I thought his justification was convincing. I've seen an awful lot of VERY bright people lose it over far less. Something about extreme intelligence makes people more sensitive, I think. They don't have the armor of the ignorant. That loss of being on the forefront of something so exciting and then failing to function, is enough to drive anyone to drink, for sure. To die, if the drink is so controlling, possibly. I was convinced. The two choices were drink or shoot and that those paralleled the wave/ particle duality. If he drinks, he doesn't shoot. If he shoots, he collapses the reality of the drinking life. The conscious act of telling himself that if he took a drink, he was going to shoot was enough to prevent the reality of the wave-form drink. Bringing consciousness to that decision was enough to determine it, just like in the Feynman experiment. Also SPOILER HERE - I thought the ending line about him collapsing the reality of the experiment he had set up months before was a substitute for the suicide. He took a drink to set up the interference pattern (and really - what is drinking, but an interference pattern, anyway?) and then opened the envelope to make the indeterminate state determined. His life had been frozen in that souless indeterminate state, between drink and gun and he acted to resolve it.
Genius, really. The more I think about it, the more I think I'll never be able to write something so very cool. Alicia On Sep 6, 2008, at 1:52 PM, delancey wrote: > > Yeah, I voted to nominate it for the Nebula ballot. I thought it very > well done, with some clever ideas. I did have one very, very big > reservation, though. Why should I be suicidal about the twin slit, or > because some people collapse the wave differently? I don't see it, > really. Seems bizarrely arbitrary -- like some Victorian being > suicidal because someone discovers space is curved. That'll likely > keep me from voting for it on the final ballot. > > cd > > > On Sep 6, 12:07 pm, Alicia Henn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I just read a story that Nan Kress had recommended to me last week. >> I had been Greg Egan's biggest fan. >> Now I wanna grow up to be Ted Kosmatka. >> His story, "Divining Light" in the August Asimov's rocks electrons. >> Definitely worth buying a copy on the newstand if they're still >> around. >> >> Alicia > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
