Jen's Reviews > Diaspora

Folks, if exposure to Greg Egan has assured me of anything it's that I'm an idiot. You heard it here first, (unless you've been talking to my parents), or you're unusually perceptive and have penetrated the highly remunerated (citation please) intellectual vacuity with which I have inundated Goodreads over the past few years, in which case you're overly familiar with the fractal ineptitude which infests my being across all levels of magnification. But let's not carp and cavil over the pernicious effects of standpoint epistemology on our current, like, zeitgeist or whatevs. The point is I have become painfully aware of the misuses of science which litter my errrrrv, and so I've decided to fact check myself in real time as error prophylaxis. But let me start by saying that Mr. Egan does indeed have a way of leaving me disoriented to the point that I scramble like a dysgenic, near-sighted ferret through a twisting vortex of Wikipedia articles and matlab palaver which leaves me feelings like an utter midwit who would rather be either much smarter or somewhat dumber, because occupying the position of someone who is aware of the most rarefied kinds of thought and the incredible beauty they portend, but lacks the perspicacity to develop a personal mastery of, or a real aesthetic sensitivity to, said subjects - is perhaps the worst infinitesimal betwixt the polar extremes of sagacious endowment. Compounding the interest on my misery: In addition to being only smart enough to realize what a middling mind I possess, I am as stubborn as Winrar is in reminding me that it's time to upgrade to the full version each and every time I extract/compress information of questionable character. So I persist in attempting to understand that which lurks beyond my bailiwick with a violence commensurate with the first fist fight I ever attempted, (with a boy orders of magnitude my superior in melee forays, because he snatched a tater tot from my lunch tray with the imperious affect characteristic of apex predators), which is tantamount to getting my ass beaten so cartoonishly that I fall in my mashed potatoes, splatter a cup of peaches like a packet of ketchup twisted at one end and ran over by a car, and lay there for several minutes intoning a dolorous mantra which goes, "Oh god damn..." Over and over while sucking chocolate milk off the linoleum. So the real reason that Greg Egan is one of my favorite science fiction writers is because he takes me back to a gentler time. 

But I've waffled enough, let me lean into this new mode of discourse with apposite quotationary peregrinations.

Plutarch once remarked that the mind is a terrible thing to taste. (A measure zero probability.) Written records descant - at length - (redundant) about his inability to enjoy science fiction unless it's delivery was sufficiently rigid (ie. A good hard (ie. Mencken's proposition that: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.) impecunious (unnecessary) railing (but crucially not a paling, palisade, balustrade, banister, hurdle, barrier, parapet. But rather a seriously deep redacted in the redacted or redacted or redacted or, Vishnu forbid, redacted.) (Redact me! I'm getting carried away, huh?). (False.) But he did recommend that one not inject to brimmage their frontal lobes with hydrochloric acid in the pursuit of knowledge, (which even Dahmer would later admit is so inimical to the project of cognition that it rendered one unable to function as even a grotesque kink-zombie) (gratuitous and possibly offensive), but kindling a fire in the 'ole brainpan worthy of searing a tomahawk steak. (A paraphrasing of significant informational infidelity). (More concise reconstruction:) Which is to say: wreathe one's cerebellum in a corona of beef mediated heat distortion caused by the differential refractive indices of red and blue thoughts moving through pulverulent concave mirror networks distributed in the glial substrate (scientific mischaracterization of heat mirages and flat out misrepresentation of myriad neurobiological processes). (Of special interest is the idea that Taco fumes are extremely heavy and not easily evicted from basements and require nothing less than the total extirpation of offending particulates by a supernatural entity of staggering statistical literacy and superior bean counting ability, (ie. Maxwell's demon), once the offending odor has become entrenched in one's subterranean lodgings, and only then can one ever resume harmonious olfactory relations with their surroundings and be free of chronic cephalic (not to be confused with a genre of porn created by intrepid Japanese animators in order to circumvent draconian censorship laws - but conditioned physiological responses to food), insulin secretion). (Logically indefensible but emotionally salient.) In other words: What if nature cannot be cognized as a whole? It may well be that nature is utterly chaotic, with no law to subsume the apparent heterogeneity, no concept capable of whittling down its ever-increasing complexity. (Not pertinent and bordering dangerously on postmodern sentiments which, if taken to the ludicrous intellectual apogee of certain firebrands, would result in the shattering of our communal sense making apparatus and thus fatally stifle the human project and leave us all sucking chocolate milk off a piebald cafeteria floor). So what did he actually say? Well, it ain't about filling a vessel, it's about kindling a flame. (Colloquially disfigured but conceptually aligned.) In this respect, one might imagine that Egan is fond of welding your zipper shut and reducing your head to a smoldering baseball. (Mr. Egan has, as far as I can tell, never publicly evinced enthusiasm for arc welding or hurling bolts of lightning.)

Many nights have passed with me attempting to contain the fissile material deposited by this far future, post-singularity tale, (False: I spend most nights lying near the neighbor’s fence and using a deer caller to mimic the sounds of a randy buck until the sudden incandescent starburst of his high watt porch light herald’s his be-slippered arrival and he inevitably calls out in a hoarse whisper: “Is that you Ted?” Which causes me to fight back laughter so hard that my entire body convulses like a tased suspect and I begin wheezing like a hyena with a collapsed trachea.) and I'll be honest, the NRC is livid, (I am unknown to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) because these soft tissues are not constructed in accordance with § 71.51, and there is a non-trivial amount of leakage. (True but contextually confused.) These are ideas which irradiate vesperal musings, mutate the morphean DNA which vitiates peaceful slumber, and bestow an agonizing death via ionized grapeshot on anserine fuck-abouts who breach the containment zone of this corium blancmange in expectation of a breezy space opera (a mere metaphor overindulged, an impulse gratified to excess - but also Greg Egan might actually damage the integrity of your organic hardisk in a way which causes your individual unit to fall far afoul of typical MTBFs/AFRs (mean time between failures and annualized failure rates, respectively) Say, causing the peripatetic read/write head of your attention to go rigid like smooth muscles in the presence of phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors and nitric oxide, which in turn suddenly diddles the precariously perched storage it normally hovers above like the breath of a creeper in a manner so lascivious that the extremely thin layer of non-electrostatic lubricant, which normally causes the perp’s pervy transducer region to harmlessly richochet, is terminally engraved by the insistence of this newly rigid armature. (ie. My boy Greg might literally fucking kill you if your state ain’t solid.)

Herein pontificated upon are the digitized, self-referential algorithms sufficient to instantiate consciousness. Embryonic minds of pure energy inhabiting electronic civilizations. Utilizing fantastical physics such as Kozuch Theory, which treats elementary particles as semi-point-like wormholes, whose properties can be explained entirely in terms of their geometries in six dimensions. Masses of virus-sized nanomachines that dismantle a human body and record the brain's information states as it is chemically converted into a crystalline computer. The arbitrary parameters of the simulated realities and their intriguing manipulations. The philosophical implications of a humanity freed from long immurement in the oubliette of ancestral biology, and where desire, once bound by these biological imperatives, discharges itself in a post human context. (Correct but incomplete.)