From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Sep 08 1999 - 05:31:32 MDT
At 09:28 AM 7/09/99 -0700, Hal wrote:
> I know that many people are distressed to consider that
>the miracles of life and of consciousness may be ultimately mechanical,
>but I doubt that most of us feel that way. It seems though that many
>of Egan's stories are meant to depict a sense of hopelessness and of
>the meaningless of life based on this fact.
No, no, no. Au contraire. Egan says: look, use your brains, understand the
world, and grasp that there is no *external* meaning. There isn't even any
reliable internal standpoint. Deal with it.
That isn't hopelessness, properly regarded. It's a `reason to be cheerful'.
(We're a sardonic lot, we Aussies.)
Here's my recent review of Egan's latest short story collection, published
in an Australian zine, The Coode Street Review:
==========
Luminous - Greg Egan
Millennium, 1998, tpb, 295pp, $A24.95
To get the ducking and weaving out of the way: in *Australian Book Review*
(Feb/Mar 1998), discussing Greg Egan's *tour-de-force* novel *Diaspora*, I
noted that 13 years earlier I'd called him `perhaps the most promising of
the Australian sf newcomers'. I added: `He has fulfilled that promise, and
more. At 36, he is now perhaps the most important sf writer in the world.'
*Luminous*, a collection of 10 short pieces and novellas published between
1993 and 1998, showcases Egan at the story length within which he
established his reputation and created that standing.
Many readers disagree, however, that he's actually achieved such
distinction, supposing Egan is being hailed as the world's *best* sf
writer, quite a different point. (Then again, some readers clearly *do*
see him that way.) At various times in sf's fairly brief history, writers
as various as Wells, `Doc' Smith, Heinlein, Le Guin - even, god help us,
Harlan Ellison and Larry Niven - have been pivotal, breaking trails,
showing fresh ways for sf to expand into untouched regions of narrative
space. Of those, only Wells, Heinlein and Le Guin could rationally be
regarded as also the best of their time.
In many respects Egan is still an undeveloped literary artist. Even his
finest work totters by comparison with the complex best of, say, John
Crowley, James Morrow, Bruce Sterling, Michael Swanwick, Gene Wolfe, Joanna
Russ, recent Le Guin. These are writers whose texts do more than deploy
with clean, brilliant ingenuity some astonishing or seemingly paradoxical
insight from science and philosophy, which is Egan's forté. They engage us
more fully in their imaginative embrace (however naive and old-fashioned
such a formulation as that inevitably strikes us, all these decades after
the advent of poststructuralism's corrosive analytics). Their characters
touch us for weeks or even years, having been rendered out of the clay of
our own richest self-understanding - the template tales we each use to
explain self and others - reshaped at the prompting of experts in human
sensibility who use all the storyteller's tools, including the heart.
Is Egan (as artist) heartless? Does his work lack heart? It can often
seem that way. His stories are, yes, luminous technical feats in opening
out or deconstructing axiomatics, individual and cultural. He is enviably
in command (or gives the impression of being so) of the latest
neurosciences, molecular biology, advanced computer programming, artificial
and natural intelligence, evolutionary theory. His politics is crisp,
astute, pitilessly candid, and by and large I am sympathetic to its account
of human conduct. If his style is... *level* (let's not say `flat')...
that isn't because it exults in deflating pretension, like the inverse
snobbery of grunge or any other self-consciously boho posture; rather, he
tells his stories by means not alien to the French existentialists of the
1940s and 1950s - Camus Among the Galaxies, Robbe-Grillet in the labyrinths
of the brain's modules. You can see why Egan prefers this anti-heroic,
anti-humanist locution. It enacts his themata. It is the natural voice
for a disillusioned, clear-eyed observer of human sanctimony in the last
era when self-deceit remains (barely) possible yet almost everywhere
regnant.
For all that, I wish he'd extend his range. The writer you tend to think
of while reading Egan's relentless fables is Stanislaw Lem (when it's not
Doug Hofstadter or Dan Dennett), probing consciousness and volition until
those central conceits blink into dazzling fragments, spin, adhere once
more, leaving only the impossible after-image of black-clad stage-handlers
shuffling spotlit puppets - except that the handlers *were never there*...
But there is more in Lem's oeuvre than games and hilarious verbal agility;
it is hard, as yet, to imagine Egan writing a book to equal Lem's first
novel, *The Hospital of the Transfiguration*, at once formally engineered
with great cool beauty and heartbreakingly moving.
For all that, I urgently commend *Luminous*. It is, in its own terms -
terms that (I hope) are helping to reorient sf once again in the direction
of hard thought and away from squishy self-indulgent consumerist wish
fulfilment - an excellent gathering. It catches an aspect of the cusp of
the millennium in just the way that Wells' sf did for his own two
centuries. Wells embodied Victorian desires of the 19th, while reaching
forward to a 20th of fantastical technologies. The machineries in Wells
were external, even if often they were palpably expressions of wish or
mental states: time travel (memory and anticipation), invisibility
(voyeurism, and camouflage in a dangerous, puzzling world), terrifying
military threats and opportunities that staged and foresaw the upheavals of
class near to Wells' own torn soul.
The mechanisms in Egan are on both the grandest scales (the substrates of
space and time, beyond the infinitesimal Planck interval that define the
quantum) and the most intimate (those intimations of the machine in the
ghost we must all share, if we dare to learn what science is now exposing,
as functional magnetic resonance imaging and PET scans reveal the flux of
our brains even as we see, hear, think, imagine, dream)... Egan need not
look to invaders from Mars; his own gaze and intellect are already vast and
cool and, if not unsympathetic, *diagnostic*. Idea is almost all; his
fiction has just barely enough domestic business to establish and convey
the salience to human persons of these high biological and cultural
abstractions. In the end, almost always, we are left with a fatal sense of
having had an allegory foisted on us. Indeed, so central is the raw idea
in many of these pieces that a reviewer risks spoiling them by `giving
away' some of the key elements. Be warned.
The slightest of the stories is the earliest, `Transition Dreams' (1993,
*Interzone*), yet already it deals effortlessly with conceits only now
coming into focus elsewhere: uploading your mind from fallible protein into
a durable computer platform and ultimately an independent robot body (the
Gleisners of *Diaspora*) free of the limitations of flesh but with all its
advantages and more. If mind is itself a vast computation, what is its
fate during that transition? A sleep akin to coma? A protracted nightmare
of unhinged hallucination? Egan tells a neat horror story with mild
philosophical implications, but that's all. It's no advance on his key
early tale, `Learning to Be Me' (1990, *Interzone*).
The intellectually sinuous `Mitochondrial Eve' (1995, *Interzone*) is a
typical ideational escapade in which a bombastic hightech bid to rid the
earth of traditional racisms and sectional strife backfires, inevitably,
and spawns a brand-new fire-flickering, bloody means to bolster old
tribalisms and new. The tale is worked through in a schematic, convenient
conjugal conflict that enacts in small that battle of the sexes its theme
accelerates and detonates. Egan is bleak in his dark humour; you get the
feeling that he doesn't see much hope for people, poor people, poor damned
mired hard-wired people.
`Chaff' (1993, *Interzone*) makes that explicit. Egan's agent flies into
El Nido de Ladrones, a micro-ecology of lethal designer pharmaceuticals
between Colombia and Peru owned by biotech drug cartels and utopians, and
learns what Egan's protagonists always learn, sooner or later, captured in
a quote from Conrad's *Heart of Darkness*: `as to superstitions, beliefs,
and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze'.
It is a scarifying assertion, one that undermines everything that makes us
human (if we take it seriously, and Egan tries again and again to force us
to do so). The story's landscape, its detail filigree, is assured,
convincing, the very model (like, say, those of Lucius Shepard) of a modern
major genre *Weltbild*. His values-are-chaff, meaning-is-contingent case
is tested again in this melodramatic setting, which is really just a
narrative gadget to keep us tracing the logical exercise. Imagine a drug
that allows you to re-write the mental maze which is yourself. What
happens when you are unhooked from the tyranny and structural solidity of
`human nature', of genetically contrived codes and tropisms of conduct?
Here is radical freedom as even Sartre and Camus and Biswanger never
dreamed it. Here is utter self-fashioning. Yet who is the self performing
this self-levitating feat of construction? We step into an Escher-void
once we grant that `all the "eternal verities" - all the sad and beautiful
insights of all the great writers from Sophocles to Shakespeare - are *less
than chaff in a breeze*.'
What burns through these minimally dramatised demonstrations in
epistemology and indeed ontology is Egan's own problematic or quest: how
*can* we know the world, or ourselves as a sliver of it, when everything
comes to us via the mediation and construction of parochial upbringing, of
genetic and cultural history, of contingent biology, of the arbitrary
settings (or are they quite so random as they seem?) of the cosmos itself?
It's explored in a sketch, `Mister Volition' (1995, *Interzone*) and more
wittily and painfully in *Reasons to be Cheerful* (1997, *Interzone*). The
poignancy of that question is made especially piercing in `Silver Fire'
(1995, *Interzone*), where Claire Booth, a kind of epidemiological private
eye, tracks an outbreak of the 21st century equivalent of AIDS. Her
conflict with 14-year-old daughter Laura, involved (this week, at least)
with the New Hermetics cult, is spot-on:
[INDENT]
Laura said, `Did you know that Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy
than he did on the theory of gravity?'
`Yes. Did you know he also died a virgin? Role models are great, aren't
they?'
Alex gave me a sideways warning look, but didn't buy in. [...]
`But sure, it's fascinating to see some of the blind alleys people have
explored.'
Laura smiled at me pityingly. *`Blind alleys!'* She finished picking the
toast crumbs off her plate, then she rose and left the room with a spring
in her step, as if she'd won some kind of battle.
[INDENT off]
Claire's world is our own, turned up a plausible notch. As the dreadful,
incurable disease Silver Fire spreads, every fashionable poseur and media
loony advances a mystery theory. In a fine pastiche of `theorists' such as
the French Jean Baudrillard and the Australian McKenzie Wark, Egan's glib
talking heads embrace the scourge as a postmodern medical condition, `the
very first plague of the Information Age'. That turns out, hideously, to
be correct, in a way. But the disease is symptomatic of a worse blight, a
recurrent collapse of even advanced technological cultures into blind and
blinding belief systems of astounding stupidity. `All it took,' Claire
realises, `was the shock of grief to peel away the veneer of understanding:
*Life is not a morality play. Disease is just disease; it carries no
hidden meaning*... At some level, we still hadn't swallowed the
hardest-won truth of all: *The universe is indifferent.*'
Yet if that is so, if we see faces in clouds and cracks just because our
brains are hard-wired by mindless selective reproductive filters to give
priority to any shape that looks like a face, to impose meaning on any
pattern that looks like an intention, what happens to our self-estimate?
Suppose homosexuality is, after all, most often a developmental pathway
switched on by an unusual stressor in the mother's environment, triggering
elevated levels of some hormone bathing the foetus? That makes gayness
`natural', true, but also provides a way to prevent growing brains from
turning along that path. What then of all the hard-won political
victories, the heroic and joyful Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, the brave,
tortured cultural history obliterated within a generation in a kind of
pre-emptive genocide? That's the quite realistic issue at the heart of
`Cocoon' (1994, *Asimov's*), a cerebral *policier* that in other hands
might have made a multi-million seller by Michael Crichton or Robin Cook,
or indeed Martin Amis or Peter Ackroyd. (Hmmm...)
But then fiction written in the shadow and illumination of advanced science
is sometimes obliged, in being true to its own strengths and possibilities,
into an oppositional stance to traditional literary devices that faces off
its forebears high and low. Consider the mockery of literary pretensions
rather broadly sketched by venturesome posthuman scientists about to cast
themselves, for the knowledge they will gain in the extended instant of
their deaths, into a black hole, in the stylised and rebarbative novella
`The Planck Dive', set in the same dazzling future as *Diaspora*. A
blowhard `flesher' poet (hapless daughter apparently in tow) arrives from
an Earth polis - rebuilt from an exabyte of data in a teleportive gamma-ray
burst - to plague the exploratory crew with his sanctimonious epic ambitions:
[INDENT]
Prospero began soberly. `For nigh on a thousand years, we... have dreamed
in vain of a new Odyssey to inspire us, new heroes to stand beside the old,
new ways to retell the eternal myths... But I have arrived in time to
pluck your tale from the very jaws of gravity!'
Tiet said, `Nothing was at risk of being lost. Information about the
Dive is being broadcast to every polis, stored in every library.' Tiet's
icon was like a supple jewelled statue carved from ebony.
Prospero waved a hand dismissively. `A stream of technical jargon. In
Athena, it might as well have been the murmuring of the waves.'
Tiet raised an eyebrow. `If your vocabulary is impoverished, augment it
- don't expect us to impoverish our own. Would you give an account of
classical Greece without mentioning the name of a single city state?'
`No. But those are universal terms, part of our common heritage--'
`They're terms that have no meaning outside a tiny region of space, and a
brief period of time. Unlike the terms needed to describe the Dive, which
are applicable to every quartic femtometre of spacetime.'
Prospero replied, a little stiffly, `Be that as it may, in Athena we
prefer poetry to equations. And I have come to honour your journey in
language that will resonate down the corridors of the imagination for
millennia... I am a narratologist... I have come to create enigmas, not
explanations. I have come to shape the story of your descent into a form
that will live on long after your libraries have turned to dust... To
extract the mythic essence, mere detail must become subservient to a deeper
truth.'
[INDENT off]
Much later, falling into gravity's inexorable doom and loving every moment
of it, Prospero's much put upon daughter, Cordelia, smiles. `Baudelaire
can screw himself. I'm here for the physics.'
And physics is what Egan provides: scads of physics, physics at the margins
of the known and beyond, physics rendered not much in story telling's
ancient visceral imagination as in a cool, ironic allegory of equations
tormented to the limit. This is a very odd textuality indeed, even for
hardened sf readers. For literary chauvinists, it is doubtless as dull as
it is abhorrent. For the adventurous, Egan's approach is worth persevering
with, even if learning that we are not inviolate selves but a pandemonium
or parliament of contesting inner voices, that we are constructed not given
from eternity, that even universal mathematics might be as gapped and
fissured as any poststructural text (`Luminous', 1995, *Asimov's*), once
deeply shocking, has become familiar news.
And when the shock of the new starts to turn into the yawn of the
been-there-done-that, surely a writer as important to sf as Greg Egan will
start to notice, turn away from austere fable, move - as Greg Bear and Greg
Benford and Greg Feeley have been doing, not always successfully - in the
direction of more sumptuous literary and imaginative values, those
contingent but time-tested techniques, which he parodies so cruelly in
Prospero, that touch the heart on their way to the brain and back again.
=================
Damien Broderick
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