Sucked into the Vortex
Robert Charles Wilson's new book, Vortex, wraps up his Spin trilogy. More connected to Axis than Spin, Vortex brings together multiple intertwining histories that lead ultimately to the discovery of the truth about the "Hypotheticals", and the eventual end of the known universe.
Or does it?
(Spoiler alert.)
Immediately after finishing Vortex, I was left feeling a little empty and perplexed. I wasn't even sure I liked the book.
But, like all good books, even after it's done, it's never really over. I spent not a few hours laying awake in bed mulling it over. The issues raised by Wilson continue to resonate long after you turn the last page. As usual with his recent books, his story-telling is compelling, his characters real, and the issues grand and subtle at the same time.
The idea of convergence of different lives leading through pathways to one of only many possible histories more than hints at the notion that there are multiple possibilities, multiple pathways, and multiple universes. So the end is not really the end after all. In the one pathway that leads Turk Findley into the Vox culture, and ultimately to the disclosure through Isaac Dvali of what the Hypotheticals are doing, we experience the eventual end of Earth and even the physical universe. In another pathway, an ex-cop intervenes in a young Turk Findley's life before he ever went through an archway, and prevents the death of an individual that must ultimately change both Findley's and his victim's lives forever.
Orrin's recording of Findley's experiences has been tainted by this intervention. And so the story he relates can't possibly be the same as it was in the time-line where Sandra and Bose did not intervene. Consequently, we can never really know the truth. Is there, in fact, a single truth at all? Wilson's answer seems to be "No".
Similarly, we learn that there is no hypothetical intelligence guiding the events through which humanity is drawn. All of this technology is simply a process - like photosynthesis. This would seem to become the atheist's example of how great and unknowable events can be misinterpreted as God-driven to those who don't understand the processes that are taking place. And the processes are galactic in scale. Hypotheticals are nothing more than a technological scavenging process bent on ensuring humanity's survival simply so that humanity can make more resources available to the process, which is part of a galactic ecosystem.
All the same, there was, at some point, an ancient, alien civilization that created the fundamental building blocks of a self-replicating technology that, once set in motion, evolved into that process. Eventually, as the universe moves inexorably toward entropy, organic life intervenes, and becomes, through this process, in some sense non-corporal, spiritual, and immortal.
Is this cautionary? Should we be always vigilant about what we create, and what the impact of those creations might be on our ecosystem? Or is it also acknowledgement of a First Mover or Intelligent Designer? Does organic (not human) life ultimately tend toward, in an evolutionary sense, a non-physical, perhaps spiritual existence? Does organic life evolve to become the non-existent gods to which it prays?
We don't really know. We are left with questions, not answers, and so Vortex leaves the Spin universe completely open-ended. There is no end, despite what Isaac Dvali experiences, because his universe, the Spin universe, is only one possible universe in a much grander multiverse.
If there is any failing at all, it is, for me, in Dvali's (through Orrin's) closing monologue ("The Sum of All Paths"). It would be nearly impossible to convey in any human language the experiences of Dvali as he transitions from mortal to machine, from finite to infinite. The result is sometimes stilted, made the more so by the info-dump necessary to give the reader some kind of understanding of what's going on. I wonder if it was even necessary to have this last chapter, in this form. As Wittgenstein said, "That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence."
That weakness notwithstanding, Wilson is extraordinary at taking cosmic, metaphysical and spiritual questions and framing them in the experience of the ordinary individual. This is why Vortex is a masterful work of science fiction, and a masterful end to a stunning trilogy.
Or does it?
(Spoiler alert.)
Immediately after finishing Vortex, I was left feeling a little empty and perplexed. I wasn't even sure I liked the book.
But, like all good books, even after it's done, it's never really over. I spent not a few hours laying awake in bed mulling it over. The issues raised by Wilson continue to resonate long after you turn the last page. As usual with his recent books, his story-telling is compelling, his characters real, and the issues grand and subtle at the same time.
The idea of convergence of different lives leading through pathways to one of only many possible histories more than hints at the notion that there are multiple possibilities, multiple pathways, and multiple universes. So the end is not really the end after all. In the one pathway that leads Turk Findley into the Vox culture, and ultimately to the disclosure through Isaac Dvali of what the Hypotheticals are doing, we experience the eventual end of Earth and even the physical universe. In another pathway, an ex-cop intervenes in a young Turk Findley's life before he ever went through an archway, and prevents the death of an individual that must ultimately change both Findley's and his victim's lives forever.
Orrin's recording of Findley's experiences has been tainted by this intervention. And so the story he relates can't possibly be the same as it was in the time-line where Sandra and Bose did not intervene. Consequently, we can never really know the truth. Is there, in fact, a single truth at all? Wilson's answer seems to be "No".
Similarly, we learn that there is no hypothetical intelligence guiding the events through which humanity is drawn. All of this technology is simply a process - like photosynthesis. This would seem to become the atheist's example of how great and unknowable events can be misinterpreted as God-driven to those who don't understand the processes that are taking place. And the processes are galactic in scale. Hypotheticals are nothing more than a technological scavenging process bent on ensuring humanity's survival simply so that humanity can make more resources available to the process, which is part of a galactic ecosystem.
All the same, there was, at some point, an ancient, alien civilization that created the fundamental building blocks of a self-replicating technology that, once set in motion, evolved into that process. Eventually, as the universe moves inexorably toward entropy, organic life intervenes, and becomes, through this process, in some sense non-corporal, spiritual, and immortal.
Is this cautionary? Should we be always vigilant about what we create, and what the impact of those creations might be on our ecosystem? Or is it also acknowledgement of a First Mover or Intelligent Designer? Does organic (not human) life ultimately tend toward, in an evolutionary sense, a non-physical, perhaps spiritual existence? Does organic life evolve to become the non-existent gods to which it prays?
We don't really know. We are left with questions, not answers, and so Vortex leaves the Spin universe completely open-ended. There is no end, despite what Isaac Dvali experiences, because his universe, the Spin universe, is only one possible universe in a much grander multiverse.
If there is any failing at all, it is, for me, in Dvali's (through Orrin's) closing monologue ("The Sum of All Paths"). It would be nearly impossible to convey in any human language the experiences of Dvali as he transitions from mortal to machine, from finite to infinite. The result is sometimes stilted, made the more so by the info-dump necessary to give the reader some kind of understanding of what's going on. I wonder if it was even necessary to have this last chapter, in this form. As Wittgenstein said, "That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence."
That weakness notwithstanding, Wilson is extraordinary at taking cosmic, metaphysical and spiritual questions and framing them in the experience of the ordinary individual. This is why Vortex is a masterful work of science fiction, and a masterful end to a stunning trilogy.
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