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This is not quite as good as Axiomatic, his other short story collection I've read. Some of the stories either didn't feature very interesting ideas or had unmemorable protagonists. Interestingly, several of these stories introduce ideas he would later reuse in his novels (e.g. Luminous' idea of battling universal physical/mathematical systems and The Planck Dive's physics technobabble, reintroduced in Schild's Ladder; Transition Dreams' Gleisner robots and The Planck Dive's polises would show up again in Diaspora), but for the most part it doesn't seem like he outright stole from himself. The stories were written over a span of 5 years, from late 1993 to early 1998. Basically every single one makes fun of religion and religious people; Greg Egan obviously HATED being dragged to church as a child.
- Chaff - An undercover agent visits a genetically engineered jungle in South America in search of drug traffickers; what if the drug can also bring enlightenment?
- Mitochondrial Eve - The battle of the sexes crossed with the search for the Historical Jesus, via quantum paleogenetics.
- Luminous - The Adventures of Johnny Mnemonic, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and the War Between Universes.
- Mister Volition - A savvy thief steals an ocular implant that offers some apparently intense insights into the way that free will works (or doesn't).
- Cocoon - A company researching technology to block harmful chemicals from reaching babies still in the womb suffers terrorist attacks; a gay detective tries to figure out the ramifications.
- Transition Dreams - A guy paying to have his consciousness scanned and uploaded to a new robot body finds out that the dreams that ensue are Serious Business.
- Silver Fire - A horrifically painful virus called Silver Fire flays its victims alive; a professor investigates a possible cult connection.
- Reasons to Be Cheerful - A guy has a life-threatening tumor as a child, which has the side effect of making him happy; when he undergoes treatment, he loses the ability to feel happiness, and has to endure years of joyless rebuilding of his life to experience the world as a normal person. This was the best and most moving story in the collection.
- Our Lady of Chernobyl - A private detective makes fun of religion while tracking down the theft of an Orthodox icon.
- The Planck Dive - Future people try to dive into a black hole to potentially cheat death. Or, in the language of the story: spacetime worldlines, quantum Feynman diagrams time dilation virtual photons, hypercylinders Schwarzchild radius Belinsky-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz geometry counter-rotation. ( )

Egan is one of those authors whose fiction I’m repeatedly told I’d like, but everything by him I’ve read in the past has left me a little bit cold – which is one novel, and a handful of stories in Interzone over the years. Nevertheless, if I see one of his books going cheap in a charity shop, I buy it. And even now, when perhaps my taste in fiction is somewhat more discriminating and I look for different things in the fiction I read than I did twenty or thirty years ago… Egan’s fiction still leaves me mostly cold. There were a couple of good stories in this collection – I especially liked ‘Silver Fire’, about a epidemic in the US; and ‘Our Lady of Chernobyl’ had some narrative impetus to it, even if the central conceit was weak – but many still felt cold to me, peopled by little more than walking, talking ideas. And ‘The Planck Dive’ is just a really dull physics lectures with a bunch of character interactions to provide something for the reader to connect with. Interestingly, although most of the stories in Luminous were written in the mid-1990s, they’re chiefly set in this decade, the second of the twenty-first century. Egan got one or two things right, but he also got a lot wrong – and yet he still manages to catch the flavour of now better than many other sf authors of the time who wrote stories set in the early twenty-first century. I’ll still keep my eye open for Egan books in charity shops, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to call myself a fan. ( )

I wasn't terribly crazy about this collection of short stories, but Egan's writing style is reassuring and a reliable form of escapism.

I didn't pay this the attention it deserves (a danger of vacation reading), and the science flew over my head quite often, but it was enjoyable enough. ( )