Anna's Reviews > Distress

From the very first sentence, ‘Distress’ is an arresting and thought-provoking novel. The point of view character, Andrew, is a documentary film-maker. This very useful conceit allows for lengthy explanations of technologies and discussion of their implications, often in a pleasant interview format. The setting is 2055, while the novel was first published in 1995, twenty years ago now. I think it has aged remarkably well, predicting total ubiquity of the internet, handheld computer/phones (‘notebooks’), Siri (‘Sisiphus’), and email as the main form of communication (‘Hermes’ - coincidentally the actual name of the University of Cambridge email system). Egan doesn’t quite predict social media, however, other than ‘netzines’ which seem similar to blogs.

That’s neither here nor there, though. ‘Distress’ has much bigger ideas to play with. It is concerned with the implications of several areas of science and technology which, as one character neatly states, bring about ‘the whole battle for the H words’. To wit, what is Health when biotech can cure all disease? And what is Humanity, when people can radically modify their minds and bodies? Who defines each H word? And in addition, what is gender? These questions are asked early on, yet they pervade the entire book and are discussed from a number of angles by different characters with various agendas. Egan is impressively good at exploring such massive, complex issues without resorting to easy, pat answers. As if that level of philosophical enquiry was not sufficient, events on the artificial island of Stateless raise questions of political economy - can an anarchist state function? What preconditions assist in its survival? How can it defend itself? The core issue of the narrative, however, is the search for a Theory of Everything and its metaphysical consequences. Thus many of the characters exist in and around academia, whilst a great deal of the action concerns what must be the most dramatic academic conference ever held.

When describing the scope of the novel in retrospect, it’s hard to convincingly explain how Egan does all of these topics justice. Yet somehow it all hangs together very well. Andrew is an effective narrator because he doesn’t take up a lot of space in the narrative; it is least interesting when concerned with his domestic life. I was also pleased that, Andrew aside, no other main character was male. The dialogue manages not to be trite, mannered, or boring, which can be a real risk when, essentially, centring your novel on intellectual debates. Moreover, it was nuanced, with each person’s argued perspective carrying conviction. A memorable example:

”No-one can deal with an unknown chance of the end of the universe. How many people can you kill, for a cause like that? One? A hundred? A million? It’s like… trying to manipulate an infinitely heavy weight, on the end of an infinitely long lever. However fine your judgement is, you know it can’t be good enough. All you can do is admit that...”

My main criticism of the novel, however, is that I found the lengthy and vivid description of having cholera unpleasant. I realise that these were intended to emphasise the theme of mind and body being indissoluble, as human consciousness can only exist in a bag of living flesh, but it seemed an unnecessarily revolting way of doing so. Still, if you can handle the opening scene with the corpse, I’m sure you will cope. It is fair enough, I suppose, to avoid the convenient abstraction of technologies that can upload minds or otherwise allow humanity to transcend the inconveniences of our bodies. Egan is more interested in how we reconcile biology, society, and metaphysics. It’s been a long time since I’ve read sci-fi that covered such ground so well. ‘Distress’ will definitely linger in my mind.