Wang’s Carpets by Greg Egan

“Wang’s Carpets” is a 1995 science fiction novelette by Greg Egan. It is about a group of cloned beings who discover an amazing life form on a planet orbiting Vega.

Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell:

In a far future Earth the majority of citizens are software clones of humans who live in communities know as polises. One of these polises, Carter-Zimmermann, copies itself a thousand times and sends each copy to a different star in the galaxy. They are searching for extraterrestrial life to help disprove a theory that the universe was created solely for mankind. This story follows one of the copies of Carter-Zimmermann that arrive at Orpheus, a watery world orbiting Vega, where they discover one huge, thin life form that ends up being more amazing than anyone ever imagined.

Vega’s sole planet, Orpheus, had been a featureless blip to the best lunar interferometers; now Paolo gazed down in its blue-green crescent, ten thousand kilometers below Carter-Zimmerman itself. Orpheus was terrestrial, a nickel-iron-silicate world; slightly larger than Earth, slightly warmer – a billion kilometers took the edge off Vega’s heat – and almost drowning in liquid water. Impatient to see the whole surface firsthand, Paolo slowed his clock rate a thousandfold, allowing C-Z to circumnavigate the planet in twenty subjective seconds, daylight unshrouding a broad new swath with each pass. Two slender ocher-colored continents with mountainous spines bracketed hemispheric oceans, and dazzling expanses of pack ice covered both poles – far more so in the north, where jagged white peninsulas radiated out from the midwinter arctic darkness.

My Two Cents:

• The good:

• This is a very hard science fiction story – if you like heady stuff written for smart people then you’ll love this one.
• There are some very cool ideas in this story: software entities cloned from real humans, using copies to travel the huge distances between stars and, of course, the brilliant carpets.
• This is a story that will make you think; it will stretch your mind with nifty ideas and push you to the limits of your understanding of biology and technology. In fact, this story could probably do with two readings!

• The bad:

• If you’d rather not read detailed descriptions of the hard sciences, such as the atmosphere surrounding a new found planet, then you may want to stay away from this story.
• If you are the kind of person who likes to focus more on the story and not so much on the science… well, skip this.

Fact Sheet:
• “Wang’s Carpets” garnered the following awards:

• It won the 1998 Hayakawa’s SF Magazine Reader’s Award for foreign short story.
• “Wang’s Carpets” placed fourth in the 1996 Locus poll for best novelette.
• It was also nominated for the 1996 Aurealis Award.

Where you can find “Wang’s Carpets”:

• This short story first appeared in the 1995 Tor book New Legends.
• “Wang’s Carpets” has also been collected in Gardner Dozois’s amazing collection The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction. (Read my review of this book.)

Related Yet Still Interesting Links:

• This short story was later expanded into the novel Diaspora.
• Buddy Pennington has written a cool review of this story on his blog – sorry, no longer available.
• You might enjoy this story more if you brush up on your knowledge of Wang Tiles and Turing Machines.
• Greg Egan has a pretty cool website with lots of information about his stories and novels – including many links to free versions!

Craving More Stories?
If you enjoyed this story then you may like Mortimer Gray’s History of Death by Brian Stableford – a story about a nearly immortal man, living in a far future Earth, who writes a life defining Magnum Opus.

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