The Dimming
The stars are dimming. The cause is us. The cure is older than the eyes.
Dr. James Okafor is losing his sight. He is also, in the course of losing it, discovering something that will change the way humanity understands its relationship to the cosmos.
The stars are dimming. Not metaphorically — literally, measurably, across the entire visible spectrum. The rate is small enough that it has taken decades to confirm. The cause, when James finds it, is not what anyone expected.
The act of observation has a cost. The universe has been paying it. And the bill has come due.
The Dimming is a standalone novel — a meditation on sight and blindness, on the cost of knowing, on the specific human experience of discovering that the act of looking changes what is looked at in ways that cannot be undone. Built on real cosmological data and the published science of quantum observation.
For readers of Richard Powers, Ted Chiang, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
Buy Kindle Edition | Buy Paperback
Opening
The stars were dimming and James was the only person who knew why.
He had known for six months. He had spent those six months checking his work, running the numbers again, asking colleagues to check his methodology without telling them what they were checking for. He had spent those six months hoping he was wrong.
He was not wrong.
He sat in the dark of his office — he preferred the dark now, his eyes hurt less in the dark — and thought about what it meant to know something that could not be unknown.