Greg Egan

A collection of science fiction stories that looks at the possible future includes stories of genetically altered dolphins that speak in limericks and a software program that allows you to design your own child. Original.

Axiomatic

Gavin

(Probably 5 stars on re-read)

Phenomenal. (Usually not nice phenomena, but always strong phenomena.) Every one of these produced an effect in me, from deep grimace to snort to total pathos. It took me a month to read 18 stories, because it is stressful to encounter characters this vivid in scenarios this brutal.* Every story has an actual logic - often a fantastical one, like the retrocausal literally-hypothetical boddhisatva posthumans of 'Eugene'. He has few peers in thinking this hard and making you feel the thought. What Black Mirror could have been: thought experiments like self-aware spears.

Ranking:
 
  

   The Hundred-Light-Year Diary 
  

   The Moral Virologist. (Nauseating, lyrical evil.) 
  

   Into Darkness 
  

   Axiomatic 
  

   Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies 
  

   Learning to be me 
  

   Eugene 
  

   The Safe-Deposit Box 
  

   The caress 
  

   The Walk 
  

   Seeing 
  

   The Vat 
  

   A Kidnapping 
  

   The Cutie 
  

   Closer 
  

   The Infinite Assassin 
  

   Appropriate Love 
  

   Blood Sisters 
  

 

The worst of these is still well above average for sci-fi - clever, satisfying plot, sympathetic characters, moment of awesome. (I tested this here; Egan's entry, weak for him, was still the best in the collection. It would be last, here.)


  
doing whatever it was designed to do. Enabling multiple orgasms of the left kneecap. Making the colour blue taste like the long-lost memory of mother’s milk. Or, hardwiring a premise: I will succeed. I am happy in my job. There is life after death. Nobody died in Belsen. Four legs good, two legs bad . . .




  
The next rack contained a selection of religions, everything from Amish to Zen. (Gaining the Amish disapproval of technology this way apparently posed no problem; virtually every religious implant enabled the user to embrace far stranger contradictions.) There was even an implant called Secular Humanist (‘You WILL hold these truths to be self-evident!’). No Vacillating Agnostic, though; apparently there was no market for doubt.



I could write something about each of these; sometimes hundreds of words. Next time.

* It is probably best to treat this book as 2 or 3 small collections, for savouring and emotional rest.

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How does it do as serious science fiction?

Social development: A great deal. Personal identity is twisted and torn a dozen times, and he sketches the social structures which would have to arise when there are two of you, none of you, half of you, chimeras. The Ndoli devices illustrate that social consensus replaces philosophy for most people. When perfect cloning and brain transplants are available - when medicine's grasp over injury is total - he still brings it back to hard economics, the small print. Better on this than Chiang, his great peer.

Software development: Not a huge amount but enough. He knows that brain transplants couldn't work without software, and the Ndoli devices are an excellent picture of machine learning, even 25 years later, after the field became more than a toy.

Actual Science: Half of these stem from an extrapolation of current science (transplants, brain editing, cloning, brain emulation, BioArt), rather than say the apriori thought experiments of Chiang. And not just science: combinatorics! Actual probability! But even his flights of fancy (like the programmable wormhole with bizarre physics of 'Into Darkness') are internally consistent, and display serious attempt to take physics or biology seriously.

Matthew Royal

THE HUNDRED LIGHT YEAR DIARY - Scientists can bounce messages from the future back to the present, but there's no guarantee they'll tell the truth ... LEARNING TO BE ME - Crystalline minds may take the place of human brains, but where does the self really lie? CLOSER - Lovers exchange bodies and minds, but their experiments go just that little bit too far, proving that you can have too much of a good thing

Amelia Lin

Excellent

This is some of the best science fiction I've ever read; thoroughly impressed with Greg Egan's inventiveness, prose, and thoughtfulness.

Dweedle 

It took me a few stories to appreciate Greg's voice. Once I did, I was hooked. There are a ton of great short stories in here. The best stories all deal with the merging of man and machine, the blurring of the lines.

Ivan Vega

A lot of very interesting stories, some which I could really see (and wish they were) in a full book. Unfortunately most endings just fell flat for me.

Axiomatic

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