Greg Egan
Luminous (C) (1998)
Reviewed: 2000-10-16

Egan's second widely available collection of short stories may lack the impact of Axiomatic, but it doesn't lose any of the dazzling brilliance. Maybe we have become accustomed to Egan's overwhelming rush of ideas and sharp extrapolation.

Contents:

"Chaff", "Transitition Dreams", and "Our Lady of Chernobyl" had already been collected previously in Our Lady of Chernobyl by an Australian small press.

Again, this collection is very homogenous in quality. Nevertheless, I'd like to pick out those two stories I found the most impressive. "Reasons to be Cheerful" deals with a boy who suffers neurological damage denying him any feeling of pleasure or happiness by eradicating the respective pathways in the brain. After vegetating for 18 years, the man receives a cerebral prothesis which allows him to consciously choose his sensation of happiness in response to experiences. The story expertly maps the consequences of this peculiar brain damage, showing what roles pleasure and happiness play in our lives, how much we take them for granted, and progresses to the hard questions: What is happiness? What is its meaning?

"The Planck Dive" deals with a different kind of extremeness. Obviously set in the universe of Diaspora, it features a team of polis citizens who dive into a black hole on a quest for answers to the most fundamental questions in physics, well aware that they will not be able to re-emerge from beyond the event horizon, nor be able to stop their fall into the singularity that will erase their existence. The characters are posthuman uploads running on a nanotechnological, later inside the hole on a photonic substrate, each person forking, with one copy remaining outside, the other disappearing into the hole. The real and speculative physics will remain largely incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with general relativity, but what drives people to suicide in exchange for a transient understanding of physics? Whether you can relate to this idea or not, the sheer audaciousness of the whole story is breathtaking.

The other shorts show Egan's customary range of topics: "Mitochondrial Eve" deals with the search for a common ancestor of all modern humans and the social consequences; "Luminous" speculates about a connection between mathematics and physics that threatens to shatter our universe; the protagonist of "Mister Volition" gains access to a display of the inner workings of his mind, which he uses in an attempt to find the core of his identity; in "Cocoon" a privatized policeman's investigation into the bombing of a harmless biotech company runs into gender politics; an epidemiologist follows a vague trail of the horrible disease "Silver Fire" through the Southern United States and experiences a world that trades in rationality and science for "spirituality".

Several themes keep reappearing throughout the collection. Most of the stories are set in the first half of the 21st century. Egan very plausibly portrays life in the post-industrial information age. There is a recurring backdrop of Sidney, Australia. Scientific progress ("Mitochondrial Eve"), a crime ("Cocoon"), or disease investigation ("Silver Fire") serve as vehicles to display the gangrene in a society uncomfortably close and credibly extrapolated from our own. Egan's obvious favorite is the increasing irrationality in modern times. He seems almost obsessed with ridiculing New Age gibberish and postmodernist drivel.

Customary excellence.


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