book review

The Best of Greg Egan
by Greg Egan
Night Shade Books, 2020, 681 pages

Reviewed by T. Nelson

I like sci-fi, but I have to admit it has a people problem. If they put women in charge, they're either crazy ladies like Ripley or they spend the whole time talking about relationships. In one Star Trek Voyager episode, for instance, the crew turned into giant lizards and the lady captain and navigation officer started a romantic relationship. The happy couple eventually returned to human form; by the next week their brief liaison was forgotten and the crew returned to their normal routine of expressing righteous indignation toward polluters and being conquered by warlike male aliens.

If they put men in charge, they mostly just shoot each other and blow stuff up.

Just so you get the idea, here are some ideas for movie posters:
** Relationships . . . in the Delllllta Quadrant!***
** A Crazy Lady struggles with large bugs. . . on a Spaaaaaace Ship! ***
** People shooting each other for no reason . . . with raaaaay guns! ***

If you're a movie producer, you can have these for a modest fee.

Then there's ‘hard’ science fiction, where the humans, if there are any, get dissected, infected with sentient viruses, or stuck in parallel universes.

** Dissected while still alive by a sentient virus from a parallel world. . . in Austraaaaaaaaalia! ***

That's the sort of thing we get with The Best of Greg Egan: hard sci-fi, which means everything that happens is related in some way to quantum mechanics or Gödel's Uncertainty Principle. Most of the stories are written in first person. The characters are as unlikeable and crude as the world they live in, making the stories read like short private eye novels.

In this collection of stories written over the past thirty years, the characters are computer programmers, so instead of using ray guns they throw code at each other. Or they're genetically engineered humans and the code is in them.

In one, the character tracks a deadly plague only to discover that religious fanatics are deliberately infecting each other. In another, a DEA agent is human scum, killing whenever he feels like it. He tracks down a rogue biologist and discovers that he has invented something new, but he has no clue what it is.

We don't go to sci-fi to learn about relationships or to experience empathy for our fellow man. We go there for the imagination and we put up with cynical misan­thro­py if we must. And indeed some of the stories are highly imaginative. In Luminous and again in Dark Integers, two computer programmers discover a flaw in arithmetic that has existed for fifteen billion years, like an Intel fdiv bug baked into spacetime. Only their skill with algorithms and world's fastest optical computer can prevent an evil corporation from exploiting it and tearing apart the fabric of reality. Or so they think.

The general feeling in the book is nihilistic. You might even say we're living in a Greg Egan story: in our world we have snails that eat concrete, self-driving cars with a death wish, guys who surgically alter themselves so they can beat women in the Olympics, and a virus that is probably manmade that just mysteriously showed up and bumped off five million souls for no reason. How can a sci-fi writer compete against that? Well, how about this:

** Sci-fi writer writes stories that make you care what happens to the characters!**

Not so easy. For sci-fi readers, it's the ideas that count.

jul 16 2022