Griaule: переводы

→Greg Egan: At the heart of this book is the politics and philosophy of what it would mean to know the future. The possibility of sending messages back in time has been implicit in the physics of the Orthogonal universe from the start, but it’s only now that the travellers’ circumstances and technology put it within reach. In the previous volume, their culture had to absorb a form of reproductive technology that completely changed the roles of the sexes, but this is even more radical and divisive. So there’s a certain amount of violence and political intrigue, but also an expedition that tries to find a peaceful solution by seeing if it’s possible to colonise a planet where the thermodynamic arrow of time carried by the air and the soil runs in the opposite direction to that of the would-be colonisers.

→Greg Egan: When I was very young, in the 1960s and early 70s, I read pretty much every SF novel that made its way into the local library. So Aldiss, Asimov, Bester, Clarke, Delany, Dick, Leinster, Le Guin, Pohl, Vonnegut, Zelazny were part of the landscape, part of the air I breathed. And though I had favourites, it almost seemed like a collective enterprise to me: I just wanted to write SF, because that was what all these people were writing. Later on, in my teens, I probably found Larry Niven the most inspiring, with books like Protector andRingworld and The Mote in God’s Eye. In my twenties I drifted more towards writers like Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, and I was starting to feel very jaded about SF, but it was Greg Bear’s Blood Music that got me excited about the genre again.

→Greg Egan: I wouldn’t use the word “Master” about anyone; outside the context of masters and apprentices in pre-industrial Europe, it sounds comically bombastic to me. But I suppose they couldn’t call the series “Some modern SF writers whose work we hoped might be interesting enough to sustain book-length monographs.” I’m grateful that Karen Burnham felt it was worth devoting so much of her time to the subject, but clearly I’m not part of the target readership, so I’ll leave it to other people to offer opinions on the book.

→Greg Egan: I don’t really know. It’s a story about growing out of religion, and both the liberation and the sense of loss that accompanies that, so perhaps it resonates with people’s personal experience.

→Q: Your 1998 short story, “Oceanic” (click to read online), won the Hugo, the Locus, and the Asimov’s Reader Poll, along with the Seiun and the Hayakawa’s SF Magazine Reader’s Award. What was it about “Oceanic” that spoke (and still speaks) to so many readers?

→Greg Egan: I’ve been writing a few short stories and thinking about the next novel, but I haven’t committed myself to a definite plan yet.

→Q: Now that Orthogonal is wrapped up, what do you plan to work on next?

→Q: The final book in the Orthogonal trilogy, The Arrows of Time, comes out in the US this August and was released in the UK last November. What can fans of the trilogy look forward to in this newest volume?

→Greg Egan: In our own universe, there’s a part of the foundations of physics that is very well understood. That includes all the basic facts about time and motion, light and matter, heat and energy — and over the last century or so, the way these things are interconnected has been mapped out very clearly.

→Q: The world of the Orthogonal trilogy followed different laws of the universe that we do. For example, for Yalda and everyone on her planet, the speed of light isn’t a constant. What kind of research did you do to make sure the changed laws and new math would be consistent as the story progressed?

→Let’s get to the interview!

→Greg took a few minutes to chat with me about his recently completed Orthogonal trilogy, how easy and fun it is to mess with the laws of physics, e-book bells and whistles, Karen Burnham’s book on his works, and more. Famous for his hard science fiction, he has supplemented many of his works with additional material that is available onhis website.

→Greg Egan was born in 1961. Since the early ’80s he has published twelve novels and more than fifty short stories, winning the Hugo Award for his novella “Oceanic” and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Permutation City. He lives in Perth, Australia.