Nehaveigur

Distress is a science fiction novel by Greg Egan that came out in 1995 and is set in 2055. The world of the mid-21st century in Distress is an extrapolation of the world of 1995, which is to say that it’s not a dystopia. Yes, there are climate refugees, but there hasn’t been an apocalypse or societal breakdown either. It’s a world that would hit most or all of my metrics of success.

Appropriately enough, the first chapter of Distress still makes for distressing reading. It’s well written but it’s hard to read. The rest of the book is easier to read but is less well written. There are some grand ideas, but they never quite make sense. The lack of plausibility makes it hard to be invested in the story.

The reason I read this was that one of Egan’s other novels, Permutation City, is one of my favorites. Here is one if it’s characters, after being brain scanned and uploaded to a computer, wondering whether the medium his mind is running on matters:

And if the computations behind all this had been performed over millennia, by people flicking abacus beads, would he have felt exactly the same? It was outrageous to admit it – but the answer had to be yes.

Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy Distress nearly as much as Permutation City. Egan’s other writing is of similarly heterogeneous quality. His short collection Axiomatic has a few brilliant stories that I keep thinking about, but most of them are forgettable.