Cindy usually didn’t come over to this module to study, but tonight there was something about sitting in a recliner chair by a fireplace that made the task all the more pleasant. Even if the recliner wasn’t much more than a fabric sling on a reclining frame, and the fireplace was electric with digital sound effects, they created an atmosphere of cozy warmth that made her reading assignment more enjoyable.
Literature classes up here were always interesting. Unlike back on Earth, her teachers didn’t automatically dismiss science fiction as “escapist trash.” Far from it, several of them explicitly included sf books in their curriculum, using them to show how the Literature of the Possible created sufficient interest in spaceflight and other advanced technologies that a whole generation would work to make it actually happen. She’d found it especially amusing when one of her teachers gave the class excerpts from several early astronauts’ memoirs in which they mentioned reading or watching science fiction about space travel in their younger days.
On the other hand, there was the down side: namely, that reading for class was always different from reading for fun. You had to pay closer attention to the text, especially if it was something new to you, and that could actually take away from being able to immerse yourself in the story and the world and just be there.
Which was probably why she noticed Juss Forsythe puttering around at something behind her. Deciding it was a perfect excuse for a break, she looked up. “Hi, Juss.”
His solemn expression was washed away by one of those big grins his geneset was famous for. “How’s it going, Cindy?”
“OK, I guess. I mean, I’d always heard about Frank Herbert and the Dune books, but I never actually got around to reading them until we got assigned them for lit class. Well, at least the first one, and the first four if we can manage it. Our teacher doesn’t think much of the rest of them.”
“So how are you liking them?”
“It’s pretty heavy reading. Some of the language is a little old-fashioned, and I thought there was some kind of experiment that proved that true precognition couldn’t exist.”
“You’re talking about the Chang-Mendolssen Experiments, aren’t you?”
“I think that’s the names I heard. Something about superdeterminism.”
She could tell she’d hit the right answer when he gave her a vigorous nod. “Although I’ve heard some arguments that Herbert’s interpretation of prescience is based on the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics rather than superdeterminism. Basically, the whole business about being able to see into the future freezing the future in that form suggests that prescience causes the wave front to collapse. But these days there’s more and more evidence for the Many Worlds Interpretation, which completely disallows the possibility of foreseeing a definite future, only a manifold of possible worlds.”
“Wow, that’s fascinating. Maybe I ought to write my essay on the quantum mechanical underpinnings of his portrayal of prescience.”
“If you have Jenny Taylor as your teacher, she really likes getting essays that dig into the science under the fiction. And if you want, I can help you track down sources.”
“Thanks. That’d be great.” Cindy shot a pointed glance at the life support monitor on the wall, with the clock readout above the standard indicators for partial pressures of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. “Right now, I’ve got another thirty percent of this book I need to get to get read before I go to bed.”