The Best of Greg Egan

The Best of Greg Egan
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher: Gollancz
Total Pages: 736
Release: 2021-03-18
Genre: Science fiction, Australian
ISBN: 9781473232297

Greg Egan is arguably Australia's greatest living science fiction writer. In a career spanning more than thirty years, he has produced a steady stream of novels and stories that address a wide range of scientific and philosophical concerns: artificial intelligence, higher mathematics, science vs religion, the nature of consciousness, and the impact of technology on the human personality. All these ideas and more find their way into this generous and illuminating collection, the clear product of a man who is both a master storyteller and a rigorous, exploratory thinker. The Best of Greg Egan contains twenty stories and novellas arranged in chronological order, and each of them is a brilliantly conceived, painstakingly developed gem, including the Hugo Award-winning novella "Oceanic", a powerful account of a boy whose deeply held religious beliefs are undermined by what he comes to learn about the laws of the physical world. This book really does represent the best of Greg Egan, and it therefore takes its place among the best of contemporary SF. Startling, intelligent and always hugely entertaining, it provides an ideal introduction to one of the most accomplished and original writers working today. This is an important and provocative collection, and it deserves a place on the serious science fiction reader's permanent shelf.

The Best of Greg Egan

The Best of Greg Egan
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher: Gateway
Total Pages: 736
Release: 2021-03-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1473232309

Greg Egan is arguably Australia's greatest living science fiction writer. In a career spanning more than thirty years, he has produced a steady stream of novels and stories that address a wide range of scientific and philosophical concerns: artificial intelligence, higher mathematics, science vs religion, the nature of consciousness, and the impact of technology on the human personality. All these ideas and more find their way into this generous and illuminating collection, the clear product of a man who is both a master storyteller and a rigorous, exploratory thinker. The Best of Greg Egan contains twenty stories and novellas arranged in chronological order, and each of them is a brilliantly conceived, painstakingly developed gem, including the Hugo Award-winning novella "Oceanic", a powerful account of a boy whose deeply held religious beliefs are undermined by what he comes to learn about the laws of the physical world. This book really does represent the best of Greg Egan, and it therefore takes its place among the best of contemporary SF. Startling, intelligent and always hugely entertaining, it provides an ideal introduction to one of the most accomplished and original writers working today. This is an important and provocative collection, and it deserves a place on the serious science fiction reader's permanent shelf.

Diaspora

Diaspora
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher: Greg Egan
Total Pages: 241
Release: 1997-09-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1922240044

In 2975, the orphan Yatima is grown from a randomly mutated digital mind seed in the conceptory of Konishi polis. Yatima explores the Coalition of Polises, the network of computers where most life in the solar system now resides, and joins a friend, Inoshiro, to borrow an abandoned robot body and meet a thriving community of “fleshers” in the enclave of Atlanta. Twenty-one years later, news arrives from a lunar observatory: gravitational waves from Lac G-1, a nearby pair of neutron stars, show that the Earth is about to be bathed in a gamma-ray flash created by the stars’ collision — an event that was not expected to take place for seven million years. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Atlanta to try to warn the fleshers, but meet suspicion and disbelief. Some lives are saved, but the Earth is ravaged. In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors resolve to discover the cause of the neutron stars’ premature collision, and they launch a thousand polises into interstellar space in search of answers. This diaspora eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an older group of travellers: a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe.

Instantiation

Instantiation
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher: Greg Egan
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2020-01-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1922240311

Instantiation is a collection of 11 stories by the Hugo award winning author Greg Egan: “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine” “Zero For Conduct” “Uncanny Valley” “Seventh Sight” “The Nearest” “Shadow Flock” “Bit Players” “Break My Fall” “3-adica” “The Slipway” “Instantiation”

Permutation City

Permutation City
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher: Greg Egan
Total Pages: 275
Release: 1994-04-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 192224001X

Paul Durham keeps making Copies of himself: software simulations of his own brain and body which can be run in virtual reality, albeit seventeen times more slowly than real time. He wants them to be his guinea pigs for a set of experiments about the nature of artificial intelligence, time, and causality, but they keep changing their mind and baling out on him, shutting themselves down. Maria Deluca is an Autoverse addict; she’s unemployed and running out of money, but she can’t stop wasting her time playing around with the cellular automaton known as the Autoverse, a virtual world that follows a simple set of mathematical rules as its “laws of physics”. Paul makes Maria a very strange offer: he asks her to design a seed for an entire virtual biosphere able to exist inside the Autoverse, modelled right down to the molecular level. The job will pay well, and will allow her to indulge her obsession. There has to be a catch, though, because such a seed would be useless without a simulation of the Autoverse large enough to allow the resulting biosphere to grow and flourish — a feat far beyond the capacity of all the computers in the world.

The Clockwork Rocket

The Clockwork Rocket
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2011-07-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1597803510

In Yalda's universe, light has no universal speed and its creation generates energy. On Yalda's world, plants make food by emitting their own light into the dark night sky. As a child, Yalda witnesses one of a series of strange meteors, the Hurtlers, that are entering the planetary system at an immense, unprecedented speed. It becomes apparent that her world is in imminent danger — and the task of dealing with the Hurtlers will require knowledge and technology far beyond anything her civilization has yet achieved! Only one solution seems tenable: if a spacecraft can be sent on a journey at sufficiently high speed, its trip will last many generations for those on board, but it will return after just a few years have passed at home. The travelers will have a chance to discover the science their planet urgently needs, and bring it back in time to avert disaster.

Luminous

Luminous
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher: Greg Egan
Total Pages: 243
Release: 1998-08-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1922240141

Luminous is a collection of ten stories: “Chaff” “Mitochondrial Eve” “Luminous” “Mister Volition” “Cocoon” “Transition Dreams” “Silver Fire” “Reasons to Be Cheerful” “Our Lady of Chernobyl” “The Planck Dive”

Dark Integers and Other Stories

Dark Integers and Other Stories
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2008
Genre: Science fiction
ISBN:

Features five science fiction stories dealing with the abuse of mathematical or physical concepts and the dire consequences on humanity's future.

Axiomatic

Axiomatic
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2010-12-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0575105402

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

Quarantine

Quarantine
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2010-12-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0575105410

It's late in the 21st century and bioengineering is now so common that people are able to modify their minds in any way they wish. It is an era which has been shaped by information systems so vast that security, in any form, is easily breached. Now you can be whatever you want to be, and do whatever you want to do. On Earth anyway. One night, thirty three years ago, the stars went out. 'The Bubble' - a perfect sphere centred on the sun - appeared in the sky, isolating the solar system from the rest of the universe. For thirty-three years, humanity has lived with the religious cults and terrorism which spawned in the wake of the darkness. We are now alone. Humanity has been cut off. Quarantined.