Greg Egan a Feature by marisa (Marisa O'Keeffe) Greg Egan, Australia's formidable science fiction writer, muses on cyberpunk and science fiction, and debunks the myth that wrap-around mirrorshades improve computer programming skills. Permutation City (submitted by marisa.) Distress (submitted by marisa.) Diaspora (submitted by marisa.) Greg Egan is a science fiction author. He is emerging as one of the most important science fiction authors of our time. He's Australian. And he totally rocks. I spoke to him by email and we talked about his new book Diaspora and the future: What did you hope to achieve with Diaspora? Did you achieve what you wanted? One of the main things I wanted to do with Diaspora was imagine what the future might be like if one branch of our descendants end up inhabiting computers, and to show this world through the eyes of an insider who finds it all perfectly normal. In an earlier book of mine, Permutation City, people are just beginning to be able to make copies of their minds that run as software and it's all still very difficult and traumatic, but when Diaspora begins there's a whole civilisation that has existed in this form for nine hundred years. So, instead of adopting a contemporary perspective and treating the idea as deeply unsettling, I wanted to take it for granted and have some fun with the possibilities - without the characters having to have an existential crisis every five minutes because they're 'only software'. I wanted to make it seem perfectly ordinary to be software, and very strange and limiting to have any kind of body, let alone one made of flesh. I think I've succeeded in presenting that point of view, though the more I've succeeded, the more off-putting it might be for some readers. If it's disturbing to read about characters in the 21st century having a hard time being software, it can be even more disturbing to imagine people so different from us that they have no problem with it at all. Diaspora probably took me as far in that direction as I want to go. When I write about the far future, I'm not interested in pretending that all our current problems - things like disease, poverty, war and racism - are going to be with us for the next ten thousand years. Human nature is a physical thing and eventually we'll transform it as much as we like. But, those 'temporary' problems are still enormously important to us right now. So, although I've written a couple of short stories since Diaspora which share the idea that in the long run we'll find software the most convenient form, especially for space travel, I'm backing off now and concentrating on the near future. What is your vision? What drives you? I suppose I have a vision of a universe that we're increasingly able to understand through science: That includes understanding who we are, where we came from and why we do the things we do. What drives me is the desire to explore both the details of this vision, for their own sake (things like quantum mechanics and cosmology, simply because they're beautiful and elaborate and fascinating) and also the ways in which we can adapt to this situation and use what we're learning constructively. How has your work has changed over the years? I'm not sure that my work has changed in any particular way over the years, though I hope I'm improving stylistically and getting better at characterisation. I think Distress was better in both respects than the previous novels; it's hard to talk about 'characterisation' in Diaspora, since the worst mistake would have been to make the characters too similar to 20th century flesh-and-blood people. What's important to me in every book is to push the ideas as far as I can, and to be as honest about the subject as I can. That never changes, but it does lead to some different trade-offs. If you're dealing with some fairly elaborate technical issues, as I was in Permutation City and Diaspora, the writing has to be as direct and transparent as possible; trying to make it too subtle or poetic just renders it incomprehensible. In Distress there was room for some more expressive writing and I felt that I could also risk leaving some things unsaid. I was fascinated to read (in another interview) you say that you believe there'll be conscious software in your/our lifetime, but that you don't think you'll live to see scanning. Can you expand on this please? I'm fairly sure that there'll be software in my lifetime that's conscious, though how it will first arise I don't know. It might be something like a complete computer simulation of, say, a lizard in a virtual environment, in which case it could be as difficult to convince some people that this program really is as conscious as it is to convince some people that animals are conscious. Or, it might be something we evolve in a computer without any real connection to biology or something we design to test a theory about consciousness. One worry I have is that we might produce conscious software before we know it, and put the software through a lot of suffering without even realising it. We're a very long way from that point right now, but ultimately it's a serious issue. It would be a horrible irony if, just as we were phasing out animal experimentation altogether and replacing it with computer simulations, some of those simulations turned out to be going through just as much pain as any lab rat. 'Scanning' is the term I used in Permutation City for the technique of completely mapping someone's brain - and preferably their whole body as well- in enough detail to recreate the person as software. In that book, I glossed over the difficulties. At the very least, you'd have to be able to identify all the trillions of connections between billions of neurons and measure how strong those connections are. It might also turn out that you'd need to know a lot more details about every individual brain cell: which genes were switched on and so on. Current techniques, like CAT scans and MRI (magnetic resource imaging) are still much too crude to give you that kind of information. So, even when computers are powerful enough to run a program that's a 'copy' of a human being, it could take fifty more years before we're able to scan a human being and create the copy. What do you/did you think of cyberpunk? I used to think that cyberpunk was a space where women could write amazing literature in which they were not defined in relation to men. Eventually though, cyberpunk's overwhelming maleness made me feel so unincluded that I got over that. But is science fiction in general a good space to invent new possibilities for human interaction? I don't want to lump all the things that were classified as 'cyberpunk' together, because some of them were wonderful, and some of them stank. I think Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan wrote a lot of good books in the '80s, and they're still writing good books, and I don't care which ones are or aren't 'cyberpunk'. Having said that, reading about characters who think they're hip bores me witless - even if they're being sent up, though it's worse if they're being taken seriously. And maybe it's not a tragedy that computers have now become ultra-cool in some circles - though it's pretty funny to someone who's been programming since 1975. I'm far more interested in ridiculing the whole idea of *caring* about what's fashionable, because, once you do care, you're a slave. A lot of cyberpunk said, in effect: 'Computers are interesting because cool, cynical men (or occasionally women) in mirrorshades do dangerous things with them.' If that really is the most intersting thing you can imagine about a computer, you shouldn't be writing science fiction. I don't know if cyberpunk was worse about women than most other science fiction, but I doubt it was any better. In general, I don't think science fiction has begun to explore the possibilities for trashing gender stereotypes - and ultimately trashing gender itself. A lot of what passes for 'science fiction about gender' just implies that we're sentenced to repeat the worst mistakes of the past over and over for the next ten million years. I guess that's okay if you read it as a cautionary fable but there ought to be a serious attempt to describe the future as well, and we certainly don't have that when most of what's written is either a nightmare of fundamentalist repression of one sex by the other, or predicts a world in which all the men, or all the women, have been removed. Science fiction ought to be the place to invent new possibilities for human interaction, but there's a lot of conservatism even in science fiction. In Distress, the main character falls in love with an asexual person, someone who's chosen to have no gender at all. One reviewer in a science fiction magazine fell over laughing at the very idea of this. He literally couldn't conceive of two people being in love without some form of genital friction. What do you think of science fiction's potential to affect change? Does science fiction have a broad enough audience to really touch people? I don't think science fiction will ever be enough, but it's the easiest place to start examining new technologies a few decades (or centuries, sometimes) before anyone else is discussing them. Unfortunately, when you hear some politicians talking about things like genetic engineering it sounds as if the most recent piece of science fiction they're heard of is Frankenstein or maybe Brave New World if you're lucky. A lot of science fiction is biased with alarmist possibilities and disaster scenarios, so I certainly wouldn't want people to start treating it as some kind of substitute for an informed debate on the facts: say, banning organ transplants from animals just because some hack writes a best-selling novel in which we all die from pig viruses that leap the species barrier. All I can ever claim to be doing myself is musing out loud while I try to think something through to my own satisfaction. If what I write makes sense to some of the people who read it, or even if it just irritates them sufficiently, maybe it will stay in the back of their minds and maybe they'll think the issues through themselves a few years sooner than they might have otherwise. But sure, it's a tiny, tiny effect, and it will possibly be drowned out by all the noise the media will generate when these things are actually on top of us. What are your plans for the immediate future? What are you working on at the moment? Right now I'm working on a new novel called Teranesia. It's about the Indian Rationalists Association, the breakup of Indonesia, quantum mechanics, evolution and sex. It won't be finished until the middle of 1998 though, so it will be published sometime in 1999. I also have a new collection of stories coming, called Luminous, but I don't know yet when that will be out. Related Web Site Created on Sun, 28 Dec 1997 and last modified on Wed, 21 Jan 1998.

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