By Greg Egan, author of Zendegi
Early in 2008, I began work on a new novel, entitled Zendegi. The plot involves brain mapping, virtual reality, and the coming of democracy to Iran.
I'd already learnt a bit about the country through conversations with some of the Iranian refugees whom my own loathsome government had seen fit to inter in remote detention centres for many years, and when it came to the novel I was hoping that with enough reading and research I'd be able to make the details ring true.
Over the next few months, though, it occurred to me that there was nothing stopping me from travelling to Iran myself. One of the books I was relying on for maps was the Lonely Planet guide, and every time I turned to it to find the location of a hospital or government building, it also offered me a hotel just around the corner from the places I was writing about. Why make do with maps and other people's accounts, when I could experience the sights and sounds of these locations first-hand? As it happened, I hadn't travelled outside Australia before — as much out of a lack of a compelling destination as anything else — so why not make this my first trip? Compared to some people's choices of wilderness treks through Peru or Nepal, urban Iran would present no physical hardships, and I'd learnt enough Farsi from my refugee friends not to feel completely daunted by the language barrier.
As I write these words, in 2009, Iran is still in turmoil after the June presidential elections, but in June 2008 everything was calm. When I applied for a visa, I wondered if the Iranian authorities might have kept records of the half-dozen (very polite) letters I'd sent to various government officials over the years at the behest of Amnesty International, requesting the release of political prisoners, but if they were still on file somewhere they weren't enough to disqualify me as a tourist.
In August, I discovered that a synopsis of Zendegi that I'd written for my UK publisher — which included the fact that the journalist hero witnesses the downfall of the Iranian regime — had somehow leaked out of their computer, despite my having plastered warnings all over it begging that it not be made public before 2009. Miraculously, only Amazon in Germany put it online initially, but then several other sites picked up their announcement. My publisher released a new, less revealing synopsis to Amazon to overwrite the old one, but I had to beg the other sites individually to amend their records. Thanks to Google's leisurely update cycle, for a couple of months prior to my trip anyone who felt an urge to search for ["Greg Egan" Iran] would see, as their first hit, an incriminating fragment of a page still available from Google's cache, describing my forthcoming novel in which the Ayatollahs got the boot.
The chances of any of this causing me problems might not have been great, but an Australian author had recently been imprisoned in Thailand for insulting a member of the royal family ... and his book had only sold 7 copies. The Thai authorities had read the offending passage quoted online, on someone's blog....
To read about the rest of Greg's trip, click here.
