Best Mathematical Science Fiction Books
best-sci-fi-books.com
best-sci-fi-books.com
(The war of the flowers was brilliant...)
The movie adaptation with Jody Foster changes the plot and leaves out much that the 90s movie studios thought general audiences wouldn’t be interested in.
Without giving away too much, the fictional result is a really clever thought experiment by Sagan about the nature of god, if he exists. (Although Sagan wasn’t the first to think of it, he was the first to put it in such an accessible way.)
It’s a fantastic novel, which for some reason isn’t much read these days.
A book that notably does not belong on this list but I read it because I thought it would be mathy has the title The Man Who Counts which I completely misinterpreted and continued to be befuddled by even after I finished reading it, having spent the entire book waiting for the math part of the story that never came.
And you could put The Part-Time Parliament by Leslie Lamport near that if you stretch it.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/story-ident...
The story is almost certainly Stephen Baxter's The Logic Pool.
https://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumb...
And this quote:
"Marsden's data stores contain a fragmented catalogue of mathematical variants. All founded on the postulates of arithmetic, but differing in their resolution of undecidable hypothesis." "Undecidability. You're talking about the incompleteness theorems," "Right. No logical system rich enough to contain the axioms of simple arithmetic can ever be made complete. It is always possible to construct statements that can be neither disproved nor proved by deduction from the axioms; instead the logical system must be enriched by incorporating the truth or falsehood of such statements as additional axioms..." The Continuum Hypothesis was an example. There were several orders of infinity. There were 'more' real numbers, scattered like dust in the interval between zero and one, that there were integers. Was there an order of infinity between the reals and the integers. This was undecidable, within logically simpler systems like set theory; additional assumptions had to be made. "So one can generate many versions of mathematics, by adding these true-false axioms." "And then searching on, seeking out statements which are undecidable in the new system. Yes. Because of incompleteness, there is an infinite number of such mathematical variants, spreading like the branches of a tree...."
http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/baxter/index.htm
Quoting from the beginning of the story:
This time he would reach the Sky. This time, before the Culling cut him away... The tree of axiomatic systems beneath him was broad, deep, strong. He looked around him, at sibling-twins who had branched at choice-points, most of them thin, insipid structures. They spread into the distance, infiltrating the Pool with their webs of logic. He almost pitied their attenuated forms as he reached upwards, his own rich growth path assured... Almost pitied. But when the Sky was so close there was no time for pity, no time for awareness of anything but growth, extension. Little consciousness persisted between Cullings. But he could remember a little of his last birthing; and surely he had never risen so high, never felt the logical richness of the tree beneath him surge upwards through him like this, empowering him. Now there was something ahead of him: a new postulate, hanging above him like some immense fruit. He approached it warily, savoring its compact, elegant form. The fibers of his being pulsed as the few, strong axioms at the core of his structure sought to envelop this new statement. But they could not. They could not. The new statement was undecidable, not deducible from the set within him. His excitement grew. The new hypothesis was simple of expression, yet ....
Accordingly, the best mathematical SF/fantasy I can think of is in short stories or novellas which are meant to be humorous. In particular, those criteria characterize:
-- Most of the stories in Fantasia Mathematica and its quasi-sequel anthology Mathematical Magpie. -- Flatland, which is novella length. -- The Dragons of Probability, or anything else in Lem's Cyberiad.
A big miss in this list is Christopher Priest's "Inverted world", about living in a non-Euclidean world.
I've other SF books with a of focus on math, from the "The stochastic man" to "Ninefox gambit", but they were either not enjoyable or with ridiculous mathematical contents.
1) Flatland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
2) Sphereland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphereland
3) Flatterland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatterland
Always RTFA before commenting. That's what we're all here for: discussion of TFA.
Other than "Flatland", the other two are not that well-known and the Wikipedia pages for the books are far more informative than this "article"; hence my comment.
PS: One of the comments on the above article's webpage points to this site which seems to be an exhaustive list of "Math Fiction" books - https://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/
I second "The Three Body Problem" series (writing is meh but I think the ideas are excellent. Disclaimer: first half of book one is a slog to get through but the second half onwards is fantastic, in my opinion. I keep thinking about the book many years later on a near biweekly basis).
"The Gods Themselves" by Asimov isn't a book mentioned here yet—it has nice math-physics energy ideas.
its why you dont write music for people who make music, there are too few of them to bother pleasing and most will just talk about how you dont know what youre doing and their own basement project is superior. the dearth of mathematical fiction could also be attributed to successful writers knowing better than to write for insufferable readers.