Greg Egan, Kelly Link Collaborate on Novel


by L. Ron Creepweans

Today Tyr books announced that they were publishing The Girl Detective's Quantum Hat, a collaborative novel by Greg Egan and Kelly Link.

"Greg and I were hanging out in the SHANAWS* chat room," said Link, "when we realized that I had never written hard science fiction, and Greg had never written modern interstitial fantasy. So we decided to collaborate on a novel."

The Girl Detective's Quantum Hat features Cindy, a teenage sleuth who investigates mysteries in her small hometown in Iowa. One day while walking in the woods, she comes across a brightly colored hat.

"Unbeknownst to Cindy, the hat is made not of regular matter, but rather a cross-entangled, vector-confined quark-gluon plasma held in superimposed Gell-Mann matrices by a meta-distributed array of smart femto-scale assemblers," commented Egan via e-mail. "The entire assemblage forms an Einstein-Rosen bridge into a pocket universe of self-aware cellular automata dwelling in 12-dimensional Fourier space which sits atop an ever-expanding universal computational substrate. As the beings in this universe are capable of simultaneously running a near-infinite number of simulations of our world on that same substrate, they are able to recreate all possible stochastic outcomes to those mysteries, from which Cindy is able to deduce the most likely solution."

"She also has a talking dog," added Link.

Tyr announced that The Girl Detective's Quantum Hat would be the second novel in their new Collaborations line, right after Jerry Pournelle and Ken MacLeod's The King's Red Brigade, the story of anarcho-communist mercenaries in the employ of a distant planet's feudal aristocracy.