By qntm
Ra - how do I describe it? Definitely among qntm’s best work, which is saying a lot.
The summary says it better than I could:
Magic is real.
Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There’s magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It’s what’s next after electricity.
Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using magic, and Laura wants to succeed where she failed. But first, she has to work out what went wrong. And who her mother really was.
And whether, indeed, she’s dead at all…
The hard sci-fi is revealed later in the story, as Ra is a giant nonlocality engine located in the Sun, and the Universe has been reconstructed after a malevolent AI catastrophe in the distant future. The old ending is perhaps more realistic, if deeply depressing (and reminiscent of The Astronomer’s Loss in Fine Structure, another of his works). The new ending is utterly brilliant, and inspires an optimism on the level of the scene where Hermione finally casts her Patronus in significant digits.