I never did like Jeremy Blasingame. He had been a colleague for a few years, and his office was six doors down from mine. It seemed to me that he was one of those people who are fundamentally uncomfortable around the blind; and it's always the blind person's job to put these people at their ease, which gets to be a pain in the ass. (In fact, I usually ignore the problem.) Jeremy always watched me closely (you can tell this by voice) and it was clear that he found it hard to believe that I was one of the co-editors of Topological Geometry, a journal he submitted to occasionally. But he was a good mathematician, and a fair topologist, and we had published some of his submissions, so that he and I remained superficially friendly.

Still, he was always probing, always picking my brains. At this time I was working hard on the geometry of n-dimensional manifolds and some of the latest results from CERN and SLAC and the big new accelerator on Oahu wer fitting into the work in an interesting way; it appeared that certain sub-atomic particles were moving as if in a multi-dimensional manifold, and I had Sullivan and Wu and some of the other physicists from these places asking questions about my work in multi-dimensional geometries. With them I was happy to talk, but with Jeremy I couldn't see the point. Certain speculations I once made in conversation with him later showed up in one of his paers; and it just seemed to me that he was looking for help without actually saying so.

Dear Prof. Kasman,

an even more near-lying source for that novel would be "The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson", Night Shade Books. (I just tripped over it at the local public lib.)

A short review: I rather like my SF hard, rock-hard, PSpace hard :-) This doesn't necessarily mean aliens and time machines and robots and all that, but rather that it's, just as math, Axiomatic. (Which reminds me BTW that Greg Egans selfsame-named short story collection needs to be included on your site for the title alone :-)

Robinson is rather from the literary than the idea dept. (see Wiki) - in *very* short stories he doesn't excel, as I see from the above-mentioned anthology. "The Blind Geometer", which is markedly longer in comparison to the rest, definitively is one of the best stories in that book. The protagonist is greatly characterized. The math is not *that* specific, though. Desargues, whatever. (I would have inserted an allusion to Bernard Morin instead.)

Yours sincerely

H. Reddmann