The Universe Is Basically a Hippie's Pipe Dream

Vandana Singh knows the universe is strange--she's a physics professor. She's also a science fiction author who uses the knowledge gleaned from her day job to write stories as bizarre as the universe itself. "I have a one-line ad for a modern physics course I teach which is that'The universe is much more like a hippie's pipe dream than it is like an accountant's ledger,'" Singh says in Episode 299 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "And that's really true, I think. Fourteen of her stories are collected in the new book Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, including "Peripeteia," in which a young woman becomes convinced that the universe is a constantly-shifting ad hoc illusion created by aliens. "She's thinking about this idea that perhaps the world is not finished, the universe is not finished," Singh says. "So the more you observe, and the more consistent your theory is, the more reality will mold or mutate to be that way.