been reading and rereading some old greg egan short stories from the '90s (specifically his collections Axiomatic and Luminous), fun stuff, would recommend. some scattered thoughts:
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1. greg egan in the '90s absolutely fucking hates religion, spirituality, all humanities subjects and the people who study them, with an intensity i find jarring. i guess this might've made more sense during the height of the atheism wars but it strikes me as ridiculous now
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possibly ironically, the characters in his '90s short stories are constantly grappling with - they wouldn't use this language, but the death of god, nihilism, the question of where meaning comes from in a universe where physics is the only true law
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his characters ask themselves: if people are just particles obeying the schrodinger equation then what does it matter whether i treat them one way or another? several characters almost explicitly conclude that it doesn't matter (e.g. in The Vat) but pull back at the last second
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it's a little difficult to tell to what extent greg egan as an author is agreeing with the words he's putting in his main character's mouths, but the frothing hatred of the humanities and the worshipping of physics as practically a religion is extremely consistent between stories
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i think you could actually argue that a bunch of these stories are about what called "stage 4.5 nihilistic depression," the gap between kegan stages 4 and 5 a certain kind of STEM-worshipping person can fall into
metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-
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2. at least in Axiomatic there's a consistent trend of men in relationships with women who are, to my mind, bizarrely cold and unempathetic, and i just have no idea what's going on here or what point he's trying to make. i wonder if greg was going through something 😬
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3. greg egan does this cool thing i've seen few other authors do (only borges and ted chiang?) of taking some very abstract idea from mathematics or physics and managing to make it the basis of a story with real dramatic tension. i would love to learn how to do this
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after all i know a lot of very abstract ideas from mathematics and physics and it would be nice to finally get some use out of them 😛
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4a. several of his near-future stories feature teenagers getting radical body modifications in this very cyberpunk way; as a prediction i don't think this panned out at all. not a single new form of body modification has become popular in my lifetime that i can think of
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(not counting gender transition stuff which i think doesn't really fall under this umbrella; greg egan is imagining like tattoos-and-piercings++ for young punks to stick it to old squares and i just haven't seen anything like that personally. afaict ppl just want to look sexy)
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4b. related to 4a, many of the body modifications come from significant tech advances especially in biotech, and i also don't think anything like that has panned out. greg egan imagined tech able to do stuff like control the levels of neurotransmitters in your brain in real time
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in a few stories (e.g. the titular Axiomatic) greg egan imagines tech able to infiltrate your brain and force you to believe some particular thing, e.g. that some religion is true. i actually suspect there will be deep reasons why something like this couldn't possibly work
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(to go into greg-egan-mc mode, i think the structure of beliefs is holographic; your beliefs reflect and are reflected by the sum totality of the experiences that make you you, everything depends on everything else, they can't just be arbitrarily modified in isolation
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so i think we'll find that we won't be able to do much better than the equivalent of installing a voice in your mind constantly trying to hypnotize you into believing something or other, which will have effects but not as powerful as what greg imagines, i think)
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(also i think this holography idea itself could be the basis of a nice short story hmm. if i really wanted to go hardcore greg-egan-style on it i could try to tie it to the holographic principle in physics somehow, greg loves doing shit like that, ted chiang too)
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5a. i'm not quite sure how to say this more precisely but something about the pandemic has made a lot of greg-egan-in-the-'90s' worldview seem naive. it's like he vastly overestimated how competent organizations are? maybe they were more competent in the '90s?
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like - there are epidemics in these stories! in one story called Blood Sisters
(SPOILER WARNING)
there's a meta-epidemic caused by a biological weapon that is basically constantly trying to evolve new epidemics. it causes a lockdown that lasts *one month*!!!!!
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the worst thing that happens in this story
(SPOILER WARNING AGAIN)
is that medical organizations are revealed to be *covertly giving some people placebos for A/B testing purposes without their knowledge*!!!!!
can you imagine a world in which *that's* as bad as it gets?
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