Well written

I suspect that this book really deserved a better rating, because I didn't see the sort of plot errors that riddle so much fiction today. Each presents an Axiom of viewpoint and shows the actions resulting. The problem I had was I just couldn't connect with the Axioms present in each story. I couldn't see arriving at those same points, so the results wouldn't click for me either. ( )

Greg Egan is just brilliant. The stories are reasonable, engaging, deep, revelational and emotional at the same time. Most other works stop at the first or second level. To quote Wittgenstein on this: what can be said is already said well by these stories. ( )

Great stuff. My favorite author as a kid was Isaac Asimov, and his Foundation and Robot novels gave me a permanent appetite for books that try to take ridiculous ideas about the future as seriously as possible, factory-farmed MFA-approved "literary" qualities be damned. The average story in this collection of 18 is twenty pages long, but each one has an absurd number of nutcase ideas per page, and it's wonderful. There's no way I can summarize all of the stories so I only want to talk about two, both of which I found genuinely disturbing; more Philip K Dick than Asimov. The first, The Safe-Deposit Box, involves a man who has been suffering through continuous metempsychosis ever since childhood, his consciousness jumping from body to body so that he wakes up every day in a new body. The soap opera possibilities of getting to nail different women every day are brought up, but Egan's description of what it would be like to grow up as a child, having no frame of reference whatsoever beyond the hard-won knowledge that somewhere behind the evanescent faces you see in the mirror is you, was seriously haunting. You could probably fill a novel with all the different facets of that kind of emotional solitude, but he wrapped it up in a few pages. It's one of those instances where the plain, unadorned style of the typical science fiction author is perfectly appropriate, and though the actual sci-fi part of the story is brief and totally overshadowed by the main character's description of the ever-changing but inescapable prison of his life, I think it's one of the most interesting short stories I've read in a while. Maybe all the more so because I think it's genuinely unfilmable; I just don't think there would be any way to really convey the quiet horror of not having an individual life of your own, not even a name, on the screen. Learning to Be Me, the other story, has a take on "helplessness in the face of fate" that's similar in a way, set in a world where implantable jewels in people's skulls learn and gradually mimic consciousness almost perfectly, so that in your mid-twenties you can get all that useless brain-matter excised and enjoy the benefits of having your thoughts manifested in flawless silicon instead of fallible neurons. So far so good, not much different from the familiar idea of uploading your consciousness to a computer except that the computer becomes you. The difference is that even though from the outside it's impossible to tell if a person is still entirely flesh and blood or just a meat puppet with an immortal silicon homunculus pulling the strings, from the inside it's quite different, and when the main character has a sync error between his jewel and his actual brain, all those familiar Cartesian ideas about the soul become more than academic. Imagine what it would be like to know that you've failed a Turing test and the penalty is death, or that you were trapped in the Chinese room. The bottom line is that I have no idea how Egan writes all these minor masterpieces again and again, the dude is plainly and simply a genius. ( )

Excellent collection of smart, thought provoking Sci-Fi stories. ( )

Greg Egan is one of the many authors whose work(s) I haven't explored yet. But as this anthology appeared in several lists the past few years, I decided to give it a go and only after having read a few reviews to be sure I wouldn't buy a pig in a poke. Kevin's review (see here) and advice ultimately convinced me to buy the book. For the French readers (pour les lecteurs/lectrices français[es]): Mathieu's review.

This anthology contains 18 stories (I won't go into detail), which appeared between the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, and deal with humanity's possible future. It's all hard science-fiction (from bioengineering over chemistry to physics), but you don't have to be well-educated to understand the stories Egan has written. However, you do need a certain basic understanding (or you can look up what you don't understand) of certain scientific aspects, I won't deny that.

The stories are presented (some of which were not previously published), in a very readable manner, about what it means to be human and how the future could look different when more and more technological developments dominate society (from certain drugs to neural implants, e.g. the Ndoli Jewel). So, yes, there's also a good slab of, for example, philosophy.

While not every story hit the bull's-eye, the vast majority did. I can definitely recommend this book to anyone, SF-fan or other. The writing is, in my opinion, fairly accessible and smooth, the themes diverse in number, and you get food for thought about humanity and the impact of technology, certainly in this day and age. ( )