A Son of the Rock

Crystal Night by Greg Egan

Greg Egan‘s early stories in Interzone (quite a while ago now) exploring aspects of quantum physics were much vaunted but I always found them cold, distanced, unengaging. In this respect Crystal Night, about developing artificial intelligence by evolutionary means within hardware housed in an expensive computer device Egan calls a crystal, starts promisingly, as one of the human characters raises ethical objections to the project. She rapidly vanishes from the story, however, never to reappear as a voice.

The nub of Crystal Night of course reminded me of Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God which also dealt with developing intelligence in an artificial environment, but that was with flesh and blood creatures and, as I remember it, had a more human dimension.

By contrast the protagonist in Crystal Night is a borderline megalomaniac. Egan tries to endow him with sympathetic tendencies but these do not go near counterweighing his autocratic nature, his feeling of entitlement. As in Microcosmic God the conditions the intelligences experience in the crystal are progressively and ruthlessly adjusted to force them to evolve in the desired direction.

Crystal Night does raise incidentally the question of whether we might be artificial creatures in some sort of huge simulation but it is not alone in that. More centrally it questions how much creations owe to their creator especially if that creator is insensitive to their needs and wishes, more intent on pursuing (in this case) his devices and desires but the main fault in Crystal Night is that the AIs are more interesting than the humans; and we see too little of them.

Interestingly, in comparison to the Ted Chiang piece, I noticed only one typo here.

Really, though, this is just Microcosmic God with AIs. And without the humanity.
No award.