Distress

To end, an existential musing on science fiction. It is clear our science and technology has had lots of benefits, but it has also led to ecological overshoot. Many people think we will somehow engineer our way out of the several catastrophes that are looming, and do not realize that engineering is what caused the predatory consumption and pollution of our habitat in the first place. I'm not a Luddite, but it's pretty clear that our social systems aren't up to the task of regulating ourselves in such a way that we keep our biosphere safe from our use of technology.

While it has produced dystopic warnings, science fiction as a whole has generally supported this mythos of unbridled technological progress, and also Egan has contributed to it with his transhumanist en techno-liberation fantasies. One could frame them as an iteration of the idea that optimism is a moral duty, but in the end, these fantasies seem a form of hubris -- energy blind and blind to the realities of material production. Technology will not save us, it will be our species downfall.

30 years after the publication of Distress, and halfway on the road from 1995 to 2055, its predictions seem off -- even though it has "greenhouse storms". Greg Egan is a smart guy. My guess is that nowadays he knows we are heading for societal and ecosystem collapse, possibly even extinction. 2019's Perihelion Summer is indicative of that: while not without hope, it was bleak and apocalyptic.

After 2010's Zendegi Egan appears to have thrown out his techno-optimism, and instead doubled down on the intellectual puzzles. Judging by the blurbs, his recent books have become more and more abstract -- thought experiments that generate world building. I have no interest in those. Instead, I would love to see a data-driven Egan take his best shot at near-future fiction, plotting the next 5 decades, in the tradition of Kim Stanley Robinson and Stephen Markley. The keen insights in human sociobiology that he displays in Distress indicate that he would be more than apt to take up that gauntlet.

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