/lit/ - Literature

Phoresis - Greg Egan (2018)

Phoresis is another of Egan's extremely science based books. In this case the novella is told in three parts covering many generations, each representing a different phase of an epic feat of interplanetary engineering in the form of connecting two nearby planets. The speculation about engineering, physics, geology, and earth sciences is all that matters. It's to the point where all the characters are more or less interchangeable and probably only exist so that it isn't a sole character monologuing all the time. There's almost nothing at all besides the practical matters of their many lives long projects, so expecting anything other that would be a mistake.

I tried reading this before, though I wasn't able to get very far. It was a struggle to read this and it probably wasn't worthwhile for me personally, but I wanted to do anyway. Egan's more science based works are usually a miss for me. Even so, sometimes it's possible to get a weird sense of pleasure from just letting all the explanations wash over you. That wasn't so much the case here for me. I have no doubt that it's far more interesting for those who'd have a specific interest in the experiments detailed by the novella. Not every book is for every reader and several of Egan's are clear examples of that, yet I persist in trying even for those that clearly aren't for me.

As with some of Egan's other writings, starting with his first published work, how reproduction functions for the species of this book could be considered body horror in human terms. You might think the engineering project depicted on the cover might have something with the title, but that'd be wrong. It's their reproductive system that it's referring to. All the characters are female, in the sense that they're the ones who give birth. All the males, in the sense of that which impregnates, have separate bodies, and live inside the female for the duration of their lives and only emerge to procreate. To say that this species is sexually dimorphic is an extreme understatement. There's a single sex scene and what it made me imagine based on what was written was honestly horrific, and even more so based on what's later described.

I'd like to read everything Egan has written despite that being rather difficult for me due to there being some such as this. Yes, it's an arbitrary and irrational idea, and one that I don't know that I'll be able to do, though I want to try anyway. There's already been a few that I don't know if I'll ever go back to though. Even if I don't enjoy all of what Egan does, I appreciate that someone is writing stories like this. That's an abstract idea of questionable merit as well, especially considering when he's written other books of wider appeal, but I think a creative should do what they want. That's arguably not in the best interest of anyone, which may just be one of the costs of having unrestricted creative freedom.

Rating: 2/5