What I'm Reading: Instantiation, by Greg Egan

Egan's always been best at short story length, writing an idea that cuts away your Human delusions of self-importance and self-awareness, and then terminates. His characters have maybe more depth now than they did 30 years ago, but it's focused on the task at hand. A number of these skip forward in time rapidly, sketching out a scene and then a # section break and it's months or years later; generally obvious from context, but I'd prefer timestamps.

I'll try to be vague but it's impossible to say even how a story worked for me, without some hint of what it is; you might want to read these cold. If so, you can probably skip Uncanny Valley or Break My Fall.

 

  • The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine: The soft AI apocalypse, as they take our jobs but nobody can figure out how to stop it. Borderline positive view of Human adaptability, which we also got in Perihelion Summer, which is always a little surprising from Egan.
  • Zero For Conduct: Afghan girl in Iranian school cultural piece, see also Egan's novel Zendegi, with a bit of SF on the side; I don't believe the SF widget is plausibly that easy, or it would be found by someone other than the protagonist, but it's a cute enough story.
  • Uncanny Valley: Legal wrangling around a kind of immortality. I've previously read this online, and was bored out of my skull by it then; the character development/backstory would be interesting if the setup wasn't all for accountants and lawyers.
  • Seventh Sight: Not quite a Reasons to be Cheerful but improved sight doesn't make everything better. OK, sure. I would expect this to be commonly available as glasses or a shitty phone app long before it became available as implants, bicycles before rockets and all that. Feels like a Vernor Vinge short story, in the good idea/half-assed delivery way.
  • The Nearest: Excellent story about alienation and how fallible Human meat brains are. Almost exactly what I read Egan for (although there's no technical cause or solution, which he'd normally provide).
  • Shadow Flock: How do you defend against insect-sized drones? Almost every kind of security is just nonexistent. Egan barely touches on this; it's kind of a straightforward heist story with the inevitable twist (see also Rick & Morty S4E03 "One Crew"). I think I have some technical arguments against the sight & sound suite these things have, real insects don't have great senses because physics makes it difficult, but maybe it's solveable with enough software post-processing?
  • Bit Players: A woman calling herself Sagreda awakes in a world that makes no sense, immediately tests the physics and deduce the nature of the world, and exploits that, as life always does. So, this is 100% in my wheelhouse. But I question the peaceful nature of this world. Maybe it's just lucky that there's not psychotic adventurers running thru here, and the next world over is blood-soaked? James P. Hogan's Realtime Interrupt and Terry Bisson's In the Upper Room deal with this at length, and I'd like to see Egan address it beyond contempt for barrel-bottom shovelware and misuse of AI. Also the setting reminds me strongly of one of my favorite joke D&D adventures, There's No Place Like Up by Paul Jaquays, in WG7 Castle Greyhawk: "If the PCs wish, they can fall forever".
  • Break My Fall: I assume this is a fragment from a book in progress, or perhaps a fragment that didn't gel into a book; it seems of a similar setting to The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred. An interesting if unlikely low-powered spaceflight solution, a disaster, and people doing their best to fix it… but it goes nowhere and the finale has no closure at all.
  • 3-adica: Sequel to Bit Players, Sagreda and Mathis move on to new worlds and try to find the way out. The world most of it is in, is the kind of shithole I would expect adventurers to like. The titular world is a bizarre mathematical premise, like Rudy Rucker's White Light, and I don't know how to visualize it; I get the trick of movement, but not how you'd even exist particle-by-particle within it. Very much the middle third of a novella.
  • The Slipway: A cosmic disaster story, the like of which Egan hasn't done since Distress or Diaspora. The Pane's an interesting Big Dumb Object, and reminds me of the Artifacts in Charles Sheffield's Summertide series, but I think either people would panic to the point of global disaster, or not care in the least, and the middle ground here is unstable. I'm not clear on how you get the long-distance view until old light has passed and new light reaches the Earth, a few years out. On the one hand, this is the safest possible place for Earth, on the other hand it's not great for long-term exploration, and on the gripping hand I would be surprised if there were any more Panes in their new location.
  • Instantiation: The finale of Bit Players and 3-adica, Sagreda spends much of this one following someone playing Kurt Gödel in a Vienna intellectuals killing Nazis game. I understand Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem (mostly?), but every explanation of it in plainer English/German sound more insane than the last. A moderately clever heist/con game, and finally a conclusion to a story. Yes, for once Egan mostly wrapped up a story without an apocalypse or "well what do I do now?"

★★★★★ despite a couple clunkers