The Best of Greg Egan
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £4.49
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Egan (Perihelion Summer) poses questions about the future of humanity and daydreams and warns about as-yet unrealized scientific developments in this hard science fiction collection. The stories are arranged chronologically and begin in 1990; early works "Learning to Be Me" and "Closer" feature a device which, when embedded in the human brain, learns from and eventually replaces that organ, effectively granting immortality. "Bit Players," "3-adica," and "Instantiation," all from the 2010s, feature self-aware digital characters forging their way to independent existence. Though the technical math and science can prove daunting, accessible action elements in such stories as the particularly satisfying "Luminous" and "Dark Integers," about the weaponization of math itself, provide a nice balance. Egan's talent for creating well-drawn characters shines in "Oracle," which imagines a debate between stand-ins for Alan Turing and C.S. Lewis, and "Zero for Conduct," in which a young Afghan woman invents "the world's first room-temperature superconductor." Although demanding, this doorstopper will prove rewarding for anyone interested in technology's role in shaping the world.
