At the end of this review there are what may be considered spoilers.
If you wish to read the story in question before reading the review,
the full text of it is available at:
http://outofthiseos.typepad.com/blog/2008/03/hugo-short-stor.html
Greg Egan used to be one of my favorite writers. I say "used to be"
because Egan opened my eyes to the wonderfully evocative power of
truly hard science fiction, only to eventually have him throw it all
away with his own ham-handed politics and pecadillos. For a while,
since the publication of Schild's Ladder, Egan hasn't written much,
but now he's back with a new series, the Amalgam stories, the first of
which was "Riding the Crocodile", and which is the setting for his
next novel, Incandescence.
A new Amalgam story, "Glory", appears in the anthology The New Space
Opera, and has been published for free at Eos books' website.
"Glory" is an awful story.
My reaction to "Riding the Crocodile" was that it was Greg Egan
pandering to the bulk of his audience: those of us too lazy to
actually follow the physics of Schild's Ladder, but willing to be
thrilled by a certain level of mastery of physics and willing to buy a
certain amount of handwavery as long as it seemed plausible. "Riding
the Crocodile" is also pandering in that it proposes a posthuman,
"AI's are people too" universe in which people flit about from
starsystem to starsystem via fast-as-light radio transmissions,
switching from arbitrary digital existence to biological instantiation
without a second thought.
"Glory" takes this pandering one step further. His opening scene wants
to be one of those masterpieces of physics handwaving, in which he
shows his Amalgam civilization throwing a one kilogram weight almost
up to lightspeed fast enough that it will go all the way through its
target star, in the process setting up shock waves so that the star,
in its wake, is briefly turned into a nanomachine factory that creates
primitive devices for listening for radio waves and converting nearby
matter into useful tools, which the Amalgam can then operate by remote
control. I don't buy it; neither space nor the insides of stars is
that predictable. His description of the matter/antimatter engine is
amazing; his attempt to convince you that it'll all work in the end
pure nonsense.
What follows from that is, well, it's not really a Greg Egan story.
Instead, it's more like a Greg Egan fanfic. All of the elements of
Egan's own hangups are there. There's absolutely no possibility of
intimate relation****ps; Egan has written a species with a reproductive
urge so limited and incapable just so he won't have to write about it
or think about it. (At this point, I have to admit that I kinda miss
the manipulative, teenage Greg Egan of such passionate works as "Mind
Vampires" and "The Demon's Passage.") The only thing that matters is
mathematics; anyone obsessed with anything else, like art or politics,
is either a fool, a knave, or a villain.
In the end, the heroine discovers The Big Secret, the Beautiful
Unified Theory of Mathematics, the End Of All Seeking in her
civilization and when she does this she breaks down and realizes that
she can't let it go. She can't tell anyone about it. Because if she
does, she'll weaken her own civilization's ability to fight the
aggressive hegemonizing culture that had the secret and didn't know
it.
What makes this unbelievable is the idea that no one in the Amalgam
may have ever considered this possibility before. I find that
completely impossible to believe. How could they not know? A vibrant,
powerful, and excessively chatty civilization (as depicted in "Riding
the Crocodile") somehow doesn't have a punditocracy that's spent
centuries (and I do mean centuries) asking themselves, "So, if we ever
do discover the Unified Mathematica, what will we do then? What will
it mean to us a civilization?" Somehow, the heroine, a historian of
xenomathematics, is completely unaware of any such pondering going on
within her own civilization?
I call bull****. This story completely failed to move me, either in a
sensawunda depiction of a technological application of known physics
(one of Egan's true strong suits), or in his story, which is a
phoned-in Heinleinesque "the right man in the right place to make the
right decision," only in this case Egan's characters are more shallow
than usual, their convinctions contrived, and the ending a pale shadow
that imparts no meaning or message.
Elf
Full text of "Riding the Crocodile," with pointers to Incandescensce:
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/INCANDESCENCE/00/Crocodile.html
Full text of "Mind Vampires:"
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/HORROR/VAMPIRES/Vampires.html
Full text of "The Demon's Passage:"
http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Demons%20Passage&pagetitle=The+Demon's+Passage§ion=fiction
Website for Schild's Ladder:
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/SCHILD/SCHILD.html
--
Elf M. Sternberg, Immanentizing the Eschaton since 1988
http://www.pendorwright.com/
Elf's latest stories are available in paperback! Buy
the genderbending novel _Sterlings_, available
now from http://stores.lulu.com/elfsternberg
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