Ian Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has five honorary doctorates and is an honorary wizard of Unseen University. His more than 130 books include Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities and the four-volume series The Science of Discworld with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen. His SF novels include the trilogy Wheelers, Heaven, and Oracle (with Jack Cohen), The Living Labyrinth and Rock Star (with Tim Poston), and Jack of All Trades. Short story collections are Message from Earth and Pasts, Presents, Futures. His Flatland sequel Flatterland has extensive fantasy elements. He has published 33 short stories in Analog, Omni, Interzone, and Nature, with 10 stories in Nature's 'Futures' series. He was Guest of Honour at Novacon 29 in 1999 and Science Guest of Honour and Hugo Award Presenter at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki in 2017. He delivered the 1997 Christmas Lectures for BBC television. His awards include the Royal Society's Faraday Medal, the Gold Medal of the IMA, the Zeeman Medal, the Lewis Thomas Prize, the Euler Book Prize, the Premio Internazionale Cosmos, the Chancellor's Medal of the University of Warwick, and the Bloody Stupid Johnson Award for Innovative Uses of Mathematics.
Don't poke your nose down a wormhole – you never know what you might find.
Two universes joined by a wormhole pair that forms a 'loophole', with an icemoon orbiting through the loophole, shared between two different planetary systems in the two universes.
A civilisation with uploaded minds in virtual reality served by artificial humans.
A ravening Horde of replicating machines that kill stars.
Real humans from a decrepit system of colony worlds.
A race of hyperintelligent but somewhat vague aliens.
Who will close the loophole… who will exploit it?
Loophole is a far-future big concept novel involving two universes.
I loved this intriguing book, full of awe-inspiring science-fiction ideas. You might need to have your wits about you as you read it, as there's something going on that's only hinted at at first but which slowly comes to light. It contains fascinating (speculative) science, exploration, space-battles – and a truly terrifying evil. Ian and I share a publisher, and I was lucky enough to catch him reading from the book at his launch event. – Simon Kewin
"When universes collide…A multicosmos at war in a scenario of staggering, but scientifically authentic, invention… As if the Marvel multiverse collided with 2001: A Space Odyssey… I am awed, and I don't awe easily. The highest of high-concept SF."
– Stephen Baxter, Award-winning author of the Xeelee sequence, Time Slip and many others"There's Hard SF. There's Wide-Screen Baroque. Now with Ian Stewart's Loophole we have Wrap-Around Rococo. Daringly inventive, Loophole is a mind-fryingly, Möbius-twistingly intense SF adventure of the first order."
– Henry Gee, Senior Editor at Nature, and author of A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth"mind boggling stuff, containing a truly remarkable collection of ideas. It's a fascinating attempt at portraying both human and non-human future tech on a grand scale."
– Brian Clegg, Popular Science book review siteIn the cold and dark between stars, vacuum slid against vacuum. There was a hole in the universe, and it moved.
Fast. Very fast. Faster than had once been thought possible. Compared to this, photons crawled.
There is a limit to the speed at which matter can move through space. There is no limit to the speed at which space can move through space.
A baby universe, so severely warped that it had become disconnected from the rest of reality, slipped between the tenuous fabric of the parent that had spawned it. The metasphere was a perfect globe of space three hundred metres across. Its parent unzipped before it to let its child pass unhindered, and zipped together behind it to seal the tear and heal a wounded continuum. The metasphere was not part of the parent universe, though born of it. What defined it was the hole where its parent temporarily failed to exist.
In three weeks the metasphere had travelled more than fourteen thousand light years, and it was now nearing the midpoint of its journey.
From outside — from normspace, the normal universe — the metasphere was virtually undetectable. It could not be seen, for light bent round it, as if distorted by an intense gravitational field, and resumed its original path. The detour caused a slight delay, but it was imperceptible. The loss of energy would not register on the most sensitive of instruments; the phase shift would go undetected because there was nothing to compare it with. Only the distorted geodesics of spacetime could reveal the metasphere's presence, for this was curvature without matter, gravity without mass.
The only practical way to detect the metasphere was to place something in its path. The metasphere would pass unharmed, walled off from external reality inside its own spacetime bubble, but the impactee, be it an observer or an instrument, would be no more than a spreading cloud of particles ripped asunder by acute gravitational curvature, and a faint, nondescript patch of noise in the x-ray spectrum, quickly fading, submerged in the background radiation of a busy universe. But to intercept the metasphere in that manner, you had to know where it was going, which was impossible because you could not observe it.
As long as the metasphere's track stayed clear of concentrations of matter, it was undetectable.
No, there is no limit to the speed at which space can move through space — and that remains true when the moving space contains matter. This loophole in the inviolable laws of nature was what had led Omfalos to build metaspheres and the strange abscission engines that enfolded them. Now the sole limitation was the power of your engine. This one was rated for 260,000c — just over a quarter of a million times faster than light.
The metasphere, though made of space, was not empty. Inside, dwarfed by the metaspace that it generated, was an abscission engine — an enigmatic machine composed almost entirely of force fields, glowing a blue so deep and so dark that it hovered at the very limits of human visual acuity. Its shape was a disturbing mixture of angular planes and soft, molten surfaces. It rotated in three hidden dimensions of metaspacetime, so that the shape seemed to change, slowly morphing from one sinister form to another in a logic that the human mind could not intuitively comprehend.
The engine was one of a pair, but only one was active. This was standard operational procedure, the second being kept in reserve in case the first malfunctioned. Abscission engines were extremely reliable, but a failure would be catastrophic — a dying hulk marooned hundreds of light years from the nearest safe harbour with only subluminal capabilities. In mission-critical technology, redundancy equals safety.
Anyway, starships were more expensive than abscission engines.
Only one region within the metasphere, an ellipsoidal cavity, remained invariant. Although embedded in metaspace, it behaved like normspace, allowing it to surround a more orthodox structure, the Omfalid corvette First Refusal. On board was a skeleton crew of eight Sweepers, an assortment of weaponry, and enough room for the thirty-two Fixers they had been sent to rescue, if any were still alive and could be found. It was a faint hope. For now, the passenger compartments were empty and dark, reverberating with strange echoes as the ship's vital gases and fluids pumped through insulated cavities between the layers of its triple hulls.
Snugly enveloped by the metafield generated by its abscission engine, First Refusal floated near the centre of the metasphere, perfectly stationary, repelled by the sphere's tight geodesic curvature, safe in an impenetrable cocoon. When the abscission field powered down and the cocoon dissolved, three weeks hence… that would be another matter altogether. The crew had no idea what to expect, except that it would almost certainly be dangerous.
That was why they were there.
