Oceanic is a science fiction novella by Greg Egan. It was originally published in Asimovs Science Fiction in August 1998. It can be read here
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Provides examples of:
- After the End: The initial settlers of the planet were still very technologically advanced and remained so for thousands of years, but the archeological record shows that suddenly, in less than a century, society utterly collapsed and reverted to a medieval state. The story’s present is several millennia after that, and the world has rediscovered science all over again, but is nowhere close to where their post-Singularity ancestors left off. It is heavily implied that the collapse was caused by chemicals released from the native life, that originally lived in the deep seas before the humans messed with the environment, and these chemicals cause feelings of ecstasy and religious extremism, thereby causing the sudden collapse. Fortunately, people have long since acclimated to the presence of the chemical over the millennia and nowadays only get the effects in concentrated doses (such as what The Fundamentalists do for baptism) so it’s unlikely this will happen again.
- Author Avatar: Martin, the protagonist, is quite clearly a stand-in for Egan himself, as the story of Martin losing his faith in the local Crystal Dragon Jesus religion is almost identical to the autobiographical essay wherein Egan recounts his own such experience.
- Bizarre Human Biology: Humans of the planet Covenant are descended from a group of transhumans who have since rejected The Singularity, are not described in too much detail, but the main feature that is different from actual humanity is that the male's penis is apparently detachable, and passes to the female during sex, at which point it is grafted onto the female, and the male grows a vagina.note Unfortunately for the readers, they find this out in the middle of a sex scene, with almost no forewarning.
- Crapsack Only by Comparison: Oceanic gives us Covenant, which the narrative goes to great lengths to set up as a Bad Future in which society has declined, but which doesn't really seem that worse than 21st-century Earth. Of course, when the civilization that preceded it was one in which nobody ever died, it's a bit easier to accept that Martin wishes he were born earlier, especially since then he wouldn't have lost his mother.
- Exotic Equipment: The single-gendered race of engineered humans have a "bridge" or male reproductive organ that can be passed from person to person; it even has an independent immune system distinct from its host's.
- Foreshadowing: Martin’s brother becoming a die-hard fundamentalist instead of gradually losing his faith like Martin did is showcased after the brother’s marriage, after which he and his wife have an odd number of children, something which Martin secretly regards as a sign of utter deviancy, and is disgusted. This is eventually explained when it’s revealed that this Human Subspecies swap sexes during intercourse, meaning that, for the sake of fairness, each partner is supposed to alternate getting pregnant, with them each bearing the same number of children. That Martin’s brother has an odd number of kids, and that Martin has never seen him in female form, suggests that he made his wife bear all the kids. In other words, religion caused misogyny to come back even in a world where everyone is a hermaphrodite and where it shouldn’t matter what equipment one was born with.
- Meaningful Name: The very thinly veiled Jesus stand-in is named Beatrice. The name happens to be derived from the Latin word for "blessed".
- One-Gender Race: Whether you're born with a penis ('bridge') isn't important; each time you copulate, it detaches and re-attaches itself to the other partner. Married couples take turns bearing children. This race of humans was artificially created, apparently because members of the uploaded human societies that appear in various of Egan's other works (especially Diaspora) thought that giving up the flesh had been bad for their souls.
- Speculative Fiction LGBT: Though it’s probably inaccurate to call the characters transgender or describe them with any sexual orientation at all, since they are all sequential hermaphrodites who change sex every time they have intercourse, it is nonetheless notable that Martin always identifies as male even though he spends a large part of the story, and his life, as biologically female, due to a fling with one of his coworkers that he comes to regret. His childhood religion makes a big deal out of monogamy and specifically of men keeping the bridge (penis) they were born with, so he ultimately waits years before asking his partner to have sex again and give him back his original penis, as he won’t accept any other. During the meantime, he has no contact with his family because they’d know he fornicated were he to show up as female but not be married.
