Early 2002: Two new Australian hard science fiction books:
Greg Egan - Schild's Ladder (HC/TPB, Orion Gollancz [UK], Allen & Unwin [AUS])
Damien Broderick - Transcension (HC, Tor [US])
This February saw the overseas publication of new novels from arguably Australia's two top living science fiction authors. Greg Egan is my favourite author (and I'm by no means alone in this), so anything new from him is highly anticipated - such that I got a friend to send the trade paperback over from London the moment it was released. The hardcover is out here now, with the trade paperback due this month.
The novel is accompanied by copious notes available at Greg's amazing website. It's a far-future novel based on some esoteric physics, and may be a little daunting for a first-time Egan reader. For those willing to take the plunge, and those who know what to expect, it's an extraordinary journey which manages to be moving and engaging despite its extreme removal from almost any familiar contemporary environments.
A physics experiment is performed, in deep space, to test the Sarumpaet Rules, which have served to explain every physical phenomenon for millennia. Catastrophically, the test is so successful that its resultant product acts as a catalyst for the swift expansion of a new space with a radically different physics, whose growth gradually threatens the entirety of inhabited space.
Being a Greg Egan novel, the nature of his intricately thought-out universe is such that the reader must pay a lot of attention to even understand what the stakes are, but Egan is a brilliant conveyor of ideas, and his extrapolations of physics, mathematics, society, biology, gender, and consciousness/artificial intelligence are a joy to read. The most immediately engaging sections are incisive observations of youthful relationships (Egan is adept at describing weird sex in completely natural ways), and the question of personal identity (What is it like to be a person? What makes you the same person you were 5 minutes ago? Two days ago? Or indeed for these nearly-immortal post-humans, millennia ago?) But there is much, much more to fascinate and illuminate for the attentive reader.
Damien Broderick has been writing since about 1960, and is a well-known critic and anthologist as well as an acclaimed author. Although his work is not generally quite as rigorously hard science fiction as Egan's, he did release a non-fiction futurology book in 1997 called The Spike. Many future-thinking philosophers and scientists believe that as technological progress accelerates (computer processors doubling in speed in less than a year), there will come a point sometime in the middle of this century where a "singularity" or spike is reached. After this point, who knows what will happen? Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology, humanity transcending into something almost god-like… Leaving aside the mystical metaphysical side of this, the central technological claims are hard to deny.
Broderick's new novel is a fictional take on the same ideas. Interleaved through the novel is an extended version of fantastic old short story of his about a cryogenically frozen cognitive scientist coming face to face with an artificial intelligence in the future. Those ideas and many more are explored through a deceptively straightforward story, told from myriad different viewpoints. There's the bored "pender" Amanda, in whose society children's adolescence is delayed until they turn Thirty, who speaks in an annoying clipped Mall cant; and there's Mathewmark, who lives in a reservation called "The Valley of the God of One's Choice", where religious fundamentalists reject any form of technology. Broderick comments sardonically on environmental issues (the Valley is Broderick's home of Coburg Valley, where inappropriate farming techniques threaten to destroy the land completely) as well as a huge range of other areas. The enormous transcendent sea-change that occurs at the end is perhaps not presaged clearly enough during the rest of the book, but all the strands are tied up nicely in the end, and the unconventional narrative style suits the content very nicely.
It's a shame that this US hardcover isn't distributed in Australia (although you can get an import at Galaxy books). Hopefully when the paperback is out, we Australians will be able to get it locally: Broderick is always a rewarding author, and this is quite possibly his best work yet.