The Condition Of New Death

[Traveller]

Thread for discussion of The Condition Of New Death

[Saski]

This was odd, and maybe a bit too philosophical for me there toward the end.

[Magdelanye]

this is my first sensation too Ruth. I feel there must be some symbolism that is hard to discern because the idea is so bizarre and distasteful the mind recoils rather than approaches.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

It made me think of how I felt when I first started learning about Einstein & Relativity. Everything depends on your frame of reference, but particularly the Twin Paradox. Special relativity (actually, probably even before that) says that if I fly, at near the speed of light, to Alpha Centauri, turn around and come back at the same speed, when I return home my twin will be some years older than me (don't ask me to work out how much). But if I'm accelerating away from you, you're equally accelerating away from me! So (this is the Paradox part), when I get back to Earth, I will be older than him!

Now we know that no matter which twin is older, our feet will be pointing towards each other.

[Cecily]

I guess the video game analogy ticks a cyber-punk box (sort of) and the specifics are about the fact we're the centre of our own virtual universes?

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

I've always believed that by definition, if the universe extends to infinity in every direction, we are each at the centre of the real universe!

But like so many of the shorter stories here, I just don't think he dug deep enough to make it work. I'm not sure there's a video-game "analogy"—it's actually theorized that there is a game going on, but he leaves it hanging.