Subject: _Axiomatic_ by Greg Egan

From: [email-masked] (Roberta and Craig Becker)
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 21:22:50 GMT

_Axiomatic_ by Greg Egan
             Millennium, ISBN 1-85798-416-1, 1995, 289pp
                   A book review by Craig Becker
		    Copyright 1995 Craig Becker

    I have a friend who tells me that much of what is sold as SF these days
isn't really Science Fiction. Too much SF, she says, is simply a basic story
(Boy Meets Girl, or Coming Of Age, or etc) dressed up with robots,
spaceships, aliens, and so forth so that it _looks_ like Science Fiction.
But it's not: change the robots into serfs, the spaceships into sailing
ships, the aliens into Indians, and viola! It's a "historical epic". Or make
the robots into PCs and the spaceships into airplanes, and it's
"contemporary drama". _Real_ SF, she maintains, is where the story _depends_
on "what-if"--without it, there's simply no story. Thus, my friend is
extraordinarily fond of Clarke's _Tales From The White Hart_, but _Star
Wars_ left her cold.

    That said, my friend is going to love Egan's _Axiomatic_, a collection
of hard SF stories that harken back to those halcyon days of yore when Real
Men wrote Real SF with Real Science...indeed, fifty pages into this book, I
could feel myself regressing back into a maladjusted high-school kid,
sitting snug in my room next to a tall pile of _Orbits_ and _Analogs_ and
assorted Groff Conklin anthologies in their dirty, crackling plastic library
wrappings. Except that Science has marched on quite a ways since then, often
to the beat of a decidedly peculiar drummer.

    The stories in _Axiomatic_ span the cutting edge from Artificial
Intelligence ("Learning To Be Me") to genetic engineering ("The Moat") to
medical ethics ("Blood Sisters") to "weird physics" ("The Hundred-Light Year
Diary"), but what sets Egan apart from most other hard SF writers is the
deft manner in which he balances the Science in his stories with the People
in his stories.  Indeed, much of Egan's talent is that he can pile on the
technical details, yet still make you care about his characters. He strictly
follows the Campbellian mandate to speculate "what-if", and then write about
how it affects _people_.

    Although it's interesting to speculate about whether or not Campbell
would actually _buy_ any of these stories, I'd guess not. Notwithstanding
the fact that Egan's excellent novel _Permutation City_ won the 1994 John W.
Campbell award, his short stories definitely lack the "Homo Sapiens Uber
Alles" kind of feel-good that Campbell liked so much. In fact, the majority
of the stories in _Axiomatic_ are quite unsettling, and several are macabre
enough that they could be classified as out-and-out horror (new mothers
should steer clear of "The Cutie", and "Learning To Be Me" has to be the
creepiest treatment of the mind-body problem ever written).

    I wish all hard SF could be like this: wildly imaginative, yet well-
written. _Axiomatic_ isn't for everyone: fans of Tolkien and Brooks won't
even want to touch this book, much less read it. But if you like hard SF--
and especially, if you've been missing that "Sense Of Wonder" that SF used
to give you--_Axiomatic_ is a Must Read.

%T      Axiomatic
%A      Greg Egan
%S      The Infinite Assassin
%S      The Hundred-Light-Year Diary
%S      Eugene
%S      The Caress
%S      Blood Sisters
%S      Axiomatic
%S      The Safe-Deposit Box
%S      Seeing
%S      A Kidnapping
%S      Learning To Be Me
%S      The Moat
%S      The Walk
%S      The Cutie
%S      Into Darkness
%S      Appropriate Love
%S      The Moral Virologist
%S      Closer
%S      Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies
%C      London
%D      1995
%I      Millennium
%G      ISBN 1-85798-416-1
%P      289pp

-- Craig Becker, Object Technology Products (512) 838-8068  Austin, TX USA --
-- Internet: [email-masked]          IBM VNET: JLPICARD at AUSVM1 --
--  'Literal immortality? Outliving the universe?'  'That's what the word  --
--   means. Not: dying after a very long time.  Just: not dying, period.'  --