Riding the Crocodile, by Greg Egan

[elfs]

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.

Comments

Consider this, please

[norincraft.livejournal.com]

Something you said got me thinking (fortunately that's fairly often)

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.

What I would like to see is someone write about the transition from a pre-abundance to abundance economy. Honestly, I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. Here is why: Human nature hasn't seemed to have changed in as long as I can come up with an example for.

1) We still use primate psychology for solving problems (agree that we're right or we'll beat you right).
2) People tend have the general opinion that if the payoff (for work) is too low there is no reason to do the work at all. I think of the photo where the dairy farmers in the US poured milk in the streets to protest the low prices. It cost them more to raise the cows that they got for the milk.
3) While people will give stuff away, like the whole opensource movement, they generally want to be compensated.