{"id":4468,"date":"2022-06-13T11:13:22","date_gmt":"2022-06-13T11:13:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=4468"},"modified":"2022-08-12T11:19:39","modified_gmt":"2022-08-12T11:19:39","slug":"beyond-these-stars-other-tribulations-of-love-by-usman-t-malik","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=4468","title":{"rendered":"Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love by Usman T. Malik"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations<\/em><\/strong> <strong>of Love<\/strong> by Usman T. Malik (<em>Wired<\/em>, 11<sup>th<\/sup> December 2020) starts off in mainstream territory with a diabetic Pakistani man called Bari whose mother is suffering from dementia. He cares for her, and he worries about what will happen if he gets ill.<br>After a few pages of scene setting (including a childhood flashback), Bari agrees to join the New Suns to better care for his mother. This involves him joining a starship crew after he is given quantum consciousness:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Decades ago, the Penrose-Hameroff theory ushered in a new era of quantum consciousness: Although gravity prevents the occurrence of large objects in two places simultaneously, subatomic particles can exist at opposite ends of the universe at the same time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>The remainder of the story sees Bari switch his consciousness back and forth between his body on the starship and a telepresence robot in his mother\u2019s house. Because of the relativistic effects (time passes much more quickly on Earth than it does on the ship), a few seconds away from the ship equates to hours on Earth. Eventually (spoiler) the relativistic trips start to have a mental toll on Bari, which in turn causes the failure of a relationship with a woman on board the ship. Then the mother dies a couple of weeks or so after launch (on Earth, over a decade has passed).<br>What we have here is a mainstream story with a clunky SF idea bolted on, i.e. a hand-wringing story about family and dementia, and not one about quantum consciousness.<br>* Mediocre. 2,950 words. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/future-of-work-beyond-these-stars-other-tribulations-of-love-usman-t-malik\/\">Story link<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love by Usman T. Malik (Wired, 11th December 2020) starts off in mainstream territory with a diabetic Pakistani man called Bari whose mother is suffering from dementia. He cares for her, and he worries about what will happen if he gets ill.After a few pages of scene setting (including [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1057],"tags":[21,296,1060,1061,12,1000,1058,1059],"class_list":["post-4468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-usman-t-malik","tag-21","tag-296","tag-dementia","tag-quantum-pairing","tag-short-story","tag-telepresence","tag-usman-t-malik","tag-wired"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4468"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5337,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4468\/revisions\/5337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}