Distress
From LeoWiki
| Score | Title | Author | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9.2 | Distress | Greg Egan | Hard SF |
| Technophilia | 9 |
|---|---|
| Secularity | 10 |
| Quality | 9 |
| Xenophilia | 10 |
| Personal Tilt | 9 |
It is the near future. Corporations and patent laws rule the world. The world's population is ten billion. Broadband internet has finally eliminated commuting.
Andrew Worth is a successful Australian journalist. He has already finished a positive documentary on gender migration. There are now seven genders in the world -- ufem, female, ifem, asex, imale, male, and umale. Ufem and umale individuals exaggerated their sexual characteristics to become "stuffed toys and lingerie". Ifems and imales deemphasize their original characteristics and seek out alternate sets of distinct cues. Asexes escape the headaches of sex by excising their genitalia and related brains parts in favour of a simple urethra.
He has also finished another documentary on "abuse" of biotech. Finding the network-dictated angle distasteful, Andrew turns down an offer to cover Distress, a new exotic disease. Instead, he heads to the renegade island of Stateless to cover the presentation of a possible Theory of Everything at the Einstein Centenary Conference by Violet Mosala, a renowned South African physicist.
Stateless is a floating Anarcho-Syndicalist utopia in the Pacific. It was founded in the early 21st Century by Californian genetic engineers who stole every patented gene they could lay their hands on and started a growth of floating coral in the international waters. Much of its population consists of real Pacific islanders whose homes were inundated by the rising sea levels.
In addition to Mosala's, two other possible TOEs are to be unveiled at the conference. This has drawn the ire of several mystical and spiritual movements. The adherents of those views have sent their own delegates to protest and proselytize. (Religious Creationists are absent, but perhaps, as one character speculates, only because physics are below their contempt.)
As far as I am concerned, Distress has a dichotomy at its heart. The philosophies and outlooks promoted in it -- demise of gender, demise of culture, demise of tradition, demise of patents and copyrights, ascendancy of individualism, ascendancy of freedom, ascendancy of science, ascendancy of atheism, etc. -- are very much ones I am sympathetic towards. On the other hand, the actual conclusion to the plot goes against a number of those doctrines.
Distress ends on a very implausible humans-are-special note. Yes, the ideas of information theory that Egan was playing around with are partly at fault. However, the humans-are-special ending of Quarantine, though still distasteful, was much more plausible. Egan botched his work in Distress. Eh.
Oh, and the book bashes gun-loving Libertarians who fled the US in the wake of the gun control laws of 2020. Sweeeeet. Libertarians piss me off.:)
Discounting the wonderful Luminous and Axiomatic story collections, Distress is the most accessible of Egan's books. The conclusion is only mediocre when compared to the arcane beauty possessed by Diaspora and Schild's Ladder. I highly recommend it.
