Paul Bryant's Reviews > Distress

I DISAGREE that this is SF "for scientists".
This implies you have to be a scientist to appreciate it.
That just isn't true.
The "S" in "SF" stands for SCIENCE!!!
REAL science fiction has REAL science in it.
The great thing about science is that anyone can appreciate it.
You don't have to be a professional scientist.
Paul Bryant, you seem not to appreciate true science fiction.
Maybe you should go read some nice Harry Potter.

I continue the debate about science fiction in this review

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

see what you think.

I think you gave a good book 2 stars because you don't understand, and therefore can't appreciate, the physics.

Of course, I probably should save my opinions until I get a chance to read it for myself. ;)

I like your review of The Road to Science Fiction 3!
I agree on all points except 3, especially 6-8.
Some authors use science jargon as a tool for story telling.
This is lame; no better than the magic in a fantasy novel.
Paul, you and I seem to agree up to this point. :)
The difference between an episode of Star Trek and a good Greg Egan novel is that, in the later, the jargon is REAL.
I also object to points 3A and 3B:

3A: "You have to know the science" -- I think this is less a problem with the SF genera, and more a problem with the undereducated reader. Anyone can read Richard Feynman, Steven Hawking, Brian Greene, etc. They have all written books for the layperson with enough material to easily prepare a person to read Poul Anderson, Greg Egan, etc.

3B: "The physics have changed" -- Yes, many SF books rely on a big crunch, which won't happen in our universe due to the small positive value of the cosmological constant. This has NEVER spoiled my enjoyment of a SF novel. Sure, anything written before the year 1900 is a different story, I grant you that. This is why I tend to read fewer classic SF, and more modern SF.

well, thank you for your comments; I think regarding 3B this is an issue which does not seem to be addressed - what happens to SF classics when the science in them turns out to be wrong? Is it - oh well, read them anyway, they're good stories? In which case this is like turning the science back into magic. I think it's a problem in the very nature of the genre.

Paul wrote: "what happens to SF classics when the science in them turns out to be wrong?"

Surely the science is permitted to become, well, fiction?

I'd be worried by any fiction that moved the plot along with sentences like: "Okay. So how do you get around that?"
I assume that the italicised section isn't just one of your exquisite parodies?

No, that's the golden prose of Greg Egan. I think the problem with the science is that as with paragraphs like the one quoted, it's clear the author really wants us to accept the science is correct up to the point of the story being written and when it turns out it isn't, then the story falls into a kind if SF limbo, but if we read these limbo-dancing old as-it-were discredited SF stories and accept them on the same merits as other fiction, then we're dismissing the science as no longer of serious concern. I think it's an epistemological conundrum.

A friend of mine at Uni did a thesis about "epistemological gaps", the gap she thought happened at the time of a political revolution when one world view replaced another.

Experiencing epistemological conundrum is part and parcel with doing science, too.
Read Einstein's Relativity, or any book on quantum mechanics, and tell me you experience no epistemological conundrum!
Reading good science fiction feels, to me, a lot like reading science nonfiction.
You have to suspend your current beliefs just long enough to follow the chain of logic.
The reader of fiction is already used to the idea it isn't all true.
Why does it have to be true?
It's fun!

Now, Paul, it seems like part of your issue may be mistrust of science because it's dynamic.
Are you one of those chaps to say Newton's laws have been "discredited"?
Well, they haven't.
Newton's laws are just as useful for throwing rocks and sending rockets into space as they have been for the last 200 years.
No new discovery is going to change our predictions on the appropriate energy scales.
It's those energy scales not yet explored where fiction can be creative.
Yes, when we fired up the LHC, a whole bookshelf full of SF became, as you put it, as-it-were.
There are still good books on this shelf which I find pleasurable to read, despite their being based on previously inaccessible science.

We can still give them 5 stars, if they deserve it!

You might be interested in the following link to a recent SMH blog about "intelligent sci fi" films:

http://tinyurl.com/3dr7h7r

This guy always has an interesting spin on what's popular in popular culture.

Hi Gendou. No, i am not one who mistrusts science. We may I think divide SF into soft and hard, and I really prefer the soft, because the hard variety is so up front and in your face about the way the science in the story works (as in this novel Distress) that it seems to me if the science is then found to be unsound, you may as well not bother with that great aspect of the story, which makes it a kind of pointless exercise to real old hard sf stories, or even new ones, if you don't grasp the science, as I really don't. So.... give me Ray Bradbury's Mars over Robert Heinlein's Mars. Although, having said that, I do intend to read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, which looks pretty hard to me.

I think either
a) this is a confused area in sf or
b) maybe it's njust me who's confused!

Yeah, probably b.

Does it really matter that the science was wrong?
I haven't read as much sci-fi as you, but there is a whole genre of fiction concerned with "alternate history".
Theoretically, this history is wrong, because it didn't happen like that.
I suppose the whole exercise is premised on "what if", so that it knows it was wrong.
Whereas, I suppose you are talking about science in sci-fi that was later proven to be wrong?
Still, I would say we can read this stuff "as if" it was right.

My problem with the type of writing that you quoted is that it seems to take large chunks of "science" and stick "fiction-y" interstitials between the science bits ("so, Albert, what exactly is the relationship between energy and the speed of light?"..."Well, funny you should ask").
Neither the science nor the fiction ends up convincing.
It would only make it more unbearable if the science was wrong, even if the author didn't know at the time of writing.
I would be more forgiving if the fiction bit was better.

well, in soft SF there is no attempt to explain how this particular thing works, it just does, so it's like magic but it's science - ftl drives, time machines, no bother. But hard sf likes to try and explain stuff, and I can never understand why - so that's why I say it must be like a nice armchair game from one scientist writer to another scientist reader. And also, you are quite right, this kind of prose is horrid. As the man says, excluding certain topologies for no good reason, throwing out one measure and adopting a new one whenever you don't like the answers you're getting seems like a retrograde step to me. Who can argue.

I can argue.
This is how the standard model was constructed!
QM predicts some particle masses a LOT heavier than what we measure.
To get around that problem, a technique is used called Renormalization.
We subtract a hugely precises and unlikely mass to produce the empirical mass.
It's not a "retrograde step", but a real-life problem in the standard model.

This is an interesting topic for SF to tackle!
Now, you don't have to be "another scientist reader" to appreciate it.
I have a degree in computer programming and that's what I do for work.
Still, I manage to read a few popular science book and blogs.
This is all the education one needs to deeply appreciate Egan's books.
That, and an open mind.

Really old thread but I just finished this book and want to chime in . . .

As a scientist myself, I really enjoy this kind of stuff. But that's because I think about stuff like "excluding topologies for no good reason is a retrograde step" every day.

To riff on Ian's point, I'd say the following analogy is approximately true: "level of scientific detail in Distress : level of scientific in an actual scientific paper :: level of historical detail in a typical alternate history novel : level of historical detail in a typical work of academic history"

Which is to say, to people who are really interested in this stuff (people who e.g. read academic work on the subject), the science in Egan is really pretty mild. But if you have no interest in science then yeah, it'll be too much. Similarly, if someone has no interest in history, then any amount of historical detail in a novel will be "too much" for them -- but that doesn't mean historical fiction is some sort of bafflingly over-expository genre.

About the question of SF that gets invalidated: I think it's still interesting to see the speculations people made in the past, even when it's been proven wrong. Serious but invalidated speculation is different from pure fantasy; when we read Aristotle we see a guy doing his best to figure out the world as it appeared to him, which is not the case when we read, say, Lucian. (SF authors are somewhere in between because they're writing fiction -- but in hard SF the fiction is supposed to be constrained somewhat by "the world as it appears to us")

thanks Rob, for a very nice and also very useful comment - I wonder if "invalidated SF" is a concept discussed in fandom... it should be, old SF is almost entirely made up of it.

Incidentally this book does count as a book "where all you have to do is say "wow" loudly every twenty minutes" except that the people who are saying "wow" are the scientists, which is quite a feat in itself.

From Cosma Shallizi's review:

"We have, in addition: artificial islands grown by sociobiology-minded anarchist genetic engineers, voluntary autism, windmill farms, mercenaries, a devastating caricature of Fay Weldon, mathematical physics jargon I expect to see enter the literature, failing relationships, a one-sentence dismissal of the cosmology of Permutation City, technolibération which has nothing in common with technolibertarianism, seven distinct biological sexes, at least three shattering ontological realizations (this is an Egan novel: drink up!), non-violent resistance, a wired refugee camp, a tour of downtown Sydney, street theater, epidemic psychosis; and for starters, the resurrection of the dead for judgement"

I like Greg Egan a great deal more than you do, but I have to give you props for producing the only book review that has ever made me laugh uncontrollably. I can definitely relate to that moment when the science goes way too far over my head, and when I got to crying Stan I just lost it!

thanks Dmitry, you made my morning!

Hey Paul,
As a fellow non-scientist, I can appreciate you take more to soft SF than hard SF. Greg Egan requires a reader to break a mental sweat, and that's for sure. My modest advise for any non-science type approaching the author is to first read his novel Zendegi for the reasons I outline in my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Then move to Egan's short fiction since it is relatively easier to get your mind around even the most science/mathematics heavy stories. For example, two stories I reviewed:

The Infinite Assassin: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Axiomatic: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Sure, as a non-science type, it took a bit of effort to write these reviews, but the reward was so worth it.

thanks Glenn - that is indeed useful!

Glenn, what Egan writes is not SF for scientists. The excerpt in the review is made up "science" has cannot possibly interest anyone. Not even made up science, it's just pretentious gibberish. One cannot be serious in trying to understanding, for it has no meaning.

Hey Eddie. As I noted to Paul, I enjoy Greg Egan but in small doses. I'm more into PKD-style New Wave. I see PKD books are among your favorites. You might want to check out a PKD review or two of mine (I wrote reviews for 20 PKD novels). Link to a couple of my favorites:

A Scanner Darkly: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Yes, indeed, pkd is my favorite sci-fi author. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the first of his book I read, and it's a really great one. Though his work has a fairly even quality, meaning most pkd novels make great reading.

But perhaps Mr. Egan is a more interesting subject. Have you checked his personal site? There's no doubt in my mind, Egan is a highly intelligent person, and he manages to impress that on many of his readers.

Thanks, Eddie. Yes, from what's one his website and the content of his novels and stories, Greg Egan is onc heck of a highly intelligent, well read guy.

For me, a glimpse of just how bright and well-educated is noted by Manuel in Message #2 at the bottom of my review of The Infinite Assassin. Link: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Unfortunately, intelligence alone does not make a good writer. Imho, Egan is a mediocre writer, whose books, if I force myself to finish, go out of my mind the moment I turn the last page. His characters lack depth and are unrelatable, his stories are dull, his story telling is unengaging. Egan's cool applets on his site are more entertaining than his books (and they probably deserve more attention).