/lit/ - Literature

>>20982423
Zendegi - Greg Egan (2010)

The most important thing to know coming into this, especially if you've only read Egan's most popular novels, is that you ought adjust your expectations. This is a small scale character focused novel where the scientific ideas serve more for the character's story than the other way around. There are two POVs. One is a 46 year old Australian male journalist and the other is an 25 year old Iranian female researcher whose mother fled with her from Iran. The first third from his perspective is a political thriller about an Iranian revolution in 2012 that overthrows the theocracy. From hers it's scientific research and trying to decide to the course of her life. The synopsis for this book leaked shortly before Egan went on a research trip to Iran and he was concerned that the government wouldn't look kindly on an author whose book included the overthrow of their government, but nothing came of it. The latter two thirds are a near-future speculative fiction character drama, which from his perspective have a focus on parenting, mortality, and social mores. From hers it's developing better proxies (NPCs) for Zendegi-ye-Behtar (Better Life), their spherical VR rigs and gaming platform, and the ethics involved with doing so.

At the end of the first chapter, a character tells the protagonist: "...if we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we’re standing right now, we’re going to trip and fall flat on our faces, over and over again." This is foreshadowing for the rest of the novel and a cautionary warning, which the book as a whole could be also considered as. There is considerable criticism leveled against various futurists, who aren't named, but two seem evident to me. Those two being Ray Kurzweil and his arguably religious reverence for the Singularity and Aubrey de Grey's supplement regimen.

There's a scene of a person buying a Salman Rushdie book in Farsi in Iran without any problems, which considering the recent attempted assassination of Rushdie by an Iranian, brought a different perspective of that scene for me. There are also extended VR scenes of historical fantasy, which I understood the purpose of, but even so, weren't really to my preference. There are a few, mostly superficial, similarities with the ongoing TV series Pantheon, which is based on some of Ken Liu's short fiction.

I've seen several write that the ending feels abrupt and unfinished, which is because it is, for the ideas at least. The story that Egan wanted to tell about the character's lives though seems finished though to me. Egan later wrote three stories for the ideas in Zendegi though, which are: Bit Players, 3-adica, and Instantiation. Even though this isn't what Egan usually writes, let alone what most of his readers may want, it was a worthwhile look at a near future that may have went for too much for naturalism, especially the arbitrary procession of life events.

Rating: 3.5/5