technology. In fact, this story could probably do with two readings!
• The bad:
- If you'd rather not read detailed descriptions of the hard sciences, such as the atmosphere surrounding a new found planet, then you may want to stay away from this story.
- If you are the kind of person who likes to focus more on the story and not so much on the science... well, skip this.
Fact Sheet:
• "Wang's Carpets" garnered the following awards:
- It won the 1998 Hayakawa's SF Magazine Reader's Award for foreign short story.
- "Wang's Carpets" placed fourth in the 1996 Locus poll for best novelette.
- It was also nominated for the 1996 Aurealis Award.
Where you can find "Wang's Carpets":
Related Yet Still Interesting Links:
- This short story was later expanded into the novel Diaspora.
- You might enjoy this story more if you brush up on your knowledge of Wang Tiles and Turing Machines.
- Greg Egan has a pretty cool website with lots of information about his stories and novels - including many links to free versions!
Craving More Stories?
If you enjoyed this story then you may like Mortimer Gray’s History of Death by Brian Stableford - a story about a nearly immortal man, living in a far future Earth, who writes a life defining Magnum Opus.
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(This is a revised version of a post which was originally published on BestScienceFictionStories.com on Apr 10th, 2008.)
