More Walking Than I'm Used To

Sunday, 1 June 1997

I finished Distress. Again, commentary at the bottom of the page. Now I'm reading Diane Duane's So You Want To Be A Wizard. No, I'm not in the least bit embarrassed to be reading young adult fiction; some of it is better than some of the crap marketed at older adults.

I took the subway into Manhattan yesterday, to J&R Computer World. I picked up some more video RAM, a copy of Warcraft II, and a couple of Jethro Tull CDs. It was a nice day, and I hadn't walked over the Brooklyn Bridge in a few years, so I decided to walk home.

Well, that's not quite how it happened. First, I decided to walk over the bridge, and then take the subway home. Then, once I was in Brooklyn, I figured I'd walk a bit farther, to Junior's, and pick up some cheesecake, and take mass transit back from there. The cheesecake was priced a bit higher than I felt like paying, so I walked a bit farther, down to the new mall, Atlantic Center, to check it out. The Center's Pathmark is an actual, real supermarket, like the kind they have in America. It wasn't as big as the Wegman's I used to shop at back when I lived in Rochester, and it didn't sell lawn furniture, but it was pretty damn big for a New York supermarket. Anyway, I bought a few things, and then wimped out and took the subway three stops to get home. It comes out to somewhere between two-and-a-half and three miles, which isn't as long as it felt like.

Spoilers for Greg Egan's Distress
That means stop reading here if you haven't read/seen it yet.

Okay, my predictions for the cause of Distress were wrong. In fact, the theme of the book wound up almost directly contrary to what I'd expected: It does tie into the understanding of the complex underpinnings of the universe, and of everything in the universe (such as our bodies, our mids, and our societies), this ultimately winds up being the salvation of humanity, rather than a threat. The story can be thought of almost as a religious fable for atheists. Despite which, I didn't like it as much as I liked Quarantine and Permutation City. Distress seemed less grounded in the possible. Much of the tension of the book revolves around groups of people with diverging opinions about the implications of the discovery of a working Theory Of Everything (sort of a super-Grand-Unified theory of physical laws), and the arguments in favor of one or another interpretation aren't presented in any way that would allow a reader (or at least this reader) to judge which one is actually accurate. Thus, the conclusion seems like it's been chosen by author's fiat, rather than deriving out of the previously established story elements. Also, I flat out just don't believe in the anarchist society of Stateless, not as written. Societies just don't get that large without people showing up who test the boundaries of the permissible.

Which doesn't mean that I think Distress is a bad book. It's still well worth reading. I just like his other novels better.