"Glory": Greg Egan writes his own fanfic
Elf M. Sternberg
If you wish to read the story in question before reading the review,
the full text of it is available at:
http://outofthiseos.typepad.com/blog/2008/03/hugo-short-stor.html
Greg 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", and which is the setting for his
next novel, Incandescence.
A new Amalgam story, "Glory", 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 by 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.
Elf
Full text of "Riding the Crocodile," with pointers to Incandescensce:
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/INCANDESCENCE/00/Crocodile.html
Full text of "Mind Vampires:"
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/HORROR/VAMPIRES/Vampires.html
Full text of "The Demon's Passage:"
http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Demons%20Passage&pagetitle=The+Demon's+Passage§ion=fiction
Website for Schild's Ladder:
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/SCHILD/SCHILD.html
--
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http://www.pendorwright.com/
Elf's latest stories are available in paperback! Buy
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Gene Ward Smith
news:87ej9dv...@speakeasy.net:
> 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.
What in hell is a Unified Theory of Mathematics?
Elf M. Sternberg
An Eganesque MacGuffin, what else?
Branches of mathematics are frequently "unified" by
mindbending innovations. The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, for
example, came from an obscure branch of geometrical studies, despite
its appearance as a simple algebraic problem, and demonstrated a
commonality between the two disciplines.
The MacGuffin, in this case, is a proof unifying some "n"
different and distinct branches of mathematics, that our
xenomathematician (and many others like her) has been seeking for
hundreds of years. The bad guys have it, but don't know that they
have it; it was left behind from the previous generation of folks to
inhabit the starsystem in which they live.
Elf
Gene Ward Smith
> Branches of mathematics are frequently "unified" by
> mindbending innovations. The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, for
> example, came from an obscure branch of geometrical studies, despite
> its appearance as a simple algebraic problem, and demonstrated a
> commonality between the two disciplines.
>
This is way wrong. It came out of the vast erudition of Andrew Wiles, who
knew so much about so many things and was able to bring it together in an
amazing tour de force. But of course principally it came out of arithmetic
algebraic geometry, which is not obscure, merely difficult.
Aaron Bergman
Elf M. Sternberg <e...@speakeasy.net> wrote:
> Gene Ward Smith <ge...@chewbacca.org> writes:
>
> > Elf M. Sternberg <e...@speakeasy.net> wrote in
> > news:87ej9dv...@speakeasy.net:
> >
> >> 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.
>
> > What in hell is a Unified Theory of Mathematics?
>
> An Eganesque MacGuffin, what else?
>
> Branches of mathematics are frequently "unified" by
> mindbending innovations. The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, for
> example, came from an obscure branch of geometrical studies, despite
> its appearance as a simple algebraic problem, and demonstrated a
> commonality between the two disciplines.
That's backwards. Fermat's Last Theorem would be just another hard to
solve Diophantine problem if Frey and Ribet and others hadn't related it
to deep and central questions in number theory and geometry.
Aaron
Gene Ward Smith
980898.181...@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu:
> That's backwards. Fermat's Last Theorem would be just another hard to
> solve Diophantine problem if Frey and Ribet and others hadn't related it
> to deep and central questions in number theory and geometry.
Well, except for the fact that Kummer had already related it to deep
mathematical considerations. Namely, he showed that the class number of the
cyclotomic field of pth roots of unity was relevant to the question, and
related that to the Riemann zeta function at odd negative integers, which is
to say, to Bernoulli numbers. And Iwasawa theory, which arose out of
cyclotomy, ended up as crucial to the final proof.
Elf M. Sternberg
> This is way wrong. It came out of the vast erudition of Andrew Wiles, who
> knew so much about so many things and was able to bring it together in an
> amazing tour de force. But of course principally it came out of arithmetic
> algebraic geometry, which is not obscure, merely difficult.
I'll take your word for it. Be that as it may, it *is* just a
MacGuffin for the story; it's discovery doesn't do anything more than
make an impression upon the main character, an impression the reader
is invited to share. Unfortunately, I suspect few readers will.
David DeLaney
>Aaron Bergman <aber...@physics.utexas.edu> wrote in news:abergman-
>> solve Diophantine problem if Frey and Ribet and others hadn't related it
>> to deep and central questions in number theory and geometry.
>
>Well, except for the fact that Kummer had already related it to deep
>mathematical considerations. Namely, he showed that the class number of the
>cyclotomic field of pth roots of unity was relevant to the question, and
>related that to the Riemann zeta function at odd negative integers, which is
>to say, to Bernoulli numbers. And Iwasawa theory, which arose out of
>cyclotomy, ended up as crucial to the final proof.
And of course if you relate something to the Riemann zeta function, it
immediately gets stuck to an ever-growing katamari of Other Stuff. It's
like how that pi number keeps turning up in all sorts of places.
Dave
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Aaron Bergman
Gene Ward Smith <ge...@chewbacca.org> wrote:
That's an, er, indirect route. But whatever.
Aaron
tkma...@yahoo.co.uk
> Greg Egan used to be one of my favorite writers. I say "used to be"
>
> Opera, and has been published for free at Eos books' website.
>
> "Glory" is an awful story.
>
> 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.
I've not read a lot of Egan - only a few shorts, Glory among them.
I thought Glory was advertised as "space opera". Doesn't that allow the
use unbelievable star travel technology? I thought his star travel
technology was *imaginative* - at least I've not seen this kind of
travel machine elsewhere; why bother to figure out whether it will
really work?
(Incidentally, there is another space opera story in this year's Hugo
nominations - "Who's Afraid of Wolf [something]?". That uses 5 or 6 AU
long electromagnetic catapults for star travel! All goes in space opera.)
I'll go with you for rest of Glory - after the two girls land there.
That's weak.
--
"It is not a matter of logic or illogic... It is merely a matter of
viewpoint. You see certain angles; I see others."
- "Dear Devil" by Eric Frank Russell
<http://variety-sf.blogspot.com/2008/04/eric-frank-russell-dear-devil-novelette.html>
Elf M. Sternberg
> I thought Glory was advertised as "space opera". Doesn't that allow
> the use unbelievable star travel technology? I thought his star travel
> technology was *imaginative* - at least I've not seen this kind of
> travel machine elsewhere; why bother to figure out whether it will
> really work?
No. The point of "The New Space Opera" is to be
physics-compliant while still being thrilling. "Who's Afraid of Wolf
359?" pulled that off marvelously. Also, Greg Egan, more than any
other writer of our time, has striven to be as physics-compliant as
possible. For him to fail so obviously is highly disappointing.
Elf
David DeLaney
Well, the direct routes kept Not Working, one after another. So they had to
keep straying further afield, so to speak.
Aaron Bergman
d...@gatekeeper.vic.com (David DeLaney) wrote:
> Aaron Bergman <aber...@physics.utexas.edu> wrote:
> > Gene Ward Smith <ge...@chewbacca.org> wrote:
> >> Well, except for the fact that Kummer had already related it to deep
> >> mathematical considerations. Namely, he showed that the class number of
> >> the
> >> cyclotomic field of pth roots of unity was relevant to the question, and
> >> related that to the Riemann zeta function at odd negative integers, which
> >> is
> >> to say, to Bernoulli numbers. And Iwasawa theory, which arose out of
> >> cyclotomy, ended up as crucial to the final proof.
> >
> >That's an, er, indirect route. But whatever.
>
> Well, the direct routes kept Not Working, one after another. So they had to
> keep straying further afield, so to speak.
Somewhere in there, there's a bad pun on the word "field" that I'm going
to resist making.
Just so you know.
Aaron
tkma...@yahoo.co.uk
> 359?" pulled that off marvelously. Also, Greg Egan, more than any
> other writer of our time, has striven to be as physics-compliant as
May be I've read only his non-physics-compliant stories. Have you read
"Dark Integers"?
A programmer defines C++ code that holds a 256-bit unsigned integer -
using any of the many possible bit-layouts within a computer. Now you
run this program on *any* machine. Whenever any program variable of this
big integer type holds certain bad ("dark") values, bad things happen in
parallel universe! I won't call that physics-compliant.
Sean O'Hara
Sternberg declared:
>
> No. The point of "The New Space Opera" is to be
> physics-compliant while still being thrilling.
I thought the point of New Space Opera was that it includes
post-human or post-singularity beings. That's certainly the
commonality I see between MacLeod, Stross, Banks, Vinge, and
Reynolds, not that they're physics-compliant, because they throw
that out whenever necessary.
--
Sean O'Hara <http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com>
Fry: The less fortunate get all the breaks!
-Futurama
Walter Bushell
> Well, the direct routes kept Not Working, one after another. So they had to
> keep straying further afield, so to speak.
That's the wurst pun I've cum across in weeks.
--
What is done in the heat of battle is (normatively) judged
by different standards than what is leisurely planned in
comfortable conference rooms.
Scott Lurndal
>tkma...@yahoo.co.uk writes:
>
>> I thought Glory was advertised as "space opera". Doesn't that allow
>> the use unbelievable star travel technology? I thought his star travel
>> technology was *imaginative* - at least I've not seen this kind of
>> travel machine elsewhere; why bother to figure out whether it will
>> really work?
>
> No. The point of "The New Space Opera" is to be
>physics-compliant while still being thrilling.
It's not science fiction then, just a scientific thriller. I'm
curious where "New Space Opera" has been defined as per your def'n?
I'm completely baffled by the continued insistance that fiction
reflect reality amongst some of the regulars here. A good story
outweighs dodgy physics in any day.
scott
Andrew Wheeler
> tkma...@yahoo.co.uk writes:
>
> > I thought Glory was advertised as "space opera". Doesn't that allow
> > the use unbelievable star travel technology? I thought his star travel
> > technology was *imaginative* - at least I've not seen this kind of
> > travel machine elsewhere; why bother to figure out whether it will
> > really work?
>
> No. The point of "The New Space Opera" is to be
> physics-compliant while still being thrilling.
That was very much *not* my impression, and that isn't what "space
opera" generally means.
Complaining about the physics in a space opera is like going to the
opera and being annoyed that there are so many large women yelling.
--
Andrew Wheeler
who wasn't thrilled by _New Space Opera_ for other reasons
Kurt Busiek
> Complaining about the physics in a space opera is like going to the
> opera and being annoyed that there are so many large women yelling.
They have opera at Shea Stadium?
kdb
Mike Schilling
"Kurt Busiek" <ku...@busiek.com> wrote in message
news:2008041119180616807-kurt@busiekcom...
Andrew didn't say "large, drunken women".
Damien Sullivan
>Elf M. Sternberg <e...@speakeasy.net> wrote:
>
>> tkma...@yahoo.co.uk writes:
>>
>> > I thought Glory was advertised as "space opera". Doesn't that allow
I don't know what Glory's advertised as. Egan has written a lot of hard
ScF in the plausible science sense; also a lot of hard ScF in the
pushing the boundaries sense, especially if math or quantum is involved
(cf. Diaspora or Permutation City).
>> > the use unbelievable star travel technology? I thought his star travel
>> > technology was *imaginative* - at least I've not seen this kind of
I don't have Elf's complaint. Stuctured neutronium and anti-neutronium
get shaped under stabilizing conditions, and act as a rocket to send a
payload into a star, to cause shock waves that end up shaping a chemical
factory. The "atomically precise" language is perhaps unfortunate; if I
think of the shock wave as spawning something like solar plasma beings
(_Sundiver_, or a Draco Tavern story) it makes a bit more sense.
Handwavy, but not beyond Egan's standards.
>> No. The point of "The New Space Opera" is to be
>> physics-compliant while still being thrilling.
>
>That was very much *not* my impression, and that isn't what "space
>opera" generally means.
"*new* space opera" needn't be the same as "space opera", thus the
change of names.
Banks is sometimes taken as the grandfather of the genre, and the
Culture's physics are as soft as they come, though Feersum Endjinn took
fewer liberties, and the Algebraist seemed to be following later trends.
Many of the other common names and those later trends *are* trying to be
more physics-compliant, either doing without FTL or giving a nod to the
FTL-time travel connection or using artificial wormhole FTL, which the
physicists give a bit of support to. Force fields and artificial or
antigravity tend to be rare too, and psychic powers are right out.
It's not Robert Forward "I have blueprints" diamond hard ScF, but it is
avoiding the traditional liberties.
-xx- Damien X-)
William December Starr
Elf M. Sternberg <e...@speakeasy.net> said:
> 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 by 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.
What second thoughts do you think they should have? (Aside from
perhaps "But meat's so *small*! And slow too" anyway.)
Consider: People today regularly switch from (1) zooming along in
ton-and-a-half vehicles at three times the speed of the fastest
sprinters to (2) plodding along slowly on their own feet, all without
any second thoughts beyond "I wish I could have found a better
parking space." Is that bad writing, or pandering to the automobile
fanboys of, say. the year 1900?
--
William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>
Elf M. Sternberg
> In article <87ej9dv...@speakeasy.net>,
> Elf M. Sternberg <e...@speakeasy.net> said:
>
>> 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 by 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.
> What second thoughts do you think they should have? (Aside from
> perhaps "But meat's so *small*! And slow too" anyway.)
That was *exactly* it. Egan's "there's no such thing as
'more' or 'different kinds' of consciousness outside of what Humanity
has already experienced and it's pointless to talk about what can
never be" gets on my nerves more than anything else. Yes, I know, you
need something to justify a post-human but not Singular existence, but
authorial fiat just isn't enough.
Elf
Blue Tyson
> tkmail...@yahoo.co.uk writes:
>
> No. The point of "The New Space Opera" is to be
> physics-compliant while still being thrilling. "Who's Afraid of Wolf
> 359?" pulled that off marvelously. Also, Greg Egan, more than any
> other writer of our time, has striven to be as physics-compliant as
> possible. For him to fail so obviously is highly disappointing.
>
> Elf
>
No, the point of The New Space Opera is that it is new.
That might be what you want 'The New Space Opera' to be, but nowhere
have I seen anyone say that. In fact, you may be in a group of one
with your own personal definition there.
Is there Hard SF Renaissance crossover with The Space Opera
Renaissance? Sure, some That is certainly not all there is.
As for the rest, Glory is an excellent story. In fact, an anti-
fail. :)
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> As for the rest, Glory is an excellent story. In fact, an anti-
> fail. :)
Really? I thought it fell a bit flat. The ending was too empty for
something this long, and I didn't like the rest of the story quite
enough to redeem it.
That said, I really enjoy Egan, and I liked most of the concepts in
Glory. I was impressed enough by the relativistic antimatter firework
to ignore the handwaving needed to have it carve out and propell
nanomachines from the face of a star, though I would have balked at it
in a novel. I wasn't bothered by the explicit "sex copout" as Elf was
either.
Perhaps it works better if you read a bit more into the ending -
1) that the Amalgalm would thrive better working the MacGuffin out for
themselves; they'd be damaged by being given it on a plate / knowing
that someone else had worked it out before them
2) it would cripple their ability to respond to the emerging threat
from the expansionist ("Spreader") Noudahs.
It still doesn't convince though. Why is maths quite so important to
the Amalgalm? And on the second point, the Amalgalm are supposed to
know "how to deal with barbarians".
I suppose it makes sense as a decision made on a risk/benefit basis,
or from the POV of someone who's... well, not literally grieving for
their lover or in fear of their life, but at least extrememly fed up
with their current situation. But this doesn't seem to be well
developed - so I read it as the usual s.f. short story ending, where
making the right Decision is absolutely necessary. Re-reading it, I
can see the subtleties, but for me they were too cryptic to override
my genre defaults. I wasn't convinced by the basic explanation and I
just wondered whether Egan thought the herione was making the wrong
decision.
Alan
Steve Coltrin
Walter Bushell <pr...@xxx.com> writes:
> That's the wurst pun I've cum across in weeks.
Eww.
--
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>
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David Dyer-Bennet
> If you wish to read the story in question before reading the review,
> the full text of it is available at:
>
> http://outofthiseos.typepad.com/blog/2008/03/hugo-short-stor.html
> Greg Egan used to be one of my favorite writers. I say "used to be"
> 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", and which is the setting for his
> next novel, Incandescence.
Sigh. Yes, I've been somewhat going off Egan myself.
Thanks for this excellent review.
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david.sh...@ymail.com
> Elf M. Sternberg <e...@speakeasy.net> writes:
>
> > Greg 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", and which is the setting for his
> > next novel, Incandescence.
>
> Sigh. Yes, I've been somewhat going off Egan myself.
>
> Thanks for this excellent review.
and I don't know whether he is still reading Usenet now.