Malicious Math

A review of Matt Moore’s “Delta Pi” (from Torn Realities, Post Mortem Press: 2012)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Matt Moore’s “Delta Pi” is an Aurora-nominated short story that plays with the idea that math can be a spell as powerful as any invocation. Math is a language, a coded system, and reality imposes strict rules upon it, but math is also something that is seen to govern reality, a system that provides guidelines for interpreting the world. What happens when those guidelines shift? What happens when technology changes the basics of math? Does reality itself shift? “Delta Pi” explores technology that fundamentally questions and alters the nature of Pi, the mathematical constant that represents the ratio of every circle’s circumference to its diameter. When that number shifts, when technology alters it, the world, a fundamentally circular space changes and shifts. Our universe is left in a state of question when things that are structured as constants begin to change – the altered Pi is a gateway to the unknown.

Matt Moore sets his story at a research lab where new technology is being tested. His protagonist is a teacher for the children of the lab techs and researchers in the experimental lab attached to the school. Gradually, through an experiment with the children, he finds out that Pi is shifting, the number ramping up from 3.14159 to 3.26, and then to 3.71… the coding underlying the universe’s constants is changing and this could have meaning for the entirety of reality. Moore explores the danger of experimentation and the power of math as a coded system, a language that has the capability for describing the nature of reality.

In particular, Matt Moore’s protagonist fascinated me because of his disability, since few SF narratives deal in depth with disability. His disability is not revealed until later in the story unlike many narratives about disabled people that generally reveal disability early on and structure the entire person and their personality around their body. The significance of his protagonist’s disability is revealed most prevalently when the plot makes it relevant – when the nature of the circle, and thus the wheels on his wheelchair, are fundamentally shifted.

To find out more about Matt Moore, you can visit his site at www.mattmoorewrites.com . To find out more about the Prix Aurora Awards, visit their website at http://www.prixaurorawards.ca/