JulesNew book: M.R. Carey's "Infinity Gate". Part one of a duology. Humanity accidentally discovers parallel dimensions, AI threatens everything. Some things always stay the same, I guess.
"She was a genius, but only in a small way. Her greatest discovery was made almost completely by accident, and it had been made before by others in a great many elsewheres. In fact Hadiz’s contribution to history is marked throughout by things done casually or without intention."
Why of course. A woman who's a genius scientist, period? Now, we can't have THAT. Just a genius in a small way! Making discoveries by accident! Unlike the male geniuses-in-a-big-way!
"Campus Cross was a small side project jointly owned by the Catholic Church and by three billionaires who had all separately decided that the world was now so badly screwed that their individual fortunes might not be enough to unscrew it."
I am kind of staring speechless at this concept.
Okay. We are going to need the "science. It does NOT work like this, folks" speech.
Hadiz is introduced as a "particle physicist" whose work requires "no mind or muscle other than her own". Which is a stretch even for a theoretician, but apparently she has a lab? There's no way you can run a modern research lab without assistants and grad students. It's not the 1500s anymore, folks.
This conversation is about an AI tool:
“Do you always use feminine pronouns when discussing strings of code?” Hadiz asked, by way of avoiding the invitation. She preferred to solve her problems under her own steam and indebted to no one. “I tell you, it’s hard not to with Rupshe. She skirts the edge of sentience.” “And do you think women do that too, Andris?”
Good one, Hadiz! 😂👍🏼
"Physicists divide the forces and effects that govern the universe into two separate categories, called scalar and vector."
Dude. If gravity were indeed a scalar or vector field, unifying all four forces would be A LOT easier!
Free worldbuilding tip: you CAN indeed have your great discovery happen off-screen and never give any details.
It's preferable to this lazy level of nonsensical technobabble.
"Hadiz put scalar and vector values together in the same box and shook them until their labels fell off. [...] She was hoping that if the dark energy boson wandered by it would be confused enough to stick around while she took its picture."
What.
Proto Himbo European@quidcumque I think I see what they author is trying to do here, part of which is to write about something complex and beyond their own areas of knowledge, and it is failing miserably. They're trying to use high-level metaphors, adorned with slappy, colloquial syntax, to make this approach more palatable, maybe. It's too bad they put this in the narrator's voice (TBF, I think I've seen that done well, in contrast to this). It might have worked better if, for instance, someone else tried to characterize her work this way and she stared at them for a few seconds then said, "Sure. Yeah. Why not."