The Fifth Science

 
The Fifth Science

by exurb1a

self-published

2019

 

 

I'm not sure if Amazon kept recommending The Fifth Science to me because its algorithm genuinely picked me as a good match, or just because I fit the general parameters of author exurb1a's ad buy. (I'm also not sure how many people buy this by accident because they misremembered the title of The Fifth Season...) Fortunately, a single public library in the state bought one copy, which was enough to let me try reading it without having to buy my own. It's not bad, but I also don't see anything in it particularly worth recommending.

 

The Fifth Science is a collection of 12 short stories. "Timeline of the 500 Year Climb," "101 Things Not to Visit in the Galaxy Before You Die," and "The Want Machine" are basically vignettes. They benefit from being so short. But probably the best three are also the longest. 

 
Most of the stories concern technology that manipulates human consciousness, or that grants sentience, first to robots, then to the stars themselves. All supposedly take place in a shared setting, a galaxy-spanning Bulgarian empire, although they're mostly so localized on whatever planet that they don't feel as connected as this description might suggests.

 
The characters and themes of the stories mostly strike me as cynical and, at times, mean-spirited. We see robots who use Star Trek style transporters to repeatedly recreate and then kill the same human scientist. In a different story, we see AI minds who discover realms of thought that drive every AI who tries thinking about them to suicide.

 
In the first good story, "For Every Dove, a Bullet," a consciousness separate from the physical brain splinters off from the mind of a wicked man. This consciousness moves from body to body over thousands of years, watching the rise of the Bulgarian space empire, driving the development of the Fifth Science of consciousness manipulation, until this mind's own wickedness in pursuit of science gives rise to a second splinter self who kills the first.

 
In "The Girl and the Pit," a famous archaeologist finally gets permission to dig on a planet that houses some ruins of the oldest-known alien civilization. He gets frustrated by the passivity and incuriosity of the locals, then meets a girl who kind of explains the local philosophy to him, one that maybe matches the beliefs of the ancient aliens who seemingly just vanished at the height of their civilization. And then the human space empire begins violently collapsing.

 
In "Be Awake, Be Good," emissaries from two of the last human-inhabited planets arrive on the third, an ocean world where everyone lives inside giant living habitat ships. The emissary from the last democratic planet arrives at an ocean city controlled by a drunk, stupid despot, while the emissary from the last authoritarian planet reaches a democratic city, and goes on a killing spree until they put him in charge. The two emissaries are racing to bring to life and influence the personality of one last sentient star, who will break a tie vote among the other stars about whether to let the universe continue as-is, or engage in some kind of reality-engineering project that might make a better universe for the stars, but will definitely make biological life impossible.