Reading Egan, Ctd.
Posted by Niall Harrison
6 January 2012
Discussion continues about the matter of Greg Egan and characterisation. Here's Matt Denault, responding to Karen:
But this all comes down to what you're trying to do, I think. If you're trying to situate Egan within the field, then yes, comparisons with Timescape and with Heinleinian Competent Men seem valid and useful--even if we can name a handful of other stories that do similar things, Egan's still been doing it longer, in more works and in more ways, than anyone else I can think of. On the other hand, if you're trying to make qualitative claims about his fiction...well, I have no problem with the argument that what Egan is doing is rare and useful, and thus it is a good thing he's doing it and his works are worth examining in some depth because of it. Where I start to twitch is when you seem to want to go from "what he's doing is rare" to "what he's doing is good fiction," or at least "it's impossible to do what he does and have it be traditionally good fiction," because at that point the comparison that I start to make is not just to what has already been written, but to what could be written, the possibilities inherent in fiction that are suggested by what's already been written. But that may just be how I think about these things.
