MorphotrophGreg Egan (Greg Egan, 978-1922240-53-8, $25.00, 384 pages, hc) April 2024. Cover by Greg Egan.

Much of Greg Egan’s work is based on single, transformative ideas – not the “gimmick” of the gadget story, but rather something like Darko Suvin’s idea of ​​a “novum” – often radical reconsiderations or changes to fundamental principles of cosmology, psychology, or physics that unfold to create entire worlds in which one imagines how things might be if they were not as they are. (A side note: Suvin’s definition of science fiction fits most of Egan’s work very closely.)

In Morphotrophthe elaborated counterfactual has a cellular biology radically different from our own. The book begins with teenager Marla waking up to find her body disintegrating—much of her left arm and leg have dissolved. Horrifying as this is, it is not an unspeakable horror but a medical event (albeit serious) rooted in the primordial biology of this world. Complex organisms are made not of cells but of “cytes,” cell-like entities that, rather than having fixed functions predetermined by genes, have the ability to take on functions by joining with other cytos in a self-organizing process to build tissues and organs and eventually entire living beings—morphotypes. For some reason, some of Marla’s cytos leave her—the metaphors used to describe her condition are taken from social organization.

In biology class, Marla’s teachers had made it sound as if… if the body suffered a catastrophic failure, the cytos would abandon it and seek a new home, like people fleeing a city leveled by an earthquake or fire. But she couldn’t remember anyone mentioning the possibility that so many citizens might simply become dissatisfied and leave that an otherwise thriving metropolis might cease to function.

However, Marla’s condition is treatable and her mother and family doctor manage to stop the process and allow regrowth.

This opening chapter is the backstory for one of the novel’s plot threads. The next chapter begins the book’s current action with a different narrative perspective, Ruth, who is a “swapper” and participates in match-ups—part trading session, part competition—in which she swaps zytes with another person, each hoping to gain a useful trait or benefit from the other’s populations and lineages—enhanced health and longevity, or even immortality. In this match-up, Ruth hopes to attract zytes from the formidable Zaleh, although individual swappers do not have full control over the match-up process—”the whole point… was to give the zytes themselves the opportunity to decide” whether to stay in a body or leave it—voting with their (metaphorical) feet. Ruth’s exchange with Zaleh ends with her losing consciousness and waking up in Zaleh—her mind stuck in a body not her own.

Ruth and Marla’s viewpoints form the basis for two gradually converging storylines: Ruth’s strange existence as a guest consciousness in Zaleh and their eventual alliance and search for a solution to their situation; and the adult Marla’s work in cyte research at the Morphotype Institute, where the goal is to understand the mechanisms that govern how cytes organize themselves into distinct, stable configurations. Marla’s story intersects with that of a third character, the Institute’s founder Ada Moss. Ada, over two centuries old, is a Flourisher by birth—one of the rare individuals whose cyte population has remained healthy, stable, and functional for far longer than the usual human lifespan. Her longevity has earned her not only the wealth that funds the Institute, but also the determination to understand the mechanisms by which cytes function. The chapters from Ada’s point of view (as distinct from her role in the present action) are flashbacks that trace her socioeconomic rise a century earlier, from domestic servant to shoemaker to factory owner—a thread that has more to do with her moral character and values ​​than with the various puzzles raised by the book’s complex of biological ideas.

There’s also a fourth point of view/story thread that should be kept behind the spoiler curtain, as it would give away not only the plot points but also the gradual unfolding of the implications and elaborations of the idea, which Egan carefully gauges. Suspense can revolve as much around the mysteries of how and why as it does around who did it or the fates of the characters, and much of the pleasure of the book lies in its deftly handled series of revelations.

The novel’s plot lines and genre categories are interestingly complicated. On the ideas side, there are a number of speculations and puzzles: How does cyto-based biology work? What do its mechanisms say about the organisms built on them? And how will understanding them enable Ruth and Zaleh to return to normal lives? Much of the plot is based on intrigue: Who sent Ada the strange video (a pig giving birth not to a piglet but to a rat) that led her to found the Institute? Who planted spies in the Institute—in novel parasitic forms that inhabit the bodies of staff (not unlike Ruth’s involuntary stay in Zaleh)? And finally, there are overlapping storylines devoted to the adventures of these spies, whose physical natures have been transformed by the technologies developed by morphotype researchers—thinking beings who, like Ruth, hope to regain a normal human body.

All of this takes place in a world that might as well be our own, full of familiar contemporary furniture like commuter trains and suburbs, research labs and health departments, URLs, viral videos and cell phones, abandoned refrigerators in backyards. And beneath the science fiction material about alternate biology and the plot machinery of the intrigue/conspiracy thriller lurk far more fantastical motifs: shapeshifters, werewolves, vampires, body horror plagues, talking animals. This is interwoven with what I consider to be some of Egan’s most persistent and primal interests: the nature of identity and the importance of cooperation in all things social.

In fact, the whole idea of ​​an animal being a self-organizing collective that somehow brings itself into being strikes me as a metaphor for larger eusocial/cooperative structures. It certainly explains much of Ada’s backstory from servitude to riches, which includes her dealings with another flourisher, an industrialist whose morals are tougher and more self-serving than Ada’s. It particularly explains the parts of the flashback chapters where Ada is dealing with the conflicts and labor unrest in the shoe factory she runs, and her dogged, patient insistence on fairness and rationality and the avoidance of coercion—and her support for the transformation of the factory into a worker-owned and -managed collective. These chapters are not about biology, but they are part of the book’s themes. The same goes for this brief scene report from a subplot of the main plot, which is unnecessary for the speculative biology or the elucidation of the mystery, but harmonizes with Ada’s sympathy for the working class and her generally implacable morality:

For some reason, everyone was swapping sandwiches and sampling the contents of each other’s flasks, but she wasn’t sure if this was the result of a planned division of labor designed to give people more variety with less effort, or if it was a spontaneous outburst of sharing that had started with a swap and then escalated.

In the acknowledgments, Egan lists his interest in the biological speculations underlying the book and his indebtedness to the technical documents that were a “source of inspiration” for the mechanisms he developed. But there is much more going on in Morphotropic as alternative biology or shapeshifting or the ethics of research – I kept hearing echoes from throughout his work, and the two resolution chapters expressed them in a way that must remain behind that pesky spoiler curtain. I invite readers to take the journey and see for themselves.

This review and others like it in the July 2024 issue of Location.

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