50 cents
To be is to change for how can something that never changes itself or others be said to exist? one might as well call it even with nothingness To change is to die for something else always results something always is no more To die is to birth for something else always results something new always is
This strange text above was inspired by Greg Egan, who has in a few months become my favorite author, and who in all his novels I’ve read — Schild’s Ladder, Permutation City, Diaspora — is obsessed by identity in far deeper and more interesting ways than everything I’d found, thought, or imagined before — how to grow up without being replaced by a stranger, asks Tchicaya? how to be immortal without changing to death, asks Peer? how not to unravel without bounding oneself, asks Yatima?
4 Comments
Yeah Egan rules, did you know that he invented the quantum soccer game which Vinge uses in Rainbows End?
Anyway just wanted to tell you that he’s got a new novel coming out next month, Incandescence, in case you didn’t already know. (His site is great fun BTW, lots of java applets and introductory physics.)His short story collections are also well worth hunting out—not many authors can manage a cyberpunk story set twenty years in the future that is still plausible now, when that future is just five years away.
Yay! Thanks for the headsup oliverd! I’m definitely working my way to the man’s entire oeuvre. Yes, his shorts are also great fun—I loved Oracle.
Any particular shorts you recommend?
Quantum soccer, though, I still don’t get. I remember scratching my head when reading Rainbows End and am still befuddled. I need to learn my physics :)
You’ve already named my favourite of his short stories, and the one I referred to above is `Our Lady of Chernobyl` from Luminous.
TAP has a linguistics theme I think you’ll really like.`Reasons to Be Cheerful`, The Demon’s Passage, `Mister Volition` and Worthless were memorable. I also enjoyed the one about a PI investigating the apparently random but actually deliberate irradiation of a biological samples freezer, but I can’t remember the name or find it online anymore.
As for autodidactism, the Feynman Lectures on Physics are pretty excellent; I’m working through volume 2 to learn more about electromagnetism.Ah! The joys of Egan! I had forgotten how enjoyable short stories are. I discovered a great little scifi-only bookstore nearby, Borderland books, and I stocked myself with Luminous and Axiomatic.
The first, Luminous, I’ve finished and Our lady of Chernobyl was actually one of the short stories I less enjoyed. :) The short Lumnious itself blew my mind (math fiction!). So did Reasons to be cheerful. And Mister Volition. And Chaff. And Transitions Dreams. And The Planck Dive. That PI story you mention, btw, is Cocoon and appears in this book.The latter, Axiomatic, I’m just starting, but Closer and Learning to be me are already favorites—I want a jewel!
I love Egan’s fiction most when it asks just the questions that torment and fascinate me, questions about happiness, meaning, consciousness, self, technology. I suspect these questions haunt him too and writing these stories is his way of wrappling with them. They are narrative thought experiments he writes foremost for himself.Egan has been compared to Borges and I love the comparison because it’s so unexpected and so true (Have you read, say, Funes? The Garden of Forking Paths? The Library of Babel?).