almost makes me regret not picking him up much sooner (Distress - Greg Egan)

Member Name: jdkane

Product:	Distress - Greg Egan
Date:	19/03/01 (37 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Characterisation; sound individuals, but how the hell did they get that way? C+

Disadvantages: Imagination; sadly below his usual standard; D

Greg Egan's sixth book, and one that almost makes me regret not picking him up much sooner. It concerns - or perhaps, given Umberto Eco, it absolutely does not concern, much in the way that a tangent touches but never penetrates a circle - the quest for a Theory of Everything and an epidemic of mental illness related to the Observer Effect, in a near future world that is just crying out for a proper state-of-the-nation address. One thing that would make me very happy is if science fiction authors would begin including census data in the back of their books - population, gross domestic product, education, lifestyle, legal data for the civilisations they describe. In particular, I want to see an updated version of the Kinsey Report for this society, because he experiments relentlessly with strange and- no sense avoiding the term- perverse sexualities.

This is a very fragmented future, in which our sense of who and what we are has died; I do not understand why nor do I suspect there is any psychological grounding to this. Only a basically very prosperous society would be able to afford to shatter in this manner, and a prosperous society would never need to, would it? The results of middle class ennui grown to nightmare proportions. Why is it so many science fiction writers have so little knowledge of how industry and government work now? All of their civic backdrops are plucked out from the Pre- Teen Cyberpunk's Picture Book Of Big Scary Things. For the love of Christ, can they not get it right at all?

This I still think is not excessive criticism; story telling, which is what has gone on here, and world building, which is what should have, are separate talents. Very few writers have both those talents.

The centrepoint of the book, the 'Aleph Moment', is of course nonsense; I have a nodding knowledge of physics and broken-spined copies of Hyperspace, A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Time Warps, and - in a futile ges
ture, because I could get nowhere - volume one of the infamous 'Red Book' Feynman Lectures on Physics to prove it; also a three- year subscription to New Scientist. More to the point, I have a semi-professional knowledge of exactly how much difference the theories people hold make to what occurs to them in life. I refer you to the Divided Line, Plato's taxonomy of degrees of knowledge as knowledge, true belief, untrue belief, and delusion. (Essentially. Fellow philosophers can argue with this - please do, I'm getting rusty. Post disks.) Every thought you have, corresponding as it does to something- and how to interleave this relational theory of knowledge with absolute Forms is just one problem for the aspiring Platonist, one reason I turned into the nihilistic, grumpy, moody sod you see before you - falls into one of these. Try a brief experiment before I tell you the answer. From the inside of this thought you have, how do you tell what it is?

You can't, of course. Your own knowledge, belief, delusion look indistinguishable to you. You require external information to sort them out, and for making sense of that you require your intellect, which frames conceptions in thoughts, which are themselves one of the above...vicious and virtuous circles loom. Reason begets reason, and delusion begets delusion....which is the only possible explanation for tabloid newspapers, but I digress. Improvement requires rigour of thought, outside help including destructive criticism of the present bad state of affairs, advice from the knowledgeable. Sorry for that digression, but you can see where I'm coming from.

The universe simply does not give a damn. I'm sorry, but there is Evidence - on the order of Hawking's assumption of non time travel, to wit that it doesn't insofar as a great number of strange thoughts have been thought and nothing happened - that it can't. There is more and more sound evidence, on the practicalitie
s of abstract thought and the nature of the brain, that it could not. If it did, it would be a far odder place. Go read The Lathe of Heaven to get a flavour for what the wild imagination thinks can be made to happen. If you can play silly games like that- and there is no practical mechanism whatever for it- you can change whatever fundamental constant it is that dictates just how far you can go. Eventually you would reach one of the extremes, a state of total pliability which should dissolve into one giant chaotic blur or a state of immobility in which the universe had been dreamt into a state in which dreams can have no effect. Which happens in The Lathe of Heaven, actually; I think it might be worth putting up a full retrospective review of it. There are so many of science fiction's best works, particularly those originating from the supposed desert of the seventies, that no-one seems to have noticed.

Very well; having destroyed the core of the book, on to the periphery. The political structures of the year 2055 are pretty much what the ecoloons expect. If anything, far too optimistic. Almost at the very start of the book we meet a mad multibillionaire - named after Homer Simpson's next door neighbour, incidentally - who has decided to recode himself with an alternative genetic system. This, too, is utter bullshit - has to be done in the womb at the very latest, better in the vat, complete virgin birth. By the end we find phase two of his plan, which is to release a bug that will wipe out the rest of the human race, taking 'I want to be alone' to rather brain- damaged lengths. This isn't even a subplot, but he comes within an ace of success. If things like that can happen so easily, why the hell is everyone still there? There are nations, and none of them has a civil service worth a damn - they can't keep track of anything. The central character is a science journalist - hardly freelance; objectivity in science appears to have dep
arted into metaphysical limbo, there to await better days. Everything he writes is nakedly biased, one way or the other. The fact that the characters themselves make a standing joke of it does not count for very much in mitigation. Anyway, the way the organisation works- why is it near future news gathering organisations always seem to resemble Max Headroom ? Look, it's not my paradigm, but it does. This is one of those horrible futures in which no-one is in command of the contents of their head; Ned Landers had a point - both of them. Either neighbourly religion or a dose of the De Montforts - the first but by no means the last man to say "Kill them all; the Lord will know his own"- would be better. The actual action of the plot - who cares? My God, look at what praise can come to. I set out intending to be nice, intending to praise a story that left powerful afterimages; but on picking it up to find quotes realised that it was gibberish.


Imagination; sadly below his usual standard; D
Science; Star Trek syndrome - jargon dropping incoherently and wildly out of context; C-
Scene-setting; boiled down from dozens of other Cyberpunk dystopias; D+
Characterisation; sound individuals, but how the hell did they get that way? C+

Overall; much sound and fury, no heart to it; D

Summary: