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Greg Egan Modern Masters of Science Fiction 1st
Edition Karen Burnham Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Karen Burnham
ISBN(s): 9780252096297, 0252096290
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.01 MB
Year: 2014
Language: english
 Greg Egan

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 Modern Masters of Science Fiction
Science fiction often anticipates the consequences of scientific discoveries.
The immense strides made by science since World War II have been matched
step by step by writers who gave equal attention to scientific principles, human
imagination, and the craft of fiction. The respect for science fiction won by
Jules Verne and H. G. Wells was further increased by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C.
Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Ray Bradbury.
Modern Masters of Science Fiction is devoted to books that survey the work
of individual authors who continue to inspire and advance science fiction.

A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

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 Greg Egan
Karen Burnham

Universit y of Illinois Press

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

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 © 2014 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burnham, Karen
Greg Egan / Karen Burnham.
pages cm — (Modern masters of science fiction)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-03841-9 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-252-07993-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-252-09629-7 (e-book)
1. Egan, Greg, 1961 — Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title.
PR9619.3.E35Z58  2014
823.'914—dc23  2013040329

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 To Charles and Gary with thanks;
To Curtis and Gavin with love.

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 Contents

Preface xi

Introduction 1

Chap ter 1 Writing Radical Hard SF 17

Chap ter 2 Ethical Standards 51

Chap ter 3 Identity and Consciousness 76

Chap ter 4 Scientific Analysis 101

Chap ter 5 Science and Society 128

Interview with Greg Egan 157

A Greg Egan Bibliography 181

Works Cited 183

Index 187

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 Preface

My personal familiarity with Greg Egan’s work tracks my development in

both the science fiction and scientific worlds. I started reading Egan around
the same time I started reading Locus magazine, after attending the World
Science Fiction Convention in San Jose in 2002. I was just out of college with
a freshly minted bachelor of science in physics and working on developing
signal processing algorithms. I had been a devoted science fiction reader all
my life, but discovering Locus magazine, with its in-depth interviews, reviews,
and news of the science fiction field, made me realize that I could get much
more out of my reading by writing about it. The first review I ever published
in a “real” edited venue was on Egan’s Schild’s Ladder for Strange Horizons.
After a few years I’d learned more about the craft, and in 2007 Locus’s senior
reviewer, Gary K. Wolfe, invited me to come to the International Conference
on the Fantastic in the Arts, suggesting that I consider submitting a paper.
I’d never written that sort of paper before but immediately had an idea that
seemed worth pursuing. So I dipped my toe into more serious scholarly wa-
ters with a paper on the treatment of posthuman gender in Charles Stross’s
Glasshouse and Egan’s Schild’s Ladder, which later appeared in The New York
Review of Science Fiction. Since then I’ve completed a master of science in
electrical engineering (which gave me an even greater appreciation of stories
such as “Learning to Be Me”), and I currently work at NASA’s Johnson Space
Center as an electromagnetic compatibility engineer.
Egan’s work strikes exactly the balance between science and art that I have
found valuable in my own life and career. So it is with great pleasure that I have
been engaging with Greg Egan’s fiction for this volume, and with immense
gratitude to the University of Illinois Press and editor Bill Regier for allowing
a rather unconventional science fiction scholar to take on the task. I hope that

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 what readers find in these pages will strike an appropriate balance between
consideration of literary values and some of the more scientific aspects that
are also critical to understanding Egan’s work.
I extend my thanks to all those who have been generous with their time as
I have talked through my various thoughts on Egan’s work over the past few
years. Conversations with John Baez, Ted Chiang, John DeNardo, Gardner
Dozois, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Daryl Gregory, James Patrick Kelly, Geoffrey
Landis, Russell Letson, Karen Lord, Beth Potterveld, Paul Graham Raven,
Maureen Kincaid Speller, Jonathan Strahan, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro have all
informed this volume. I need to profusely thank those who have mentored
me in my engineering career over the years, especially Sud DeLand, Buzz
Delinger, Michael Draznin, Mary Harris, John Norgard, and Bob Scully. I thank
the late Charles N. Brown for founding Locus magazine and for inviting me
to drive him to the airport—which favor he amply repaid with his wealth of
insight, anecdote, wine, and scotch. I must especially thank Gary K. Wolfe
for inspiring me to become a reviewer, for encouraging me when I did, and
for thinking of me when he heard about this series at the University of Illi-
nois Press. Without his generous feedback, and the editorial eye of Maureen
Kincaid Speller, this would be a much poorer volume. All errors, of course,
stem from the source, myself.
I thank my parents, Paul and Anne Burnham, for introducing me to science
fiction, for letting me read whatever I wanted with no limitations, and for
inculcating the habit of thoughtful conversation to which I remain addicted
to this day. Many thanks go of course to Greg Egan, who has been generous
with his time in conducting the interview you’ll find at the end of the book,
who has kept a beautifully detailed online bibliography and scientific note-
book, and who has created so much fiction that is worthy of deeper thought
and study. And all my thanks, forever, go to my husband Curtis Potterveld. I
started drafting this book when our son Gavin was two weeks old, and before
it was done we’d also moved houses. Without Curtis’s vast well of patience
and willingness to solo-parent, this manuscript, my sanity, or our son (prob-
ably the manuscript) would not have survived.

xii p re face

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 Greg Egan

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 Introduction

Traditionally, a book-length study focusing on a single author might begin

with a chapter of biographical material: parents, early childhood, family
history, and the like. This book, focusing on the work of Australian science
fiction author Greg Egan, will not follow the traditional format. The scant
biographical details known about this multifaceted, influential author can
be summed up as follows: Egan was born on August 20, 1961. His mother
was a librarian. He had an early interest in film, earned a bachelor of science
in mathematics from the University of Western Australia, and worked as
a programmer in the medical research field. He has been writing full time
since 1992. He’s a vegetarian. Add in a young-adult flirtation with Catholi-
cism and a staunch adult commitment to atheism and refugee issues, and
that nearly exhausts the available biographical material.
Throughout his literary career Egan has avoided publicity and self-promo-
tion, with occasional interviews conducted by e-mail being the exceptions.
He discussed his reasons for this reticence in his first published interview,
conducted in 1993 by Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy G. Byrne of Eidolon
magazine:

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 As for being entertaining in person, I’m not a public speaker. That’s not my role,
and it’s not something I’d do well in any case. I had a job interview once where I
said so little that the man who was conducting the interview—a very pompous
professor of immunology—told me I was illiterate. (What he meant was inar-
ticulate, of course, but it didn’t seem wise to point that out to him.) So the day
it becomes obligatory for writers to go out and cultivate fandom, like politicians
on the hustings, they’d better put it in the publishing contracts so I can refuse
to sign them. . . . I’d do it badly, and I also think the value of it is overrated. I’ve
bought books by my own favourite authors for years without knowing the first
thing about them, other than what they’ve written. It’s all down to reviews, past
works, and word of mouth. I believe there’s a large component of the SF reader-
ship who don’t even know—let alone care—about all the bullshit that goes on.
Of the people I know who read science fiction, the majority have no connection
whatsoever to fandom, and they’re quite oblivious to whether or not Writer X
has had his photo in Locus every month, and juggled armadillos while filk-singing
at the latest Worldcon. (“Burning the Motherhood Statements”)

His stance on this issue has been unwavering, as seen in this 2009 interview
in Virtual Worlds:
Q: You’ve been described as a recluse. You don’t attend science fiction conventions,
there are no photographs of you to be found anywhere, and very few people in
the publishing industry have actually met you. Is there a reason why you value
your privacy so highly?
A: It’s funny; I spend my long weekends mowing the lawn and visiting friends, and I
get described as a “recluse” by people whose idea of normality is dashing around
a dreary hotel somewhere trying to get photographed next to someone famous.

It was once jokingly noted at a World Science Fiction Convention panel that
if science fiction reviewers were barred by ethics from reviewing anyone they
knew personally, then the only person they could all review would be Greg Egan.
This book will also forgo any consideration of Egan as a quintessentially
Australian writer. While he lives in Australia, sets some of his fiction there, and
has won a number of Australian awards, his career took off in British (Interzone)
and American (Asimov’s) magazines, and he doesn’t consider his Australianness
to have had much to do with it. He dismissed the notion of core Australianness
(or “Miracle Ingredient A”) explicitly in his 1995 essay “A Report on the Origins
and Hazardous Effects of Miracle Ingredient A” in the Australian SF magazine

2 in t roduc t ion

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 Eidolon. One line serves as an example of the tone: “Yeah, and Skylab fell on us
because it was homing in on Miracle Ingredient A.”
Egan leaves his work to stand on its own, and that is how it will be consid-
ered in this book. At the time of this writing he has published twelve novels
and sixty shorter stories. Over time we can chart a clear career trajectory that
any author could be proud of: an early mix of successes and rejections, slowly
finding his core themes and audience, getting published regularly, showing up
in Year’s Best anthologies, getting award nominations, moving from short sto-
ries to novels, and winning major awards. One can track Egan’s rise to promi-
nence in part through tables of contents: when David Hartwell and Kathryn
Cramer looked at the history of hard SF in The Ascent of Wonder (1994), Egan
did not appear, and he did not have a novel out in time to merit inclusion in
the 1992 edition of John Clute and Peter Nicholls’s The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction. By the year 2000 all that had changed. In George Mann’s The Mammoth
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2001), Egan’s entry reads in part: “This is why
many view him as one of the most successful writers of HARD SF: he does
not alienate the reader with high-tech jargon but instead puts the scientific
aspects of his work in understandable terms and characters with whom it is
easy to identify” (130). (This has, however, become arguably less true as the
new century has progressed.) When Hartwell and Cramer revisited hard SF
as it appeared in the 1990s in The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), Egan appeared
not once but twice. Farah Mendlesohn devotes several pages of the introduc-
tion to The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003) to a detailed reading
of Schild’s Ladder, and by 2010 Egan fit comfortably in a book titled Fifty Key
Figures in Science Fiction, which stated: “[Egan is] widely considered one of
the preeminent figures of post-cyberpunk sf ” (Bould et al. 76). As we will see
in chapter 1, that upward trajectory has perhaps peaked and declined in the
new millennium. However, there is no doubt that Greg Egan is an important
and influential author who remains a touchstone of the science fiction field.
Arguments about definitions of science fiction in general or hard science
fiction in particular are perennial topics of conversation and literary analysis.
However one chooses to define the terms, there is no doubt that what Egan
writes is near the heart of contemporary SF and hard SF. More than any other
contemporary science fiction writer, he has set himself a project of raising
science’s profile through art—to convince people that science is as important

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 and critical to the human condition as romance or religion. As he puts it in
the extensive interview that can be found in this volume:
If I’m pleased with one general achievement, it’s to have contributed something to
the very small subset of literature that engages in a meaningful way with the full
context of human existence. The fact that we are part of a physical universe whose
laws can be discovered through reason and observation is the most profound and
powerful insight in our history, but most literature—including a large proportion of
SF—either ignores it or trivialises it. . . . A body of art that contained nothing about
the laws of electromagnetism, gravity and quantum mechanics, nothing about the
physical grounding of consciousness, and nothing about the process by which we’ve
learnt the rules that govern everything around us, would be like a body of art depict-
ing present day Earth that contained no mention of any human law or custom, no
tension between an individual and society, and no representation of a city, a village,
a forest or a river. Art that’s blind to the true landscape we inhabit—physical reality
in the widest sense—is just absurdly, pathetically blinkered and myopic.

I believe that this project as it relates to the intersection between art and
science is laid out most clearly in “The Planck Dive,” a novelette Egan wrote
near the peak of his popularity. Published in 1998 in Asimov’s magazine (edited
at the time by Gardner Dozois, a major booster of Egan’s fiction), the story was
nominated for the Hugo Award for best novelette and won the Locus Award
for best novelette for 1998. It has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese,
French, Spanish, and Czech (not unusual for his fiction from the nineties). It is
set in the same universe as his novel Diaspora, which appeared in 1997. It features
software-based posthumans, the type of characters that appear in many of his
most famous and successful stories, including Permutation City, Schild’s Ladder,
and “Glory.” A detailed reading of “The Planck Dive” might be a good way to
elucidate some of what makes Egan’s fiction unique and important.
The story starts with an unusual image: “Gisela was contemplating the
advantages of being crushed—almost certainly to death, albeit as slowly as
­possible—when the messenger appeared in her homescape. She noted its
presence but instructed it to wait, a sleek golden courier with winged sandals
stretching out a hand impatiently, frozen in mid-stride twenty delta away.” This
is typical of the sort of hook that Egan tends to use to invite a reader into a
story. It invites the question “Why is this person considering being crushed to
death?” which may motivate readers to stick with the next few paragraphs.

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 That’s important because the next few paragraphs walk us quickly through a
dense web of quantum and general relativistic physics, with sentences such as:
Relativity demanded that a free-falling particle’s rotating phase agree with every
other clock that travelled the same path, and once gravitational time dilation
was linked to changes in virtual particle density, every measure of time—from
the half-life of a radioisotope’s decay (stimulated by vacuum fluctuations) to
the vibrational modes of a sliver of quartz (ultimately due to the same phase
effects as those giving rise to classical paths)—could be reinterpreted as a count
of interactions with virtual particles. (Luminous 291)

Only those readers who are really interested in the physics, or who have been
sufficiently firmly hooked by Gisela and the still-frozen messenger, will make
it through. That the story did so well on popularly voted awards lists (the
Hugo and Locus Awards are both voted on by a large population of science
fiction readers) indicates just how many readers have been happily willing
to absorb these kinds of rigorous and abstruse physics lessons (or at least to
skim them as necessary).
Egan throws out a few well-chosen names to give us a context for his
projected future physics: Einstein and his theory of relativity that links space
and time; Andrei Sakharov and his theorizing on gravity; Roger Penrose and
his work attempting to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity (work
still not complete, early in the twenty-first century); Lee Smolin and his work
on quantum gravity; and Carlo Rovelli, who helped develop loop quantum
gravity theory. He then mentions a physicist named Kumar, presumably in
our future (“a century after Sakharov,” who died in 1989), who is described
as having moved the theory forward into something that could be used to
make accurate predictions. This tracing of a conceptual lineage, grounding
speculative physics in the work of modern physicists both well known and
not, is a hallmark of Egan’s stories and helps make his stories stand out even
among other hard SF writers.
It becomes clear that Gisela is working on her own physics model in the
run-up to a daring experiment. The eponymous Dive is an audacious proposal
to manipulate the interior of a black hole to allow for computation and to
send copies of several posthuman scientists into the black hole to conduct
experiments. Only after grounding us in the physics relevant to the ­experiment

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 does the messenger unfreeze and do we start to learn more about Gisela’s
environment. She lives inside a simulated reality that is physically based on
a satellite orbiting a black hole named Chandrasekhar (after another twen-
tieth-century physicist, who worked out the evolutionary sequence of stars,
specifically which stars can become black holes). Egan will feature another
community orbiting a black hole in Incandescence (2008). Gisela learns that they
are receiving visitors from another VR community back near Earth—people
in this future can change location by transmitting the information that defines
them: “Everything meaningful about an individual citizen could be packed
into less than an exabyte, and sent as a gamma-ray burst a few milliseconds
long” across space (Luminous 292). There is no faster-than-light travel here, as
Egan almost always writes fiction that plays by the rules of physics as we know
them today, but this does enable light-speed travel for anyone willing to brave
the trip and resulting temporal displacement (Chandrasekhar is ninety-seven
light years away from Earth, meaning that a minimum of 194 years will pass
between the guests’ leaving home and returning to it).
The arrival of the guests precipitates the main conflict of the story. Corde-
lia and her father Prospero (“[Gisela] been wondering why a Prospero had
named his daughter Cordelia, but now it struck her as only prudent—if you
had to succumb to a Shakespearean names fad at all—not to put anyone from
the same play together in one family” [Luminous 295]) come from a commu-
nity devoted to the arts of flesh-and-blood humans from before the majority
of the population uploaded into computers. This sets up a collision between
“science” and “the arts” that will play out through the story.
Gisela takes Cordelia for a tour while her father’s information is still be-
ing downloaded. Cordelia seems very interested and well informed about
what is going on. (This gives a sense of the timescale on which the posthu-
mans operate; for Cordelia to have been aware of the experiment at all, it
must have been in the planning stage for at least two hundred years, due to
the light-speed communication and travel limit.) We are treated to a visual
description of what travel near a black hole would look like and how light
from the stars would appear to a human observer moving closer to the event
horizon. Gisela and Cordelia discuss the view, adding to our understanding
through dialogue. In this case, Cordelia asks some of the questions that a

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 reader might have, allowing Gisela to explain the physics in more detail.
This dialogue-based approach to exploration of scientific ideas is a very old
form—it easily goes back to Plato’s accounts of Socratic dialogues, which
dealt with topics of math and science as well as philosophy and aesthetics.
It is also seen in Galileo’s famous Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations
Relating to Two New Sciences, which he wrote while under house arrest. That
manuscript features three speakers—Salvati explains the ideas, Segundo asks
the necessary questions, and Simplicio asks the “dumb” questions that can
arise through misunderstanding. Egan’s work in the twenty-first century
often uses this format (although almost never with a Simplicio character),
especially in the novels Incandescence, Clockwork Rocket, and Eternal Flame.
It becomes clear that Cordelia is firmly in the Segundo category when she
points out a subtle feature that Gisela’s software hasn’t modeled correctly.
Prospero, on the other hand, is a caricature of an artist who not only fails
to understand science, he also fails to understand why anyone would want to
understand it. His opening line is: “I’m sure your Falling City is ingeniously
designed, but that’s of no interest to me. I’m here to scrutinise your motives,
not your machines.” He insists on shoehorning their scientific adventure into
a classical mythic structure: “There’s a wide range of choices besides the
Pandora myth: Prometheus, Quixote, the Grail of course . . . perhaps even
Orpheus. Do you hope to rescue the dead?” He doesn’t fill Simplicio’s role in
the dialogue, simply because he has no interest in the dialogue at all. “Why am
I needed? I’m here to be your Homer, your Virgil, your Dante, your Dickens!
I’m here to extract the mythic essence of this glorious, tragic endeavour! I’m
here to grant you a gift infinitely greater than the immortality you seek! . . .
I’m here to make you legendary!” The frustration that many in the scientific
community felt during the 1990s, when some sectors of academic humanities
departments seemed to glorify willful ignorance about science and scientific
achievement, oozes from the pores of this story.
Sachio’s owl blinked with puzzlement. “But you find the Dive itself incompre-
hensible. So how are you suited to explain it to others?”
Prospero shook his head. “I have come to create enigmas, not explanations. I
have come to shape the story of your descent into a form [poetry] that will live
on long after your libraries have turned to dust.”

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 “Shape it how?” . . .”You mean change things?”
“To extract the mythic essence, mere detail must become subservient to a
deeper truth.”
Timon said, “I think that was a yes.” (Luminous 308–9)

There are five members of the dive team: Gisela, Sachio, Tiet, Vikram, and
Timon. The names conjure up a Star Trek–style multiracial future, but as is typical
for Egan’s fiction featuring posthumans, their names are just about the only thing
that differentiates one from another. Gisela is clearly our POV character, but the
others all seem turned from the same mold. One may be snarkier than another,
or they may have different technical specialties and avatars, but the fact that one
character has an implied Asian heritage and another an Indian background leaves
no trace on their characterization. I believe that Egan has come a long way in
terms of integrating cultural and gender differences in his characterization, but
certainly this somewhat featureless approach has come to typify Egan’s writing
for the majority of science fiction readers familiar with his work.
After additional scientific dialogue and complaining about Prospero, the
mission is launched. From the viewpoint of those remaining on the satellite,
the event is over in less than two milliseconds. Then they must suffer through
Prospero’s rendition of “The Ballad of Cartan Null.” Prospero has ignored
everything Gisela and the others had told him. In his version of events,
“Charon’s passengers” entered “gravity’s abyss” for reasons he’d invented
out of thin air: to escape, respectively, a failed romance/vengeance for an
unspeakable crime/ennui of longevity; to resurrect a lost flesher ancestor;
to seek contact with “the gods.” The universal questions the Divers had
actually hoped to answer—the structure of space-time at the Planck scale,
the underpinnings of quantum mechanics—don’t rate a mention. Eventu-
ally, the arguments break out:
It was Sachio who finally lost control and interjected angrily, “Cartan Null is some
ghostly image of a scape, full of ghostly icons, floating through the vacuum,
down into the hole?”
Prospero seemed more startled than outraged by the interruption. “It is a city
of light. Translucent, ethereal . . .”
The owl in Sachio’s skull puffed its feathers out. “No photon state would look
like that. What you describe could never exist, and even if it could it would never

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 be conscious.” Sachio had worked for decades on the problem of giving Cartan
Null the freedom to process data without disrupting the geometry around it.
Prospero spread his arms in a conciliatory gesture. “An archetypal quest nar-
rative must be kept simple. To burden it with technicalities—”
[...]
Sachio cut him off impatiently. . . . “What you’ve created is not only devoid
of truth, it’s devoid of aesthetic merit.” (Luminous 317–18)

Eventually, Prospero grabs Cordelia and leaves in a huff. Gisela makes a

last-minute bid to convince the girl to stay, but Cordelia decides to return
with her father—both out of love for him, and hope that the two centuries
that have passed since they left will have moved her home community beyond
its rather insular ways. But the resolution of the character and plot arcs
(Cordelia’s decision to migrate or not, and Prospero’s disastrous poem and
the reaction to it) are not the end of the story. Now the viewpoint shifts to
the participants in the Dive, where it turns out that Cordelia snuck a copy
of herself on board to participate (let’s not think too carefully about the
implied software security, or lack thereof, that allowed that to happen):
“‘Freeeeee-dom!’ Cordelia bounded across Cartan Null’s control scape, a
long platform floating in a tunnel of colour-coded Feynman diagrams, stream-
ing through the darkness like the trails of a billion colliding and disinte-
grating sparks” (Luminous 319). We then get the rest of the story from the
Divers’ point of view—a couple of milliseconds to the observers back in
normal space becomes hours of subjective time for the participants. As the
experiment progresses, they make a major breakthrough in understand-
ing the “why” of certain rules of quantum mechanics. Although they’ll
never be able to communicate their discovery to the outside world, and
even though their time inside the black hole will be finite, in the end they
feel that it was all worthwhile—the beauty and the elegance of what they
have discovered, although not everything they had hoped for, is immensely
satisfying for them.
“The Planck Dive” involves investigations into the nature of quantum
mechanics and space-time under extreme conditions. These questions come
up repeatedly in Egan’s fiction, especially in the twenty-first century. The novel
Incandescence tackles general relativity as experienced by a society orbiting a

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 black hole (without the quantum mechanics), and the Orthogonal trilogy
alters the equations that describe our space-time and works out large swaths
of new physics and how a world based on them would operate. As is the case
with many Egan stories, the two best resources for further understanding
the physics that go into stories like “The Planck Dive” are Gravitation (the
authoritative book on general relativity, by Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, and
John Wheeler), and Egan’s own website, which includes the equations he
used to make his predictions, as well as pictures and animations illustrating
the different exotic scenarios.
What we are presented with in “The Planck Dive” is a future where (unlike
our own present) there is a working model of the interactions of particles in
space-time: “a model of spacetime as a quantum sum of every possible net-
work of particle world lines, with classical ‘time’ arising from the number of
intersections along a given strand of the net” (Luminous 262). No experiments
have disproved this model, but it is somewhat arbitrary and thus unsatisfy-
ing. In our current understanding of physics there is considerable difficulty
in moving between macroscopic “classical” interactions and quantum-scale
interactions, as well as understanding how the world we see arises from the
non-intuitive rules governing quantum mechanics. Apparently, a lot of that
confusion has been resolved in this future, but there are still questions about
why the rules of the universe work the way they do.
Cordelia’s tour of the black hole introduces us to the odd ways light be-
haves in the vicinity of a black hole. Light visibly bends in the presence of a
strong gravitational field (it bends in the presence of any gravitational field, but
we don’t notice it in our day-to-day environment), and if it passes close enough
to the hole, it can end up either orbiting it or spiralling into it. We learn that
the space-time inside a black hole is not a homogenous flow, but a chaotic froth
of light and energy and tidal forces based on the mass and light flowing in.
Thus, the actual Planck Dive will consist of injecting matter and radiation into
the event horizon in very specific ways in order to shape the geometry inside.
This reshaping will allow light beams carrying information (the computations
that will simulate the people inside) to exist for some amount of time inside
the event horizon, where they will be able to conduct physics experiments
at length scales much smaller than possible outside. This will enable them to
test their physics model at the smallest possible distances (Planck’s constant is

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 the smallest unit of length possible in our quantized universe, hence “Planck
Dive”) and, with luck, learn about the physics underlying it all.
The experiment plans to make use of an extreme application of the Dop-
pler effect. Light consists of electromagnetic waves—the light we see from
the sun and the radio waves we receive on our radios are all part of the same
phenomenon; they just have different wavelengths. The wavelength of an FM
radio station might be three meters; the wavelength of green light is close to
forty micrometers (six orders of magnitude smaller). As light gets Doppler-
shifted more and more, its wavelengths will get shorter and shorter—into
x-rays (a few nanometers—10–9), and then gamma rays, the shortest waves
on our measured electromagnetic spectrum at roughly one picometer, 10–12.
That is the highest-frequency (and thus most energetic) light that any known
natural process can emit. However, Egan imagines that under the tidal forces
inside a black hole, there would only be a theoretical limit to how short light’s
wavelength could become—perhaps even down to the Planck length of 10–35
meters. That is how the participants of the Dive hope to learn about the
fundamental nature of space-time. The whole setup will act like an extra-
super particle accelerator, where photons that are becoming more and more
energetic (as the light achieves ever-shorter wavelengths) are colliding and
producing all kinds of new particles. In much the same way that the Large
Hadron Collider needs phenomenal amounts of energy to accelerate protons
and smash them into each other to produce a variety of exotic particles, here
the scientists are getting even more extreme acceleration and energy “for free”
from the black hole’s infinitely steep gravitational field.
As the experiments progress, there’s the moment of breakthrough—after
confirming the Kumar model at successively smaller and smaller lengths, the
scientists find something that is different from the predictions. As with all the
best scientific moments, there’s a specific sequence of events. First, the data
show something odd, so they go back and confirm the results. In this case,
the data have to do with a variation on the well-known two-slit experiment
in quantum physics that shows that while light is a particle (a photon) that
can only go through a single slit at a time, it also has a wave structure (as in
the wavelengths we have been talking about), which means that a diffraction
pattern shows up (based on the phase differences of the waves) when you
run the experiment over and over. Inside the black hole, the experimental

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 diffraction pattern shows that the phase differences between these particles
are quantized (not something we see in experiments we have been able to
do)—but not evenly spaced. Next, all the scientists grow quiet as they try to
figure out what the discrepancy means. This is followed by elation when one
of them works out a framework allowing the new data to fit elegantly with
everything known beforehand:
Vikram shouted with joy, and did a backwards somersault. “There are world
lines crossing between the nets! That’s what creates phase!” Without another word,
he began furiously sketching diagrams in the air, launching software, running
simulations. . . . Gisela felt a stab of jealousy: she’d been so close, she should
have been first. Then she began to examine more of the results, and the feeling
evaporated. This was elegant, this was beautiful, this was right. It didn’t matter
who’d discovered it. (Luminous 325)

This is the way the process of scientific inquiry works in the real world: not
quite content with the current state-of-the-art models, people devise experi-
ments to push understanding just a little bit further. There is a moment when
the unexpected happens, and then progress can be made. The exultation that
comes from that moment of breakthrough is truly a rush, and I think Egan
captures of the spirit of that moment as well in this story as in any of his
other work.
This is especially important in this story, where he is making the stron-
gest possible case that the narrative of science, completely separate from
the narrative modes of myth, poetry, and classical drama, is just as valid and
important as those more commonly exalted forms. By ending the story at the
moment of scientific climax instead of personal climax, by throwing all the
scientific detail into the story with no apologies, by basing the science in some
of the most fundamental scientific theories known today, and by making his
posthumans as human as possible while still enabling their trip into a black
hole, in every way this story makes the claim that science is just as critical
to human experience as art, and that it need make no apology for its “hard-
ness.” It also makes the case for “pure” science: by having the scientific climax
take place inside the event horizon of a black hole, there is no possibility of
technological advance based on this experiment, or even any hope of com-
municating it to the outside world. Even though this endeavor is completely

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 self-contained, all the participants feel that it is worthwhile, and to the extent
that we are rooting for them, so do we. This story, along with Diaspora (from
which “Planck Dive” is an offshoot), set Egan’s work on the trajectory that
moved away from near-future work concerned with consciousness, identity,
and bioethics toward the cutting-edge mathematical physics that underlies
Schild’s Ladder, Incandescence, and the Orthogonal trilogy in his twenty-first-
century work.
The final line in the story (and also in the short story collection Luminous,
where this story provides the final entry) is “That’s all right. I was just curious.”
Curiosity is what fundamentally drives scientific inquiry, and it is something critic
Russell Letson identifies as core to Egan: “I’m willing to defend the proposition
that the ruling passion of Egan’s work-as-a-whole is curiosity (rather a small
word for what I sense in him)” and ‘“Curiosity’ is such a watery word for what I
sense in Egan. I’ll bet there’s some double-jointed polysyllabic German term that
means ‘a passion not only for structural, functional, and operational understand-
ing but for the implications and connections that make for value or meaning.’
With a side order of irony and humor, to cut the Teutonic earnestness a bit”
(Locus Roundtable, March 5, 2012). Egan’s curiosity has been wide-ranging over
the years and currently focuses with laser intensity on mathematical physics.
However, he has only recently turned fifty-two years old as of this writing, so
there’s no telling where it will take him, and us, in the next decades.

As Greg Egan is not a particularly conventional author, I have arranged

the chapters of this book slightly unconventionally. Chapter 1 begins, sensibly
enough, with an overview of Egan’s fiction. It centers his work in the context
of the “radical hard SF” promoted by the magazine Interzone in the mid- to
late 1980s and provides an overview of his work to date, including his rise to
prominence (and subsequent diminishment). I trace a loose “future history”
that his stories follow, moving from biomedical advances in the near future
to digital immortality in the far future. I also give a summary of some of
his reception by critics to date, including the focus on his perceived lack of
characterization and the various attacks and defenses that have been mounted
over his work. In discussing his approach to character, I will also cover the
diverse range of characters that he portrays in his fiction.

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 In the subsequent three chapters I tackle the three most prominent themes
that I identify in Egan’s fiction. These chapters are loosely chronological:
chapter 2 deals with Egan’s view of ethics, which can be seen from his earli-
est breakout story, “The Cutie” in 1989. Chapter 3 addresses questions of
identity, which forms a central concern of Egan’s fiction from one of his most
important stories, “Learning to Be Me” in 1990, to his most talked-about SF
novel, Permutation City (1994). Chapter 4 works through the hard-core math
and physics that underpin his later novels, especially Incandescence (2002) and
the Orthogonal trilogy (2011–13).
Chapter 2 looks at several facets of ethical concerns, including medical
ethics as seen in “Blood Sisters” (1991) and “Cocoon” (1994). It also covers the
uneven distribution of technological benefits, best illustrated by “Yeyuka”
(1997) and the genetic engineering piracy shown in Distress (1995). Finally, it
focuses on our ethical responsibilities to life that we create and to alien life
that we may find out in the universe.
Chapter 3 covers stories that take questions of identity as their central
theme. First, it looks at stories that highlight how malleable our brains are in
terms of our neurochemistry. Next, it highlights stories where our conscious-
ness is digitized, eventually becoming immortal. It uses information theory
as a lens to examine some of the future consciousnesses proposed in Egan’s
stories and to consider what it means to divorce consciousness from physical
embodiment so strictly.
Chapter 4 addresses the scientific underpinnings of several of Egan’s nov-
els. Arranged in three parts, the chapter first considers the “subjective cosmol-
ogy” of the universes depicted in Quarantine, Permutation City, and Distress,
with their attendant quantum mechanical weirdness. Next, it tackles theories
about how our own universe works as seen in the novels Diaspora, Schild’s
Ladder, and Incandescence. Finally, the chapter provides a rough overview of
the alternate-world physics shown in the Orthogonal trilogy, with a particular
focus on Clockwork Rocket and Eternal Flame, the two volumes published at
the time of writing. It concludes with a section on Egan’s use of scientific
principles as metaphors for larger philosophical points.
Chapter 5 concludes the discussion. I set Egan’s work in the context of
some broader clashes between science and society at large. Several of Egan’s

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 stories address the conflict between science and religion, and others look at
the conflict between the humanities and scientific fields in academia. I apply
some criticisms of pure science to various Egan stories and then end with
a defense of science and science fiction as meaningful elements of human
experience. After this, you will find an extensive interview with Egan in the
appendix, touching on a broad array of topics, including his fiction, views on
the future, and time spent working on refugee issues in Australia.
My hope is that readers will gain an understanding of Egan as more mul-
tifaceted than his reputation admits. While he is generally considered as the
hard SF author who leaves all the math in, I hope to show that there is more
to his work than simply equations and physics experiments.

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 chapter 1

Writing Radical Hard SF

When people discuss Greg Egan today, it is usually in the context of “hard
SF.” Of course, hard SF as a term is nearly as difficult to define as “science
fiction” itself, but whatever it is, Egan is certainly at the center of it. In The
Hard SF Renaissance (2002), which included two of Egan’s stories, editors David
Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer described him as “perhaps the most interesting
hard SF writer to emerge in the 1990s” (25). Egan also served as a touchstone
for several story notes in the anthology: Robert Reed “[finds himself] retreat-
ing from Greg Egan’s more radical ideas” (282), Joan Slonczewski “seems
closest in attitude to Greg Egan” (317), while Alastair Reynolds points him
out as an exemplar in his essay “On Hard SF” (621); Karl Schroeder says, “At
the moment I admire Greg Egan the most of the current generation of [hard
SF] writers” (723).
What hard SF is and what it means to the field has evolved over the years.
P. Schuyler Miller is credited with the invention of the term in 1957, when he

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 used it simply to refer to the “core” of the SF field, the sort of works published,
for example, by John W. Campbell in the pages of Astounding magazine. It
was largely synonymous with what today we would refer to as “Golden Age”
SF. Later, the term was pressed into service to draw a distinction between SF
that dealt with physics and engineering (the “hard” sciences) and the SF being
popularized during the New Wave, which often drew on the “soft sciences”
such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Along those same lines,
for a time hard SF referred to (especially in America) science fiction that had
a particularly right-wing and militaristic viewpoint, such as that written by
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The other options were largely confined to
sci-tech problem-solving stories in the pages of Analog magazine (the succes-
sor to Campbell’s Astounding).
Gregory Benford was a rare American exception to that trend. Benford, a
physics professor in California, famously defined hard SF as playing “with the
net of scientific fact up and strung as tight as the story allows” (Hartwell and
Cramer 1994, 16)—meaning to work (write) within the constraints imposed
when one obeys the known laws of physics. In its strictest formulation, none
of the common SF “cheats,” such as warp drive or faster-than-light commu-
nications, would be allowed. In his 1980 novel Timescape, Benford played with
the speculative frontiers of physics, considering notions of time and the pos-
sibility of communicating backward in time using particles called tachyons
(posited in 1967, they have since become a staple of television SF shows such as
Star Trek, about as far from hard SF as it is possible to get). However, Benford
sought to humanize hard SF. He lavished as much, if not more, attention on his
characters and their backgrounds as he did on the physics, and he consciously
adopted techniques from modernist literature in order to do so.
Also presenting an alternative to militaristic SF and problem-solving sto-
ries was the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s. William Gibson’s famous
novel Neuromancer was published in 1984, and it pushed forward the literary
possibilities of examining the human/machine interface in the increasingly
digital world. However, very little of the technology in Neuromancer and other
cyberpunk stories was grounded in realistic science and technology, either
from an electronics or a biological point of view. So at the same time, in 1984,
David Pringle and the editors of Interzone magazine in Britain put out a call
for what was termed “radical, hard SF” (SF Encyclopedia: “Interzone”). Pringle

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 and others argued for hard SF that featured rigorous extrapolation across a
broad spectrum of science; faithful both to what is physically possible and
what is socially and psychologically possible, with as much attention paid to
character and society as to spaceships and black holes.
Science fiction of this stripe spread from the pages of Interzone and flour-
ished in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. Kim Stanley Robinson achieved
widespread acclaim for his Mars trilogy, which used rigorous science and
engineering to depict the near-future colonization of Mars, while his main
action was driven by a dynamic and evolving sociopolitical situation seen
through the eyes of a diverse cast of characters. Meanwhile, David Brin’s
Earth (1990) took speculative but not impossible physics (a microscopic black
hole dropped into the core of the Earth) and used it to drive a plot that was
as much an excuse for near-future social and psychological world-building on
a global scale as it was a hard SF thriller.
Biology matched physics for importance as hard SF reintegrated the “softer”
sciences and investigated their deeply human consequences. In 1991 Nancy
Kress won her first Hugo Award (the premier award of the science fiction field)
for her novella “Beggars in Spain,” which uses genetic engineering to examine
the consequences of inequality projected into the future. Biotechnology played
a role in the fields of cybernetics and artificial intelligence that appeared in
cutting-edge 1990s SF, especially that from another author who responded to
David Pringle’s call for radical hard SF, Paul McAuley, a British biologist. In 1996
McAuley won the Arthur C. Clarke Award (given annually for a science fiction
novel published in Britain) with Fairyland, a tale of black-market biotech. Joan
Slonczewski, a biology professor, had already brought the same level of rigor
to the biological speculations of A Door into Ocean (1986).
It is in this context that Greg Egan began appearing regularly in Interzone.
Very few of Egan’s short stories and none of his novels broke Benford’s “play-
ing with the net up” rule. However, those of Egan’s early stories which delved
into neuroscience, medical ethics, psychology, and bioengineering set him
solidly at the core of the radical hard SF movement and its effort to integrate
hard and soft sciences.
At the same time, other early Egan stories centered on questions of digital
consciousness, which lined up neatly with another burgeoning movement,
the Singularity. The idea behind the Singularity is that as computer-processing

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 power increases exponentially, artificial intelligences will quickly outstrip us,
leaving ordinary humans in the dustbin of history. In 1965, Gordon Moore,
the founder of Intel, formulated “Moore’s law,” stating that the number of
transistors in an integrated circuit could double every two years. That idea of
exponential increase in processing power became widely known and accepted
in the 1990s. (Moore’s Law continued to hold through 2012, although the rate
of increase is expected to finally slow in the near future.) If you extrapolate
that trend into the future and assume that intelligence/sapience is an inevi-
table emergent property of sufficiently complex systems, then artificial intel-
ligence will arise and quickly outstrip the combined intelligences of all human
beings alive at the time. Under one set of assumptions, the new intelligences
will be to us as we are to bacteria, or at the very least they will be similarly
incomprehensible. Ray Kurzweil popularized the idea in the press, and Vernor
Vinge did the same in science fiction, with essays and award-winning stories
such as A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) featuring superhuman intelligences. Charles
Stross came to prominence in the late 1990s with the linked cycle of short
stories known collectively as Accelerando, which form both an examination
and critique of the Singularity future.
Egan’s stories are often associated with the Singularity trope; for instance,
in James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel’s Digital Rapture: A Singularity Anthol-
ogy (2012), which investigates the Singularity through science fiction stories
and non-fiction essays, Egan’s story “Crystal Nights” appears right alongside
Vinge’s story “The Cookie Monster” and nonfiction by Kurzweil. Certainly,
Egan’s characters have explored many facets of the posthuman experience,
even if they do not follow the Singularity model point for point. However,
Egan tends to reject the Singularity as a real-world concept:
It’s uncontroversial that if we could be digitized there’s a lot of scope for our
minds to be made faster, more efficient and less prone to various kinds of errors,
but I see no compelling reason to believe in Vinge’s notion of “transcendence,” in
which there are types of consciousness that are superior to our own in a qualitative
fashion that goes completely beyond those forms of improvement.
In fact, I’d say humans crossed the point about 30,000 years ago [when] we
gained the capacity to reason well enough to understand any physical process
whatsoever, given enough time and patience. (Burnham interview)

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 Even when distancing himself from parts of the field—rejecting some of
the fuzzy speculations of the Singularity or cyberpunk, eschewing the social
capital of the convention scene, and so on—Egan remains a key figure. For
those who view hard SF as the core of science fiction, Greg Egan’s work lives
immediately in that core. Speculations about biology, medicine, physics, and
digital consciousness, combined with a vivid imagination and a talent for
evoking a sense of wonder in science fiction readers, have all contributed to
cement his status as one of the masters of the field.

Works and Career Tra jectory

Egan did not start out as a standard bearer for hard SF. His first novel, An
Unusual Angle, leans toward the literary and surreal rather than the science-
fictional. Of this book, published by Norstrilia Press in 1983, Egan himself says:
For the benefit of those readers who have no idea what the book is about—most
of them, I hope—An Unusual Angle is a kind of eccentric teenage loner story
with surreal elements. The narrator literally has a movie camera inside his skull.
I wrote it when I was sixteen, although I revised it slightly just before it was
published, six years later.
It was very big-hearted of Norstrilia Press to publish it, but it didn’t do them,
or me, much good. They blew their money. I laboured under the mistaken im-
pression that I could now write publishable fiction; it took me a while to realise
that that simply wasn’t true. Quarantine is the eighth novel I’ve written, and the
first publishable one. That An Unusual Angle was published at all was really just a
glitch. (“Burning the Motherhood Statements”)

An Unusual Angle belongs to that period of Egan’s career before he became

Greg Egan, as it were. It is a novel that is generally mainstream with a few SF
and fantasy elements that make the whole thing feel somewhat experimental.
It contains references to films both popular and avant-garde—presumably
stemming from that time in his life when Egan aspired to be a film director
rather than an author and mathematician. However, even in this early book
one can see that Egan uses the language of science as a basis for metaphor:
“Enthusiastic English teacher inevitably explodes with 1000 watts (RMS) of
ecstasy at every record-rending result.” (Unusual Angle 20). RMS stands for Root
Mean Square and denotes a particular convention for measuring ­electrical

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 power. Including it as a modifier to “watts” in a nontechnical book is exces-
sively geeky, even for a story of high-school alienation. Evidently, the precision
of science has always been an integral part of Egan’s worldview.
Along with that unusual novel, Egan published eight short stories through
the 1980s, an assortment of SF and horror. He was no overnight success;
for him the 1980s were filled with rejection slips and novels that did not sell.
But once he started getting published, it did not take long before he started
getting noticed. His fifth published story, “Neighbourhood Watch” (origi-
nally published in Aphelion 5), appeared in Year’s Best Horror XVI (Wagner),
and his sixth story, “Scatter My Ashes,” showed up in Ellen Datlow and
Terri Windling’s Year’s Best Fantasy, Second Annual Collection. But the ap-
pearance of “The Cutie” in Interzone in 1989 really marked a turning point,
establishing Egan’s presence as a pure SF writer. So far, Egan has published
twenty-three of his sixty short stories in the pages of Interzone. As he put it
in the early Eidolon interview: “David Pringle did help steer me away from
horror; when he bought ‘The Cutie’—my first SF story for Interzone—he
made it clear that he thought I was heading in the right direction” (“Burning
the Motherhood Statements”). “That little nudge in the right direction,” he
said “saved me from wasting another ten years trying to become the next
Clive Barker!” (Aurealis interview). In “The Cutie” a single man longs to
have a child but hasn’t been able to find a partner with whom to have one.
He opts for a bioengineered “Cutie” of the title—a child who looks human
but will never develop human intelligence and will die at around age four.
He becomes “pregnant” in order to grow the Cutie—the unnaturalness of
this is highlighted, which makes more sense in the context of the horror
stories that precede it in Egan’s publishing history—and he loves the “child”
immensely. But he is devastated when the Cutie learns to speak—obviously
she is developing greater-than-advertised intelligence but will still die at four.
As with several of Egan’s other early stories, the author’s hand is obviously
tipping the scales, with a narrative that at times seems manipulated instead
of flowing naturally. It is difficult, for example, to believe that there would
be a market for semi-human babies who die young, or that a protagonist
obsessed with child-nurturing would not simply adopt. However, while this
is a story that lightly hits some horror buttons, it is firmly on the side of
near-future, bioethics-oriented SF.

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 After Pringle’s editorial intervention, 1990 proved to be Egan’s breakout
year, with eight stories appearing in venues such as Interzone and Asimov’s as
well as smaller venues such as Pulphouse and Eidolon. That year Egan showed
up on the Interzone readers’ poll three times, winning with “Learning to Be
Me,” twice on the Asimov’s readers’ poll, and five times on Locus magazine’s
recommended reading list—an impressive showing by any measure. He con-
tinued appearing in annual Year’s Best anthologies, with “Learning to Be Me”
and “The Caress” both appearing in the eighth volume in Gardner Dozois’s
long-running Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series. Dozois, then editor
of Asimov’s magazine, became a major booster of Egan’s work, and he has
included Egan’s stories in thirteen Year’s Best anthologies to date, as well as
placing them in several themed anthologies. Asimov’s was second only to In-
terzone in its embrace of Egan’s short fiction; to date, fourteen of his stories
have appeared there. In his review of Distress, Gary K. Wolfe of Locus magazine
noted in April 1996 that “[Egan] was the first writer to have two stories in the
Dozois annual for two years running.”
In Dozois’s recollection:
I first noticed Greg Egan’s work in Interzone, where he’d published a couple of
stories such as “Scatter My Ashes” that I suppose would have to be called techno-
horror. When he first started sending stories to me at Asimov’s—and, as I recall,
he sent a number at once—there were both SF stories and horror stories in the
batch; I encouraged him to send more SF, and indicated that I wasn’t particularly
interested in the horror. His early stories also tended to be short and sketchy—he’d
have a great new idea in them, but wouldn’t do much with it fictionally (the early
stories of Charles Stross were similar); all they would really have going for them
was the idea. (Locus Roundtable, March 4, 2012)

Looking at the stories published in that breakout year 1990, a core theme of
Egan’s fiction emerges with repeated inquiries into the question of identity.
One of his most important stories, “Learning to Be Me,” is critically concerned
with identity and how it may be maintained (or not) when transforming into an
immortal, digital consciousness. Even a story with only the most hand-waving
of scientific premises, “The Safe-Deposit Box,” wonders how a person who
inhabits a different body every day could construct a coherent sense of self. In
“Axiomatic” he posits bioengineered nanotech that when inhaled can literally

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 change one’s mind—rewiring neural structures in such a way, for instance,
that Buddhism will seem the only possible truth of the universe or, as in the
case of the protagonist, lowering one’s inhibition against committing murder.
What does it mean to be you when changing your brain chemistry can alter
your most cherished convictions? We will continue to see Egan focusing on
questions of identity through all of his short fiction and novels.
The other theme that emerged in 1990 may come as a surprise in the context
of Egan’s reputation as a hard math- and physics-based SF writer. Questions of
bioethics are more dominant in his early short fiction than the intense specu-
lative physics that one finds in his novels. The short story “Eugene” looks at
the potential to genetically engineer a super-child and speculates about what
the child’s opinion of the matter might be. “The Caress” is a mystery tale that
involves an eccentric rich person (a trope that shows up repeatedly in Egan’s
short stories as a handy way to motivate and enable sci-tech breakthroughs in
SF and dramatize them) who genetically engineers and surgically alters all sorts
of beings in order to recreate fantastic works of art. “The Moral Virologist”
is a heavy-handed critique of those religious fundamentalists who believe that
the AIDS virus is God’s scourge against gays and other sinners; in this story a
fundamentalist (and eccentric, independently wealthy) man bioengineers a virus
to punish all those who are not monogamous—but through the intervention of
the author’s thumb on the scales, so to speak, he ends up condemning breast-
feeding mothers to death as well. This is an obviously contrived story, and one
that leaves no doubt where the author’s sympathies lie. It will not be the last
time that we encounter Egan’s distaste for the religious mindset or for people
who eschew the complexity and doubt of the scientific viewpoint in favor of
the black and white certainties of some belief systems. “The Extra” (1990) is
a quirky story, reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890)
and prefiguring Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), again featuring an ec-
centrically wealthy protagonist. In this instance, Daniel Gray keeps a stable of
clones to act as replacement parts for himself as he ages. This and other early
Egan stories highlight possible abuses of biotech, and some have a surprising
air of technophobia, although Egan’s later fiction moves away from that tone.
The year 1991 brought seven more stories and similar levels of success, in-
cluding appearances in Recommended Reading lists and Year’s Best collections.
The key story of that year may well be “Blood Sisters,” which i­ nterrogates the

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 ethics of double-blind medical trials. While it is one of the key methodological
underpinnings of all of modern medicine, how can we justify giving placebo
treatments that we know won’t work to some patients—and keeping them in
ignorance about it? Egan dramatizes the dilemma in this story about twins
with a rare genetic condition, one of whom dies as a result of receiving a
placebo medicine while the other, receiving the genuine treatment, survives.
Another bioethics story from 1991 is “Appropriate Love,” which asks how
much trauma we may require loved ones to go through in order to preserve
the life of a family member.
Egan’s growing reputation as one of the major authors to watch in the SF
field was cemented in 1992. Eight stories appeared that year, including three in
Asimov’s and three in Interzone. The year also marked a major milestone: the
publication of Quarantine, his first purely SF novel and his first book published
by a major press. Quarantine deals with the possibility that the human brain’s
potential to collapse the quantum wave function could be unusual or unique
and addresses what the consequences of that might be. More than his other
novels, Quarantine feels rather like cyberpunk, with a corporate-saturated fu-
ture (product descriptions and prices are salted throughout the early chapters)
and recurring Asian motifs (such as a New Hong Kong in Australia). When
asked about the connection with cyberpunk, Egan replied:
In fact, the way cyberpunk as a movement influenced me most was a sense of
irritation with its obsession with hipness. I don’t think there’s much doubt that
“Axiomatic” and the opening sections of Quarantine have a kind of cyberpunk
flavour to them, but my thinking at the time would have been less “Maybe I can
join the cyberpunk club!” and more “Maybe I can steal back private eyes and
brain-computer interfaces for people who think mirrorshades are pretentious,
and do something more interesting with them.” (Burnham interview)

Quarantine is now seen as the first in a loose trilogy of books dealing with
“subjective cosmology,” which also includes Permutation City and Distress.
Meanwhile, Egan’s short fiction for that year featured both hard and hand-
wavy SF. “Into Darkness” posits a phenomenon where light only travels one
way, so you can never see what’s in front of you. It’s a hard-SF puzzle-story
with a thriller feel. “The Hundred Light-Year Diary” deals with the potential
to send information back in time and the political control of that i­ nformation.

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Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Divots
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Divots

Author: P. G. Wodehouse

Release date: November 25, 2023 [eBook #72227]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: George H. Doran Company,

1927

Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book
was produced from images made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DIVOTS ***

 DIVOTS
P. G. WODEHOUSE
 By P. G. WODEHOUSE

CARRY ON, JEEVES!

HE RATHER ENJOYED IT
BILL THE CONQUEROR
GOLF WITHOUT TEARS
JEEVES
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH
MOSTLY SALLY
THREE MEN AND A MAID
INDISCRETIONS OF ARCHIE
THE LITTLE WARRIOR
A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS
 DIVOTS
BY
P. G. WODEHOUSE

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN
COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926 AND 1927,
BY P. G. WODEHOUSE

DIVOTS
—B—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 TO
My Daughter
LEONORA
WITHOUT WHOSE NEVER-FAILING
SYMPATHY AND ENCOURAGEMENT
THIS BOOK
WOULD HAVE BEEN FINISHED
IN
HALF THE TIME
 PREFACE
Before leading the reader out on to this little nine-hole course, I
should like to say a few words on the club-house steps with regard to
the criticisms of my earlier book of Golf stories, The Clicking of
Cuthbert. In the first place, I noticed with regret a disposition on the
part of certain writers to speak of Golf as a trivial theme, unworthy of
the pen of a thinker. In connection with this, I can only say that right
through the ages the mightiest brains have occupied themselves
with this noble sport, and that I err, therefore, if I do err, in excellent
company.
Apart from the works of such men as James Braid, John Henry
Taylor and Horace Hutchinson, we find Publius Syrius not disdaining
to give advice on the back-swing (“He gets through too late who
goes too fast”); Diogenes describing the emotions of a cheery player
at the water-hole (“Be of good cheer. I see land”); and Doctor Watts,
who, watching one of his drives from the tee, jotted down the
following couplet on the back of his score-card:

Fly, like a youthful hart or roe,

Over the hills where spices grow.

And, when we consider that Chaucer, the father of English poetry,

inserted in his Squiere’s Tale the line

Therefore behoveth him a ful long spoone

(though, of course, with the modern rubber-cored ball an iron would

have got the same distance) and that Shakespeare himself,
speaking querulously in the character of a weak player who held up
an impatient foursome, said:

Four rogues in buckram let drive at me

we may, I think, consider these objections answered.

A far more serious grievance which I have against my critics is that
many of them confessed to the possession of but the slightest
knowledge of the game, and one actually stated in cold print that he
did not know what a niblick was. A writer on golf is certainly entitled
to be judged by his peers—which, in my own case, means men who
do one good drive in six, four reasonable approaches in an eighteen-
hole round, and average three putts per green: and I think I am
justified in asking of editors that they instruct critics of this book to
append their handicaps in brackets at the end of their remarks. By
this means the public will be enabled to form a fair estimate of the
worth of the volume, and the sting in such critiques as “We laughed
heartily while reading these stories—once—at a misprint” will be
sensibly diminished by the figures (36) at the bottom of the
paragraph. While my elation will be all the greater should the words
“A genuine masterpiece” be followed by a simple (scr.).

One final word. The thoughtful reader, comparing this book with
The Clicking of Cuthbert, will, no doubt, be struck by the poignant
depth of feeling which pervades the present volume like the scent of
muddy shoes in a locker-room: and it may be that he will conclude
that, like so many English writers, I have fallen under the spell of the
great Russians.
This is not the case. While it is, of course, true that my style owes
much to Dostoievsky, the heart-wringing qualities of such stories as
“The Awakening of Rollo Podmarsh” and “Keeping in with Vosper” is
due entirely to the fact that I have spent much time recently playing
on the National Links at Southampton, Long Island, U.S.A. These
links were constructed by an exiled Scot who conceived the dreadful
idea of assembling on one course all the really foul holes in Great
Britain. It cannot but leave its mark on a man when, after struggling
through the Sahara at Sandwich and the Alps at Prestwick, he finds
himself faced by the Station-Master’s Garden hole at St. Andrew’s
and knows that the Redan and the Eden are just round the corner.
When you turn in a medal score of a hundred and eight on two
successive days, you get to know something about Life.

And yet it may be that there are a few gleams of sunshine in the
book. If so, it is attributable to the fact that some of it was written
before I went to Southampton and immediately after I had won my
first and only trophy—an umbrella in a hotel tournament at Aiken,
South Carolina, where, playing to a handicap of sixteen, I went
through a field consisting of some of the fattest retired businessmen
in America like a devouring flame. If we lose the Walker Cup this
year, let England remember that.
P. G. WODEHOUSE
The Sixth Bunker
Addington
 CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE HEART OF A GOOF 15
II HIGH STAKES 51
III KEEPING IN WITH VOSPER 85
IV CHESTER FORGETS HIMSELF 116
V THE MAGIC PLUS FOURS 153
VI THE AWAKENING OF ROLLO PODMARSH 183
VII RODNEY FAILS TO QUALIFY 210
VIII JANE GETS OFF THE FAIRWAY 246
IX THE PURIFICATION OF RODNEY SPELVIN 283
DIVOTS
 CHAPTER I
THE HEART OF A GOOF

It was a morning when all nature shouted “Fore!” The breeze, as it

blew gently up from the valley, seemed to bring a message of hope
and cheer, whispering of chip-shots holed and brassies landing
squarely on the meat. The fairway, as yet unscarred by the irons of a
hundred dubs, smiled greenly up at the azure sky; and the sun,
peeping above the trees, looked like a giant golf-ball perfectly lofted
by the mashie of some unseen god and about to drop dead by the
pin of the eighteenth. It was the day of the opening of the course
after the long winter, and a crowd of considerable dimensions had
collected at the first tee. Plus fours gleamed in the sunshine, and the
air was charged with happy anticipation.
In all that gay throng there was but one sad face. It belonged to
the man who was waggling his driver over the new ball perched on
its little hill of sand. This man seemed careworn, hopeless. He gazed
down the fairway, shifted his feet, waggled, gazed down the fairway
again, shifted the dogs once more, and waggled afresh. He waggled
as Hamlet might have waggled, moodily, irresolutely. Then, at last,
he swung, and, taking from his caddie the niblick which the intelligent
lad had been holding in readiness from the moment when he had
walked on to the tee, trudged wearily off to play his second.
The Oldest Member, who had been observing the scene with a
benevolent eye from his favourite chair on the terrace, sighed.
“Poor Jenkinson,” he said, “does not improve.”
“No,” agreed his companion, a young man with open features and
a handicap of six. “And yet I happen to know that he has been taking
lessons all the winter at one of those indoor places.”
“Futile, quite futile,” said the Sage with a shake of his snowy head.
“There is no wizard living who could make that man go round in an
average of sevens. I keep advising him to give up the game.”
“You!” cried the young man, raising a shocked and startled face
from the driver with which he was toying. “You told him to give up
golf! Why I thought—”
“I understand and approve of your horror,” said the Oldest
Member, gently. “But you must bear in mind that Jenkinson’s is not
an ordinary case. You know and I know scores of men who have
never broken a hundred and twenty in their lives, and yet contrive to
be happy, useful members of society. However badly they may play,
they are able to forget. But with Jenkinson it is different. He is not
one of those who can take it or leave it alone. His only chance of
happiness lies in complete abstinence. Jenkinson is a goof.”
“A what?”
“A goof,” repeated the Sage. “One of those unfortunate beings
who have allowed this noblest of sports to get too great a grip upon
them, who have permitted it to eat into their souls, like some
malignant growth. The goof, you must understand, is not like you
and me. He broods. He becomes morbid. His goofery unfits him for
the battles of life. Jenkinson, for example, was once a man with a
glowing future in the hay, corn, and feed business, but a constant
stream of hooks, tops, and slices gradually made him so diffident
and mistrustful of himself, that he let opportunity after opportunity
slip, with the result that other, sterner, hay, corn, and feed merchants
passed him in the race. Every time he had the chance to carry
through some big deal in hay, or to execute some flashing coup in
corn and feed, the fatal diffidence generated by a hundred rotten
rounds would undo him. I understand his bankruptcy may be
expected at any moment.”
“My golly!” said the young man, deeply impressed. “I hope I never
become a goof. Do you mean to say there is really no cure except
giving up the game?”
The Oldest Member was silent for a while.
“It is curious that you should have asked that question,” he said at
last, “for only this morning I was thinking of the one case in my
experience where a goof was enabled to overcome his deplorable
malady. It was owing to a girl, of course. The longer I live, the more I
come to see that most things are. But you will, no doubt, wish to hear
the story from the beginning.”
The young man rose with the startled haste of some wild creature,
which, wandering through the undergrowth, perceives the trap in his
path.
“I should love to,” he mumbled, “only I shall be losing my place at
the tee.”
“The goof in question,” said the Sage, attaching himself with quiet
firmness to the youth’s coat-button, “was a man of about your age,
by name Ferdinand Dibble. I knew him well. In fact, it was to me—”
“Some other time, eh?”
“It was to me,” proceeded the Sage, placidly, “that he came for
sympathy in the great crisis of his life, and I am not ashamed to say
that when he had finished laying bare his soul to me there were tears
in my eyes. My heart bled for the boy.”
“I bet it did. But—”
The Oldest Member pushed him gently back into his seat.
“Golf,” he said, “is the Great Mystery. Like some capricious
goddess—”
The young man, who had been exhibiting symptoms of
feverishness, appeared to become resigned. He sighed softly.
“Did you ever read ‘The Ancient Mariner’?” he said.
“Many years ago,” said the Oldest Member. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the young man. “It just occurred to me.”

Golf (resumed the Oldest Member) is the Great Mystery. Like

some capricious goddess, it bestows its favours with what would
appear an almost fat-headed lack of method and discrimination. On
every side we see big two-fisted he-men floundering round in three
figures, stopping every few minutes to let through little shrimps with
knock knees and hollow cheeks, who are tearing off snappy seventy-
fours. Giants of finance have to accept a stroke per from their junior
clerks. Men capable of governing empires fail to control a small,
white ball, which presents no difficulties whatever to others with one
ounce more brain than a cuckoo-clock. Mysterious, but there it is.
There was no apparent reason why Ferdinand Dibble should not
have been a competent golfer. He had strong wrists and a good eye.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that he was a dub. And on a certain
evening in June I realised that he was also a goof. I found it out quite
suddenly as the result of a conversation which we had on this very
terrace.
I was sitting here that evening thinking of this and that, when by
the corner of the clubhouse I observed young Dibble in conversation
with a girl in white. I could not see who she was, for her back was
turned. Presently they parted and Ferdinand came slowly across to
where I sat. His air was dejected. He had had the boots licked off
him earlier in the afternoon by Jimmy Fothergill, and it was to this
that I attributed his gloom. I was to find out in a few moments that I
was partly but not entirely correct in this surmise. He took the next
chair to mine, and for several minutes sat staring moodily down into
the valley.
“I’ve just been talking to Barbara Medway,” he said, suddenly
breaking the silence.
“Indeed?” I said. “A delightful girl.”
“She’s going away for the summer to Marvis Bay.”
“She will take the sunshine with her.”
“You bet she will!” said Ferdinand Dibble, with extraordinary
warmth, and there was another long silence.
Presently Ferdinand uttered a hollow groan.
“I love her, dammit!” he muttered brokenly. “Oh, golly, how I love
her!”
 I was not surprised at his making me the recipient of his
confidences like this. Most of the young folk in the place brought
their troubles to me sooner or later.
“And does she return your love?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t asked her.”
“Why not? I should have thought the point not without its interest
for you.”
Ferdinand gnawed the handle of his putter distractedly.
“I haven’t the nerve,” he burst out at length. “I simply can’t
summon up the cold gall to ask a girl, least of all an angel like her, to
marry me. You see, it’s like this. Every time I work myself up to the
point of having a dash at it, I go out and get trimmed by some one
giving me a stroke a hole. Every time I feel I’ve mustered up enough
pep to propose, I take ten on a bogey three. Every time I think I’m in
good mid-season form for putting my fate to the test, to win or lose it
all, something goes all blooey with my swing, and I slice into the
rough at every tee. And then my self-confidence leaves me. I
become nervous, tongue-tied, diffident. I wish to goodness I knew
the man who invented this infernal game. I’d strangle him. But I
suppose he’s been dead for ages. Still, I could go and jump on his
grave.”
It was at this point that I understood all, and the heart within me
sank like lead. The truth was out. Ferdinand Dibble was a goof.
“Come, come, my boy,” I said, though feeling the uselessness of
any words. “Master this weakness.”
“I can’t.”
“Try!”
“I have tried.”
He gnawed his putter again.
“She was asking me just now if I couldn’t manage to come to
Marvis Bay, too,” he said.
 “That surely is encouraging? It suggests that she is not entirely
indifferent to your society.”
“Yes, but what’s the use? Do you know,” a gleam coming into his
eyes for a moment, “I have a feeling that if I could ever beat some
really fairly good player—just once—I could bring the thing off.” The
gleam faded. “But what chance is there of that?”
It was a question which I did not care to answer. I merely patted
his shoulder sympathetically, and after a little while he left me and
walked away. I was still sitting there, thinking over his hard case,
when Barbara Medway came out of the club-house.
She, too, seemed grave and pre-occupied, as if there was
something on her mind. She took the chair which Ferdinand had
vacated, and sighed wearily.
“Have you ever felt,” she asked, “that you would like to bang a
man on the head with something hard and heavy? With knobs on?”
I said I had sometimes experienced such a desire, and asked if
she had any particular man in mind. She seemed to hesitate for a
moment before replying, then, apparently, made up her mind to
confide in me. My advanced years carry with them certain pleasant
compensations, one of which is that nice girls often confide in me. I
frequently find myself enrolled as a father-confessor on the most
intimate matters by beautiful creatures from whom many a younger
man would give his eye-teeth to get a friendly word. Besides, I had
known Barbara since she was a child. Frequently—though not
recently—I had given her her evening bath. These things form a
bond.
“Why are men such chumps?” she exclaimed.
“You still have not told me who it is that has caused these harsh
words. Do I know him?”
“Of course you do. You’ve just been talking to him.”
“Ferdinand Dibble? But why should you wish to bang Ferdinand
Dibble on the head with something hard and heavy with knobs on?”
“Because he’s such a goop.”
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