"He gestured at the screen, and the ball of twine exploded, sending brilliant loops arching out into the darkness in all directions. 'The Keystone is, at the very least, armed with a TOE [Theory of Everything], and aware of both vis [sic] existence, and a canonical body of observations and experimental results - whether vis [sic) own, or 'second hand' - which need to be accounted for. If we lacked either the information density or organizational schema to explain vis [sic] own existence self-consistently, the whole event would be sub-critical: there'd be no universe implied. But given a sufficiently rich Aleph, the process won't stop until an entire physical cosmos is created."
I know, I know. Let that sink in for a while, and get back to me. No one's going to get there all at once, and anyone who says they have is probably mistaken.
Greg Egan is an Australian computer programmer and writer of science fiction. He's somewhat famous for being one of the harder hard science fiction writers out there, and he's won several awards for his books. One of his other books, Permutation City, has also been reviewed here.
In Distress a journalist is assigned to cover a physics conference in the year 2050. This particular physics conference has attracted a lot of attention because at least three of its keynote (or should I say keystone?) speakers have claimed to have discovered a Theory of Everything (TOE) which will revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos. Little do these speakers know that a fringe group of cosmologists has targeted each and every one of them for assassination, hoping to avert the end of everything.
As novels go it's damn slow, and it just didn't blow my mind the way Permutation City did. The protagonist is by turns irritating and slow on the uptake, and none of the situations in which he finds himself are remotely interesting. About halfway through the book I started to actively wish for his death, and the threatened end of the world began to seem like a satisfying way to end this novel.
As much as I loved Permutation City, I think it's in Distress that Greg Egan reveals his weakness as a writer. He's good with big, sweeping, mind-numbing ideas - the kind of ideas that held center stage in Permutation City - but very weak with regard to creating interesting characters and putting them in dramatic situations. And instead of going with his strength as a writer, the kind of philosophical/technological/scientific ideas which should have been at the heart of this story, he decided to populate this novel with a host of unlikable and uninteresting people, all loosely joined together by a subplot that would make most people laugh if you explained it to them.
So yeah, this book is boring... but I won't hold it against the author. If the only thing he'd ever written was Permutation City, that alone would be enough to put him up there with authors like Asimov and Clarke. I'm also fairly certain that he's written other, better books than Distress. Every author's allowed his or her occasional duds, and it was just my bad luck to have chosen Distress out of Egan's bibliography.
Related Entries:
"Artemis" by Andy Weir (2017)
"The Windup Girl" by Paulo Bacigalupi (2009)
"Mission of Gravity" by Hal Clement (1954)
"R.U.R. and War with the Newts" by Karl Capek (1920 and 1936)
"And in the meantime? The privileged class of Copies will grow larger, more powerful - and more threatening to the vast majority of people, who still won't be able to join them. The costs will come down, but not drastically - just enough to meet some of the explosion in demand from the executive class, once they throw off their qualms, en masse. Even in secular Europe, there's a deeply ingrained prejudice that says dying is the responsible, the moral thing to do. There's a Death Ethic - and the first substantial segment of the population abandoning it will trigger a huge backlash."
How "hard" do you like your science fiction? Do you prefer sword and sorcery with a dash of laser guns? Or books so conceptually deep that they threaten to split your head open? Ursula K. Le Guin or Stanislaw Lem? Starship Troopers or the V.A.L.I.S. trilogy? Straight-to-film, or unfilmable? If your answer in each instance is the latter, then you'll love Greg Egan.
Egan is a science fiction writer and computer programmer. He also has a degree in Mathematics (and it shows). According to Egan, there are NO pictures of him to be found on the Internet, though you are, of course, welcome to search. Maybe, just maybe, some of those you find will be the real Egan?
Permutation City is one of his earlier novels. He's written a lot of them, many with catchy titles like "Dark Integers," "Mitochondrial Eve," and "The Moral Virologist." Still looking for those laser guns and rocket ships? Abandon all hope, all ye who enter Egan's bibliography.
So what's this book about, you ask? Well, the simple answer is virtual reality. The more complex answer is the nature of virtual reality, and how the virtual might be more "real" than we think.
Or something. I'm not sure. It gets very deep my friend. It gets very, very deep. Along the way Egan also speculates on the nature of consciousness, the conditions necessary for the creation of life, and the nature of sanity in relation to a ever-shifting, possibly illusory world.
Long story short (not that this book is that long), Permutation City will FUCK YOUR MIND, and I mean that in the most complimentary way. If you like books that ask big questions, if you like authors that talk up to you instead of down, then you'll freaking love this one. It is, I think, the most difficult science fiction novel I've ever read (and I've read a few whoppers), but for those who enjoy thinking (and reflecting) on their science fiction this one's a winner. Just don't expect Egan to go gentle. He'll be hitting you over the head with existential quandaries before the end of the introduction.
If You Liked This Book, You Might Also Like:
"The Eden Cycle" by Raymond Z. Gallun
"The Information" by James Gleick
...and You'll Probably Despise:
"Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline
P.S. Egan gets a lot of flack for the "Dust Theory" of consciousness presented in this book. Some people on the Internet like to think they're VERY clever, and in their oversimplified mode of thinking this theory is easy to tear apart. There are, however, certain allowances in quantum mechanics for this theory - it's just that Egan doesn't include these allowances in the book. Given our current understanding of both quantum indeterminacy and entanglement, the Dust Theory does make a certain kind of sense.
Many critics also fail to take into account the sheer volume of information available within the observable universe (In the book, a character mentions that "dark matter" has been fully accounted for, and that the approximate date of a "Big Crunch" can be predicted.)
P.P.S. There is a criticism that runs "Egan only writes for his main audience, which is Egan." I see some validity to this argument. While I think Permutation City is fairly accessible (especially if you already have an interest in scientific topics), some of his other stuff is so obscure that one wonders why he bothered to write it in the first place.
