Customer Reviews

Zendegi

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The idea of mapping and uploading human consciousness isn't new to science fiction. Indeed, Egan has explored it in a couple of his earlier novels and in his short stories. Other SF writers have done so too. But Zendegi isn't stale or hackneyed; quite the opposite in fact.

Zendegi is the name of a virtual reality role-playing game whose designers manage to create game characters from partially mapped human minds. They do so for commercial reasons, to give their product an edge in an increasingly competitive VR market place. It's ironic that something so complex and amazing should be applied to such mundane purposes - entertainment and money-making. Egan juxtaposes this scenario with another far more worthwhile one - using a virtual version of a dying parent as way of ensuring that the child doesn't grow up totally without parental guidance. But what are the moral implications of doing this? And what other applications, altruistic or otherwise, might such technology lead to, especially given the increasingly commercial nature of scientific research?

Exploring big questions like these is what great SF is all about, and Egan's treatment of this particular topic is fascinating. Equally fascinating is the setting - a near-future Iran which is now democratic but where religious ideology is still a factor.

By contrast with his previous two novels, Egan balances the science and the storytelling really well, creating believable characters and putting them in a setting that, while speculative, is eminently plausible. There's also a touch of humour where, early in the novel, one of the characters is confronted by a science journalist whose previous works include `The Sociobiology of The Simpsons' and `The Metaphysics of Melrose Place'. Ha ha! Shades of the pretentious academics in Teranesia whose careers have been forged in the cutting edge fields of X-Files Theory and Diana Studies.

The characters in the book are not heroic, but they are very human. The story does not have a dramatic climax, but it leaves you thinking about morality, about politics, about business, about humanity's future. It's a provocative speculation on the possibilities of technology and it's Egan's best novel in years.

I don't exaggerate when I say that some of Egan's earlier books changed my life. The intellectual repartee got me thinking as no other fiction writer ever has except maybe Dostoyevsky. The solidly grounded speculative physics was the best ever. Permutation City, Distress, Quarantine, Diaspora .. but then after Schild's Ladder there were some disappointments. Teranesia didn't measure up, the next one didn't either. And I was two thirds of the way through Zendegi before I realized it just wasn't going anywhere. Sorry Mr. Egan but I'm not impressed that you've learned Farsi and I just don't find Iranian culture all that fascinating. This book was a pale ghost of Egan's earlier speculation on consciousness in inorganic substrates like the Qusp, and when I finished the last page I realized that unlike so many others read dog-eared, this is one I won't be reading again.

And the first story in Crystal Nights? More Farsi. Doesn't do a thing for me.

Come on, Mr. Egan, get back that spark of the earlier books. This was an honest to god letdown.

What could have been a very good short story has been stretched into a so-so novel, which (at times) is more about parenting than anything else. The story is not riveting and it's not in league with Egan's best. It drags in several places and only has a couple of mildly interesting ideas.

I've been a Greg Egan fan for a long time. I was blown away by Permutation City, then Quarantine and his other early novels. Devoured all his short stories. This was an author with deep ideas and great writing.

Then came his later works like Schild's Ladder and others that were 50% speculation and musings about physics and science wrapped in a novel. I didn't like these as much. I guess they were great for the people in the fields involved but not easy reading. I normally like "Hard Science Fiction" with futuristic and amazing technical detail - well thought out and deliciously described. If you made an analogy between writing style and music - let's say "hard sci fi" was "hard rock", Egan had become death metal. The earlier accessibility of his writing was gone.

Then came Zendegi. I bought it as a kindle book and am not sure if that had anything to do with it but its one of the most boring reads I've ever come across. Endless detail about a some Arabic uprisings in the future, page after page after agonising page. Maybe this book is a big hit in Iran? Then come the endless family interactions and the guy wanting to copy himself into a machine before he dies so that his son can continue to be guided by "him" - gee - die already, the boy will be fine.

Then finally the endless sessions in the "VR" world that bored me senseless. Reading those pages feels like someone in the 80's putting on some cheap VR goggles for the first time and describing the world he sees in detail. Sure its more sophisticated than that in the novel, but the descriptions are overdone and lacking in fun. Compare the way Iain Banks describes VR worlds and just the future itself - its all intertwined with the main story, meaningful and insightful. Zendegi VR sessions are like repeated descriptions of walking into a local VR booth and describing what you see - my finger was flipping forward on my kindle reader app on most occasions.

This is not the Greg Egan of old. The writing style is unrecognisable, its like another author at work. I believe the writing style was changed deliberately - why? Its like some publisher said to Egan - write a dumbed down sci fi novel for the Arabic market, and change your writing style whilst you are at it so that nobody recognises you - and we'll publish it under a different name. Then at the last minute they end up using his name anyway.

I feel like deleting this ebook from my kindle library, because its very presence makes me feel bored and claustrophobic. And to think I used to tell everyone I knew (in Australia) to check out the mighty Greg Egan - our home grown hard sci fi author mixing it up with the big boys.

In Greg Egan's earlier books, virtual humans are an accepted reality. In Zendegi, he has taken up the challenge of describing the early development efforts into virtualising a human being. The degree of difficulty is further increased by setting most of the story in Iran. The only downer was that the book ends abruptly and we are left hanging, waiting for a sequel.

With the Arab Spring beginning just after the book was published, will the rest of Greg Egan's future history come true? If so, we are in for some very interesting times!

I have never read Egan. This was therefore his introduction to me. The first part of the novel was not sci-fi - it was simply a bit of reasonably good near future fiction about an unremarkable revolution in Iran - very similar to a reporters' eye view of the recent "Arab Spring" events in Egypt. I enjoyed reading it - it wasn't what I expected but it was pretty good reading.
The second part of the novel concentrates on the same reporter trying to create a "proxy" avatar to guide his son after he dies so that his best friend who will raise the child after his death will not overload him with his (Arabic) prejudices. This was hard work to read in the extreme - the VR world is simplistic and the endless rehash of Arabic stories to be used as parables was painful. The ending was....well... as expected. If the whole novel had been like part 1 I would have enjoyed it much more.
This was good value for $0 - at the end of the day it was better than most of the free books out there. I certainly don't feel shafted on the price, but as a literary work it is Jeckel and Hyde... and ultimately a bit repetitive...I hate that the main character becomes such a whiner...he deserved better.

I enjoyed this book, the honest effort it made to wrestle with the issues of what it means to be human, and the ethics of using semi-humans for grunt work. The descriptions of Iran make it sound like a country well worth visiting.

I've loved most of Greg Egan's novels up to this point, and so was eagerly looking forward to Zendegi but unfortunately Greg has dropped the ball this time around. Zendegi is a novel that plays it safe; a dull, methodical, ramble that tries far too hard to present a politically correct view of a future Iran (with some safe, token jabs at obvious targets) and as a result never really goes anywhere. It is a timid novel lacking almost entirely in creativity -- something I never thought I'd see from Greg Egan -- full of dull characters and anemic story telling. The groan-inducing cliché of a (non)ending is simply icing on a horrible cake.

I know Greg means well, he did visit Iran while writing Zendegi (you can find details on his homepage) and his trip notes make for a far more interesting read about Iran and its beauty than you will get from Zendegi. I just wish Greg had had the courage to tell a stronger story.

Because I'm a big Greg Egan fan I made this book my first Kindle purchase without knowing anything about it. I should have read the two-star reviews here first and saved myself a lot of time and disappointment.

I was hoping for was a hard science fiction story with some action, along the lines of Permutation City. Something with a few mind-bending concepts to chew on and think about. Instead, I got a boring (to me) story about the politics of an imagined Iranian political upheaval mixed with a story about parenting.

The two science main fiction concepts explored were related to potential advances in a shared virtual reality game, mostly revolving around how artificial intelligence can be improved by trying to model human brains. Neither seemed particularly interesting.

All in all, way too much backstory, and my hopes for the final third of the book to get good were in vain.

Zendegi is a very believable near term future novel. It spans 2012 to 2030 or so and covers the rise of intelligent software based on scans of human brains. Much of it is set in the online virtual gaming environment, Zendegi, which drives the development of intelligent software. Quite plausible, and really gives you something to think about in terms of the transition of clever software to possibly sentient software. Having a gaming environment drive the requirement is pretty obvious as gaming has been a major driving force in software and required hardware since inception.
Much less of the hard core physics from Egan in this book, and generally it is much more accessible. It is also quite interesting from a current events view as well as it is mostly set in Iran, and covers changes in Iran and its politics over the period.
Very interesting, but ends a bit flat, although full of possibility.

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