Greg Egan's Distress

Monday, 26 May 1997

The transition to my new computer continues. I've disabled the .forward file which forwards my personal email to my office account, and installed Eudora email software, but neglected to bring home the hefty filter file I've developed for automatically trashing junk email. In a way, I've lost a portion of my immune system, though one that's easily replaced. I'm dissatisfied with Eudora's email filters, though, and hope that Bare Bones Software's soon-to-be-released mail client will have the sort of scriptable hooks that will let me write arbitrary filter algorithms in Frontier.

The radio station we listen to has been counting down their top 500 rock-and-roll songs. Number three was Derek and the Dominoes' "Layla" (the electric version, of course); while it was playing, I asked Chris if either the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" or Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" had been played yet. She said they hadn't, to her recollection. Sure enough, while I was typing, the opening bars to "Satisfaction" came over the speakers. I'm waiting to see if I was right about number one now.

Man, was there ever any doubt?

The first volume of Kitchen Sink's trade paperback collection of Scott McCloud's Zot! came out last week. It's pricey (US$35), but collects the entire first storyline, ten color issues, under one cover. I'd forgotten how good some of those comics were, and how strong a heroine Jenny was. The late eighties were the days of the "deconstructed" superhero: dark, "realistic," often insane, frequently unheroic. Zot! was one of the few comics published at the time that managed to be cheerful and uplifting without being stupid. It's probably no coincidence that Kurt Busiek, writer of Astro City, a man at the forefront of the current "reconstructionist" trend in superheroes, is an old friend of McCloud's, and is listed as a script consultant on many of those old issues; he's also written the introduction for the collection.

The sad news is that Kitchen Sink Press is going out of business, and will probably not survive to publish the three volumes of black-and-white stories that will complete the collection. Still, the first volume contains a complete story, and if maybe if enough people buy it, either Kitchen Sink will recover or the project will look profitable enough for another publisher to pick it up. So go buy it. Because justice is more than just a punch in the mouth.

I've finally finished The Three Musketeers, and started on Distress, the recently-released (in the U.S.) Greg Egan novel, which popped to the top of my to-read stack immediately, of course. Only 58 pages into it, I already have some guesses as to how it's going to come out, which I've concealed at the bottom of this page, behind a spoiler header.

Have I mentioned how much I like Egan? How I think he'd be the owner of several Best Novel Hugo awards if not for the fact that his books get released in Australia (making them eligible for the Hugo, which is, in theory, an international award) more than a year before they're released in the U.S. (making the available to the fans that make up the bulk of the Hugo voting population)? Have I mentioned that he combines Philip K. Dick's philosophical explorations with the sort of imaginative extrapolation that Larry Niven aspired to in his better days? But that his speculations grow from current science and technology in a way that neither Niven nor Dick ever quite managed?

(BBEdit's spelling checker doesn't recognize Australia, but suggests Australian as a substitute; neither does it recognize BBEdit. Is there any logic at all to the default dictionaries that come with these things?)

Spoilers for Greg Egan's Distress
That means stop reading here if you haven't read/seen it yet.

It looks to me like the major theme of Distress is going to be a refutation of the claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. From the protagonist's inability to understand the women he dates, to the point where he has to consciously follow a list of "rules" he's come up with, to the advocate for the Voluntary Autism movement who questions the value (and, ultimately, the existence) of intimacy, to the Experimental Cuisine that the diner needs to examine the pedigree of to determine whether she'll like it, the book (or at least the 17% of it that I've read so far) is full of cases where characters need to deliberate over things that our society takes for granted. I predict that the fictional syndrome from which the novel derives its title will turn out to be a reaction to this need for deliberation.