Riding the Crocodile, by Greg Egan

Greg Egan's latest novella, Riding the Crocodile, is available from his website, shows him trying to reach out in a new direction with a fast-as-light space opera universe, and build a new setting.

Riding the Crocodile is an interesting little adventure story, but it doesn't give us anything new. The technology he shows is his usual up-to-snuff, but he isn't doing anything interesting with it. This book feels more like slumming, as if Egan isn't writing what he wants to write, but is writing for the fans of Diaspora who wanted more, who wanted to see what the universe in which Carter-Zimmerman finally settled down, the stable universe of the Star Striders and the Contingency Handlers, would be like.

Riding the Crocodile is Greg Egan, low on ideas.

He's getting a little better at depicting human beings. Leila and Jasim aren't exactly cardboard, but they're not full-fleshed people. Their inner lives, their love and dedication one to another, feels contrived and unconvincing. The economics of the universe he shows us lacks any justification for working the way he says it does: it just does, by authorial fiat, a strange cobbled-together vision of utopianism, transhumanism, and post-abundance economies.

I feel sad. Greg Egan once gave me a greater sense of wonder than almost any writer out there, but posthumanist literature has passed by Egan, and he doesn't seem to know quite how to catch up.

Gods, I hope that's her first novel.

The other day, while I was visiting shemayazi, I spotted a novel on her desk with a hot cyborged babe on the cover in shiny black latex standing in front of your typical long-haired D&D elf with the leather fanny back and the plunging neckline pirate blouse. The title was Quantum Gravity: Keeping It Real.

I opened it up. The prologue was entitled, "Common Knowledge," and was a six page infodump of "the world after the Superconducting Supercollider shattered the walls between the worlds." It goes on in a sonorous voice about the six planes that intersect with ours: the world of elves, the world of daemons, the world of death, the world of elementals. There were more, I don't remember them.

Good grief, some publisher paid for this crap? It read like a bad Shadowrun novel, but with the labels ripped off and the serial numbers filed down. It reads as if the author, Justina Robson, wanted to write something Shadowrunny but she also wanted it to be edgier, sexier, more "adult" (for weighted values of), so she wrote this instead. I thumbed through the book, and discovered that she used five different typefaces, so her character's AI could talk in bold san serif and her daemon-elf-spirit-possessor thingy used a flowery, curlicue type face, the kind where the letter i is dotted with a heart and the artists's eyes should be dotted with bleach.

Apparently the premise is that the Elves want to kill the world's first Elfin rock star as punishment for his association with humans, and our heroine, Lila, a borged-out babe whose AI interface may or may not have an agenda of its own, is sent to be his bodyguard.

Amazon has seven reviews: two 5-stars and five 4-stars. What I read was trite, contrived, silly.

Unfortunately, it does look like Robson has other books that I might be interested in, like Natural History and Silver Screen, both of which look like posthuman or transhuman pulp. But unless she's a master of characterization, there's nothing yet that convinces me I'm going to have the sense of wonder I like out of my SF.