Author Topic: EP288: Future Perfect  (Read 19612 times)

LaShawn

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Reply #25 on: April 25, 2011, 02:56:52 AM
Wow! So sorry it took so long to respond, but it's been an eventful month. This got posted right after my 40th birthday, so I've been "celebrating" a lot more than I thought.

Thank you everyone for all your comments. This was the first science fiction story I ever wrote. I was surprised when it got picked up--I know how critical you guys get on the details.  ;D I did get some help from my husband on the more technical aspects of the story.

This was indeed a story about obsession. I was vieing for an anthology that had a theme of stories based upon a song of one's choosing. The song I chose was "Circling Around the Moon" by John Mellencamp. It was also based on a thing I used to do back when I got my heart broken by a guy. I used to tell myself, "well, in an alternate universe, he and I would be happy and married with kids..." (the irony is, the last guy I tried with this I wound up marrying and just celebrated our 12th anniversary).

I am aware of the cookie cutterness of the worlds. It's a weakness I've recognized. The only way to stretch my creativity would be, uh, writing more stories. If only there was some magical elixir to speed it up... No? ::sigh::

Thank you, Mur, for buying it. I enjoyed the reading, and the great conversation that stemmed from it!

And now, for my next goal: ::sideeyes Podcastle and gives a long, slow smile::

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Reply #26 on: April 25, 2011, 04:25:08 PM
And now, for my next goal: ::sideeyes Podcastle and gives a long, slow smile::

Good luck!  They tend to be very quick to respond, but they've got a tough gatekeeper.



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Reply #27 on: April 26, 2011, 06:31:57 AM
And now, for my next goal: ::sideeyes Podcastle and gives a long, slow smile::

Good luck!  They tend to be very quick to respond, but they've got a tough gatekeeper.


Even worse: they have TWO tough gatekeepers.


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Reply #28 on: April 26, 2011, 01:31:26 PM
And now, for my next goal: ::sideeyes Podcastle and gives a long, slow smile::

Good luck!  They tend to be very quick to respond, but they've got a tough gatekeeper.


Even worse: they have TWO tough gatekeepers.

You're referring to Schwind and Thompson?  I was actually talking about Leckie, the gatekeeper to the other two.  I've only ever gotten one story past her (which was then turned down by Swirsky).  I'm sure the editors are tough too, but once you're to them you're past the gate and into the foyer.



acpracht

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Reply #29 on: April 27, 2011, 08:37:52 PM
Just a small comment on what I saw as a failing in the protagonist's scientific reasoning that has doomed her to failure.
In an infinity of possible universe in which you are trying to find a very specific outcome, there will be a finite number of universes in which you have the desired, very specific outcome, but an infinite number of universes in which the desired outcome does not occur.
Without any sort of guiding principles on how changing variables actually effects possible outcomes, or even a decent hypothesis on what changes what, the protag is essentially doomed to entering the worst lottery odds ever (Odds are 1:∞ ? Sure, give me five tickets...)
Maybe an actual scientist has a different perspective on this?
Not really a criticism of the story, just an observation.

I wasn't wowed by this one overall, but it was solidly OK.
-Adam



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Reply #30 on: April 28, 2011, 01:33:50 PM
In an infinity of possible universe in which you are trying to find a very specific outcome, there will be a finite number of universes in which you have the desired, very specific outcome, but an infinite number of universes in which the desired outcome does not occur.

Wouldn't there also be infinite universes with the desired outcome?  If you could compare infinities, it might be a less probable infinity, but it'd still be infinity.



acpracht

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Reply #31 on: April 28, 2011, 02:30:06 PM
I thought about this after I posted... I think I'm just making myself more confused. I don't know how one "infinity" can be larger than another "infinity." By definition, any infinity would be uncountably large, right. And yet, some logical part of my brain thinks just that: that given an infinite number of possible outcomes, finding a specific outcome among them is so impossible as to be indistinguishable from zero possibility.

Am I making any sense? :)

-Adam


In an infinity of possible universe in which you are trying to find a very specific outcome, there will be a finite number of universes in which you have the desired, very specific outcome, but an infinite number of universes in which the desired outcome does not occur.

Wouldn't there also be infinite universes with the desired outcome?  If you could compare infinities, it might be a less probable infinity, but it'd still be infinity.




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Reply #32 on: April 28, 2011, 03:18:14 PM
If it's any consolation, there can, in fact, be different sizes of infinity. 

There is an infinity of numbers between 0 and 1, for example.  (Decimal places don't ever end to the right.  You can keep going forever.)  However, there is also an infinity of numbers between 0 and 2.  That infinity is a larger infinity because of complicated math that I don't understand.  So your initial point was correct: she is looking for a particular infinity of options within an infinity of infinities of options.  She isn't being very scientific.  I disagree that this is somehow a flaw in the story, since the whole point is very much that she is Not Stable and has ulterior motives the size of Texas for her choice of "experiment."



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Reply #33 on: April 28, 2011, 05:37:26 PM
If it's any consolation, there can, in fact, be different sizes of infinity. 

There is an infinity of numbers between 0 and 1, for example.  (Decimal places don't ever end to the right.  You can keep going forever.)  However, there is also an infinity of numbers between 0 and 2.  That infinity is a larger infinity because of complicated math that I don't understand.  So your initial point was correct: she is looking for a particular infinity of options within an infinity of infinities of options.  She isn't being very scientific.  I disagree that this is somehow a flaw in the story, since the whole point is very much that she is Not Stable and has ulterior motives the size of Texas for her choice of "experiment."

What Scattercat said.  I will arbitrarily call the numbers between 0 and 1 Infinity1, and the other Infinity2.  Not only can you say that Infinity2 is larger than Infinity1, you can also say it's TWICE as large as Infinity1. 
Consider the question:  If you randomly choose a number within Infinity2, how likely is it that this number is also within Infinity1?  The answer is 50% because of the relative infiniteness of the intervals.

This is similar to the question in the story.  In this case Infinity1 is redefined as "futures where she ends up in a happy future with a guy" and Infinity2 is "all her possible futures from whatever branching point she's chosen".  There are infinite outcomes in both of these sets. 
The original question she was asking was "Given strategic selections from Infinity2, is the result within Infinity1"?
The question she ended up pursuing in the end was "How many damned random selections do I have to choose from Infinity2 to get JUST ONE result in Infinity1". 
In the beginning she had a hypothesis and set out to prove it or disprove it, which is along the scientific method.  In the end she had a particular goal in mind and wanted to find any way to force that result, which is not good use of the scientific method.

Anyway, which is to say, there was nothing wrong with her hypothesis.  It's her shifting methods that are the problem.



LaShawn

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Reply #34 on: April 28, 2011, 10:16:42 PM
If it's any consolation, there can, in fact, be different sizes of infinity.  

There is an infinity of numbers between 0 and 1, for example.  (Decimal places don't ever end to the right.  You can keep going forever.)  However, there is also an infinity of numbers between 0 and 2.  That infinity is a larger infinity because of complicated math that I don't understand.  So your initial point was correct: she is looking for a particular infinity of options within an infinity of infinities of options.  She isn't being very scientific.  I disagree that this is somehow a flaw in the story, since the whole point is very much that she is Not Stable and has ulterior motives the size of Texas for her choice of "experiment."

What Scattercat said.  I will arbitrarily call the numbers between 0 and 1 Infinity1, and the other Infinity2.  Not only can you say that Infinity2 is larger than Infinity1, you can also say it's TWICE as large as Infinity1.  
Consider the question:  If you randomly choose a number within Infinity2, how likely is it that this number is also within Infinity1?  The answer is 50% because of the relative infiniteness of the intervals.

This is similar to the question in the story.  In this case Infinity1 is redefined as "futures where she ends up in a happy future with a guy" and Infinity2 is "all her possible futures from whatever branching point she's chosen".  There are infinite outcomes in both of these sets.  
The original question she was asking was "Given strategic selections from Infinity2, is the result within Infinity1"?
The question she ended up pursuing in the end was "How many damned random selections do I have to choose from Infinity2 to get JUST ONE result in Infinity1".  
In the beginning she had a hypothesis and set out to prove it or disprove it, which is along the scientific method.  In the end she had a particular goal in mind and wanted to find any way to force that result, which is not good use of the scientific method.

Anyway, which is to say, there was nothing wrong with her hypothesis.  It's her shifting methods that are the problem.


::brain explodes::

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Reply #35 on: April 29, 2011, 01:53:49 PM
::brain explodes::

Which is surprisingly appropriate given this week's Escape Pod story "Tom the Universe".  :D



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Reply #36 on: April 29, 2011, 08:33:34 PM
I also enjoyed the complete inverse of this story - the Escapepod (or was it another podcast?) about a woman sending a gigolo back in time to her college self in order to give her more self-confidence.



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Reply #37 on: April 30, 2011, 11:14:56 AM
this is why i dropped maths

fun story though, I liked how she steadily disintegrated into insanity, obsessing over this one random guy. As someone who has a habit of obsessing over women in this way and wondering 'what if', i can sympathise (that's not to say that i obsess quite to the same extend as this person, but I've always idealised the 'random meeting with a stranger that turns into love' scenario, even if it's a terrible way of finding a compatible partner).

I thought the woman he was with near the end was actually an alternative reality her and the watch beeping at the end would reveal some weird brainfuck where she's not even in her reality anymore or something, but clearly not...


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Reply #38 on: May 02, 2011, 08:59:03 AM
I liked this a bit better than 'Taste Of Time', mostly because the obsessive behaviour was pretty well observed. Still, I didn't love it. Quite some of the things I didn't like so much about that one came back here like the fragmented style that prevented any real insight into the main character beyond that specific obsession. Another thing that has been pointed out was how unscientific she seemed, and instead of fine-tuning the details completely changing the set-up every time. Also not sure what you can take away from a story like that, there was no real rational reason why it never turned out well (or is the lesson that relations always end badly) which made me suspect that this was just a way for the author to enforce the moral on the character, and in the end, on the reader.

On a side note, about the math discussion above: Infinities can indeed be of different magnitude but the number of real numbers between 0 and 1 is actually the same as that between 0 and 2. You can see this since there is a mapping between every number between 0 and 1 to every number between 0 and 2 (x -> 2x). On the other hand, the number of real numbers between 0 and 1 IS larger than the number of positive integers (another infinity), because there is no way you can map the positive integers to the former set without missing (you guessed it) an infinite number of numbers. Just my finite number of cents.



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Reply #39 on: May 02, 2011, 04:11:57 PM
I also enjoyed the complete inverse of this story - the Escapepod (or was it another podcast?) about a woman sending a gigolo back in time to her college self in order to give her more self-confidence.

I believe you're referring to Escape Pod 61 "I Look Forward to Remembering You", written by Mur herself before she was EP's editor.  That is a very good story.



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Reply #40 on: May 02, 2011, 07:33:11 PM
Wow, I really liked this story! I loved how the alternate realities started out quite close to the original scenario, and slowly got crazier and crazier as her obsession got stronger and stronger. For me the icing on the cake would have been if we could have gotten to know the MC a little better, especially if we could have seen her slowly "losing her grip" in between the flashes of alternate realities. However, even without that there was enough information presented that it's fun to go back and analyze her from different viewpoints. :)


::brain explodes::
Which is surprisingly appropriate given this week's Escape Pod story "Tom the Universe".  :D

I giggled :D



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Reply #41 on: May 24, 2011, 06:11:08 AM
Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood. I seem to dislike a lot of stories right now.
Me too.
I think the biggest problem I had with this one was the switching between, what was it, first and third person POVs? I ended up skipping to the next episode after 10 minutes and never finished the story. Perhaps it would have worked better for me in print.
It did remind me somewhat of The Lathe of Heaven, with the constant tweaking to try to "fix" reality.

Well, I just loved this one. To be quite honest I'm a little over time-travel stuff as it's such a common trope in sci-fi -- I feel like it's been done to death, especially having just finished The Man Who Folded Himself, often feted as the last word in time-travel stories.
I think it might be more correct to say that it has been attempted to death, and the overwhelming majority of attempts are either failures, or else the story had very little to do with time travel. Most authors simply force whatever ending they wanted in the first place, rather than the ending that could plausibly happen, and the reader is cheated yet again.


So far, only Time Master by Robert L. Forward is on my list of "time travel done well" stories, but I will try to check out The Man Who Folded Himself.

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