Who Goes There?

We last covered Greg Egan with his 2002 quantum computing novella “Singleton,” which was very typical Egan; now we have something more atypical. Egan is one of the quintessential transhumanist writers in SF and one of the leading figures of the post-cyberpunk era in the ’90s; but “Oceanic” is not cyberpunk at all. Here we have a coming-of-age story on an alien planet, about a young man’s crisis of faith through both religion and sex, apparently inspired by Egan’s own disillusionment with Christianity in his youth as recounted in his autobiographical essay “Born Again, Briefly,” which I highly recommend reading as a kind of double feature with “Oceanic.” Indeed despite the exotic locale this reads as one of Egan’s most personal works, and while it isn’t cyberpunk it does manage to veer back into some go-to Egan themes. The gambit paid off, as it remains Egan’s single most decorated story, having won the Hugo for Best Novella as well as placed first in the Locus and Asimov’s readers’ polls for that year. It might also be my favorite Egan story I’ve read so far.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1998 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Gardner Dozois liked this story so much he bought it for Asimov’s, but then reprinted it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection and The Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Short Science Fiction Novels. It’s in the Egan collection Oceanic, and of course it’s also in The Best of Greg Egan. You can read it free online at Egan’s site, so you don’t have an excuse!

Enhancing Image

Sometimes when I’m reviewing a story I feel like I’m struggling to come up with things to say about it, but with “Oceanic” there’s no such problem—especially if you know how autobiographical it is. But first some context. We’re on the planet Covenant, over a thousand years after humanoids (I say “humanoids” because it doesn’t look like normal humans had come to the planet in the first place), and we follow Martin, who as narrator is writing what you might call a fictional memoir, recounting from the time he was about ten to when he was deep in his twenties. Martin and his family are “Freelanders,” in that they live on the vast waters of the planet, unlike the “Firmlanders” who live primarily on land. Martin’s family are Transitional, that is to say mildly religious, but Martin’s older brother, Daniel, joins the Deep Church, a fundamentalist sect, when he’s fifteen (David being five years Martin’s senior). Daniel tries to convert Martin, and in a scene ripped straight from Egan’s own life (his older brother having split from their Anglican family and converted to Catholicism as a teenager), the two kneel by Martin’s bed one night and pray to Beatrice, the Christ-like figure of the religion. But Martin hasn’t really been converted yet. “I wasn’t sure that I wanted Beatrice to change my mind, and I was afraid that this display of fervour might actually persuade Her.” The practice starts as more out of respect for Daniel than believing his faith, but Martin will soon go through a rite of passage that will turn him into a firm believer—for a while. This is all told with melancholy hindsight.

“Oceanic” is a coming-of-age narrative, or a bildungsroman, about a boy crossing the shadow-line (to steal Conrad) into maturity—a crossing that tends to be not one experience but several key turning points. The first major turning point for Martin is arguably not kneeling with Daniel that one night, but taking part in the Drowning, a ritual in which someone is submerged in the depths of Covenant’s waters—so far down that it would seem suicidal, and yet this near-death experience is euphoric, at least if the person accepts Beatrice in their heart. Martin is Drowned one day, with Daniel as his second, and this experience in the depths, by his lonesome, makes him feel like he’s somehow become one with Beatrice. A switch gets flipped inside his head. Getting Drowned is something only the Deep Church people do, as others see it as dangerous and an aberration, something fundamentalists do; but his Drowning causes a religious awakening in Martin. As he struggles in the depths he recounts the story of Beatrice and the “Angels” as written in the Scriptures. This is where things gets pretty strange, and dense, in the sense that Egan seems to have developed a whole origin story for the people of this planet—one that is clearly adjacent to Christianity, although there’s a transhumanist twist that’s more implied than explained. While submerged, Martin takes in a gulp of the seawater, and at this moment light floods his vision, leaving “a violet afterimage” once it recedes and Daniel brings him back to the surface, the Drowning successful.

The irony is that after this point Martin and Daniel’s relationship weakens, granted that part of this is to be expected given their age gap. Martin gets involved with Daniel’s Prayer Group, but soon grows tired of it. “What did I have in common with them, really?” The brothers grow apart. Daniel gets married young to a fellow Deep Church person named Agnes and the two lead a boring, traditional life thereafter. Some years pass and now Martin’s a teenager. It’s at this point that I should probably mention the eccentric biology of the humans in this story. Something I noticed only after the fact is that Egan refrains from giving physical descriptions of characters really, and this could be for a few reasons, but one reason I can think of is that the characters are physically androgynous—they, in fact, have physical traits of both male and female, and even functioning sex organs that would normally be unique to either. They’re true hermaphrodites, “women and men were made indistinguishable in the sight of God.” What gender someone identifies as really does come down to their self-perception rather than their sex. I’m bringing this up now because it’ll soften the blow for when we get to what is perhaps the most important scene in the story—and also the most unusual. When Daniel gets married Martin meets up with one of Agnes’s cousins, Lena, a Firmlander who nonetheless is very interested in the way Freelanders live. The two hit it off and enter a sort of casual relationship, and it doesn’t take long for sex to enter the picture.

So, in a bildungsroman, it’s not uncommon for the protagonist’s first sexual experience to serve as a turning point in the narrative, as a euphoric or traumatic experience. One’s first time is rarely all that. I myself didn’t lose my virginity till I was 21, and it was with someone I was not in a relationship with; it was a one-time thing, but the important thing is that we were nice to each other and there was certainly no pain in it. A lot of people aren’t so lucky. Poor Martin over here has one of the strangest first times possible—not because the sex with Lena goes wrong exactly but because there’s a certain part of the exchange nobody had thought to warn him about in advance. Remember how I said that the people of Covenant are hermaphrodites? Not only that, but the penis is apparently detachable. If sex happens between someone with a penis and someone with a vagina there’s a literal exchange of “the bridge,” so that after he climaxes inside Lena Martin finds, to his horror, that Lena now has his cock and that Martin, with blood on his groin, finds that a pussy has formed where his cock once was. (There’s no mention of testicles that I can recall—and no, don’t ask me to go back through to see if there is. I would have to think then that the testes are internal, somehow, but still functional. For better or worse Egan doesn’t go into great detail as to how the anatomy of these future humans could function. The effect is akin to one of Dali’s paintings, or one of the more nightmarish scenes in a Buñuel film.) Eventually Martin and Lena have sex a second time so that Martin can get his dick back; but the relationship has done sour because of that first time and they seemingly never talk again.

A lot is happening, so let’s rewind the film and take this step by step. We’re never outright told this I believe, but it’s implied pretty heavily, even early on, that the humans on Covenant are the descendants of the so-called Angels, who apparently had foregone flesh-and-blood bodies but then decided to build organic yet artificial bodies for themselves so that they could experience bodily pleasures and even mortality again. The Angels, being basically noncorporeal, are now spoken of as if they were literal angels, the “present” of the story being so far into our future that even the far future of the Angels is spoken of as if it were ancient history or myth. Egan has gone out of his to imagine a future humanity that in some ways is not so different from us, but then there’s the biology of these people. Martin losing his virginity is a traumatic event for more than one reason: it gives him gender dysphoria, makes him feel ashamed because he’s had not only had sex while unmarried but lost his “bridge” in the process, and it’s the first time in his life where the hard reality of biology shakes his faith. I probably should’ve also mentioned “Oceanic” nearly made the shortlist for the Tiptree Award. Now, transphobes might read this story and be repulsed by its implications, because it becomes obvious that, as is regularly the case with Egan’s fiction, biology is framed as tyrannical. Martin and his kind are not beholden to biology but victims of it. (I saw someone theorize that Greg Egan is actually a woman, and while it’s true we’ve never seen or heard Egan, I find this a bit far-fetched.) Indeed Martin deciding to study microbiology, under an affable but ultimately dead-end professor named Barat, will prove to make him only more miserable.

Something I’ve had to do in writing this review is go back through “Oceanic” and reread some passages, which I’m not prone to doing for these—in no small part because I know with certainty there are details I had missed on my first reading. On the one hand you could try boiling this story down to a “religion sucks” narrative, but that really would not be doing the world Egan has built justice, nor would it encapsulate the thematic depths. Granted that showing “Oceanic” to a transphobic Christian would disgruntle them, it’s more a dramatization of Egan’s own coming of age; this is his Go Tell It on the Mountain. A mild criticism I have of Egan’s writing is that when it comes to first-person narrators they tend to have more or less the same voice, which I have to take to some extent as Egan’s own voice: brooding, seemingly teetering on the line between macho and a little feminine, a sort of overly sensitive film noir detective cadence. Martin might be the most Egan-ish of Egan narrators, and yet rather than distract me this ended up being more of an asset than a negative—indeed Martin being the quintessential Egan narrator might well be the whole point. The result is that despite not having anything to do (at least directly, though it’s very much part of the backstory) with computing or quantum uncertainty, “Oceanic” manages to be thematically kin with Egan’s other work, even if on the surface it seems to hark to a kind of old-school planetary science fiction. As someone who’s not very literate in computer science (like most people) I thus found it accessible by Egan’s standards.

There Be Spoilers Here

As he ages Martin distances himself more from organized religion—first from the Deep Church and even the Transitionals, increasingly finding fault and hypocrisy in the arguments of theologians. Among his own scientific colleagues he finds himself siding more with the earnest atheists than with whom he sees as weak-willed believers. “Theology aside, the whole dynamics of the group was starting to get under my skin; maybe I’d be better off spending my time in the lab, impressing Barat with my dedication to his pointless fucking microbes.” And then tragedy strikes. Martin’s mom comes down with a severe illness, and by the time he gets to hospital she has already died. Daniel was there, but this ends up being the final straw for Martin’s perception of him, for according to Daniel’s own faith their mother is destined for Hell since she was never drowned; but upon confronting him about this bit of theology Martin finds that his fundamentalist older brother has softened—for his own sake if nobody else’s. “There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs.” By this point Martin has become one of those devout but rebelliously individualistic religious people, but even his personal faith has been eroding, slowly but surely. “The God of the gaps,” to use an edgy atheist phrase. What breaks the camel’s back turns out to be Martin’s own work in the microbes of Covenant’s oceans.

So, to make a long story short, the microbes in the planet’s water have this hallucinatory fucky-wucky effect if taken into one’s body in concentrated form. The humans on Covenant have adapted to these microbes in moderation, but it’s still dangerous to interact with too much, which would explain the religious experiences had by those who have Drowned. Martin’s religiousus experience, which he had kept close to his heart all these years even as his understanding of the natural world expanded, has a scientific explanation: he saw some freaky shit because he had inhaled a concentrated amount of these microbes. It’s like the SFnal version of how people who suffer from epilepsy are prone to having “religious” visions—or indeed people with schizophrenia who claim to be in touch with the divine. Biology has its way with Martin; it caresses him, withers him, takes the moon and the sun from him, takes what is in front of him and even behind from him, and at the end of the day it takes God from him.

I was lucky: I’d been born in an era of moderation. I hadn’t killed in the name of Beatrice. I hadn’t suffered for my faith. I had no doubt that I’d been far happier for the last fifteen years than I would have been if I’d told Daniel to throw his rope and weights overboard without me.

But that didn’t change the fact that the heart of it all had been a lie.

At age 25 Martin becomes an atheist, incidentally around the same age when Egan gave up his own faith. This is not a victory for atheism or any dumb bullshit like that, but rather a melancholy crossing of the shadow-line, from youth to manhood. Something is lost and gained, at the same time, like a passing of the torch. While “Oceanic” is by no means Egan’s first “mature” story (he had already written Permutation City and Disapora at this point, not to mention some pretty great short fiction), it’s a reflection on the artist (or the scientist, who anyway is adjacent to the artist) coming into his own. Maturity is not sunshine and rainbows.

A Step Farther Out

I ended up reading “Born Again, Briefly” after I had read “Oceanic” but before starting this review, which turned out to be a good idea since it helped explain the strong personal touch of this story. It’s also a bit of a mind-bender, but not for the reasons typically associated with Egan, in that you don’t have to be an amateur computer programmer to understand the point he’s trying to make. Still, it’s a dense novella that almost demands a second reading, for pleasure but also so one can soak in all the details. Egan could’ve gone farther with the gender aspect, but for 1998 it’s still pretty wild and forward-thinking. People forget that even in 1998, which for some of you was not that long ago, queer representation in SF was very… mixed. And also nearly always evidently from a cishet perspective. With that in mind, “Oceanic” has aged pretty gracefully; it also happens to be a story people new to Egan can read without issue.

See you next time.