Erik's Reviews > Dark Matter

Are you happy?

So ask the characters of each other and themselves at key moments throughout the story. And while the story has a sci-fi wrapping, it’s this eternal, human question that serves as the story’s heart. So let’s talk about it!

I’m not going to pretend I have THE definition of happiness, but I have A definition of happiness that I think is pretty good:

That, at the present moment, you have something in your life more precious than anything else you could even imagine. For most people, this will be the relationship with their children or other loved ones, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be an object - a dream house, say - or even an experience - a religious conversion that could not have been more profound.

Now, combine this precious with at least an implicit understanding of chaos theory, the butterfly effect, and/or quantum mechanics - that is, the realization that even the most apparently minute change in the past could have resulted in drastic changes in the present. And now you know happiness:

Because you will have no regrets. You will have total acceptance. Because no matter what horrible things happened to you or the world in the past, no matter how suboptimal the choices and outcomes of your life up to this present moment, you wouldn’t risk a single change because you understand that to do so would risk the existence of your precious. That is happiness, that is contentment, the Gollum-reference notwithstanding.

But here’s the rub: happiness can only ever be fragile because that precious thing can be so easily taken from you, either by your own mistake or cruel reality. The child can die. The wonderful spouse can divorce you. The house can be destroyed by a hurricane because you built it too close to the beach. The religious conversion can be poisoned when you discover that your church has aided and abetted pedophile priests.

I myself once knew such happiness, and not even that long ago. I rescued a dog that meant the world to me. Hey, look, you can even see a picture of us in my profile and his silhouette is in my dev studio’s logo. I knew the happiness of waking up every day, being perfectly content with all the decisions of my life because any change, even the smallest change, would have meant that Atlas and I were not together. I had to be dating the woman who had to say, “We’re adopting a dog or else.” COVID had to happen to isolate us enough that she issued that ultimatum. I HAD to go to the animal shelter on that ONE day, at that EXACT moment, to get Atlas. He was only there for a day or two, he wasn’t even officially registered yet. It had to be then. So literally any change in my life - and there’s been some bad mojo in my life, let me tell you - was unacceptable.

My dog Atlas died in an accident at a young age - and so total acceptance has become total regret.

But getting to Dark Matter finally: That whole arc is basically the arc of Dark Matter, except this ‘butterfly effect’ discussion is made concrete by the inclusion of the Many-World Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the notion that waveform collapse represents the branching of the universe into a multi-verse. All that COULD happen DOES happen…a giant tree, Yggdrasill if you will, of all the permutations of reality. Our universe is but a single branch of that. But what if you could explore the other branches…?

The sci-fi here is really just a means to an end. It doesn’t get much more advanced than the paragraph I just wrote. So if you’re interested in a deeper sci-fi exploration of MWI, I would point you towards Greg Egan’s Permutation City, which compared to this book (in terms of the sci-fi elements) is like a Claude Monet painting versus a kindergartener’s crayon drawing.

But that isn’t a criticism of Dark Matter, which ultimately doesn’t particularly care about the science-fiction elements. They really are just the means to an end, that end being the aforementioned question: Are you happy? and the related question: Do you ponder much the ‘paths not taken’ and regret not choosing the other fork? Specifically in Dark Matter, it’s the character of Jason Dessen, a man who MIGHT have become an acclaimed physicist but instead chose to have a family, who explores this question.

It’s a good story. I read it in a single evening. Your preferences may vary but when I read novels, I need a good story first and foremost. Without a good story, without a character or two I can root for (or against), a novel is just a worse version of some other type of text. It’s a worse version of a non-fiction exploration of interpretations of quantum mechanics. It’s a worse version of a philosophical text exploring the meaning of life.

As I said, however, the book does center first and foremost on telling this story of Jason Dressen, and all the other sci-fi gooey is just extra filling to add spice and flavor. I don’t think a book will ever be anyone’s precious, I don’t think it alone can constitute that bulwark against regret, but this is still one of the good ones and a worthy read.