Review: Greg Egan, "Glory"
Apr. 9th, 2008 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsGreg 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" (link leads to full text of story), and which is the setting for his next novel, Incandescence.
A new Amalgam story, "Glory" (link leads to PDF of full story), 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 at 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 relationships; 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 bullshit. 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.
(My thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fallenpegasus for also reading the story and giving me his reactions to it, which mirrored my own in many places.)
A new Amalgam story, "Glory" (link leads to PDF of full story), 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 at 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 relationships; 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 bullshit. 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.
(My thanks to
fallenpegasus for also reading the story and giving me his reactions to it, which mirrored my own in many places.)
Politics
Date: 2008-05-30 09:17 pm (UTC)I only liked Glory as entertainment, while a critical look wouldn't be kind. Yep Egan seems to have gone "mainstream" focusing on entertainment and the implications of science and physics rather than bombarding us with partial differential equations. So yes it may disappoint the math geeks, but may make his wonderful ideas more accessible to a general audience. And yeah AI's are not people because they don't exist... sorry i just had to mock that moment of well stupidity.
Re: Politics
Date: 2008-05-30 10:11 pm (UTC)