good solid scifi ( )

Greg Egan, Best Of -- 20 stories, of which I’ve read 6.

[Learning to Be Me]

The theme of this story is not new…only the approach: will I still be me, if an artificial copy of my personality replaces me, in my body, and continues to survive beyond the normal lifespan of my body, in newly grown replacements of my body? The requirement, of course, is that the original repository of “me”, my brain, must be eliminated so that the mechanical repository of my personality can take over. As far as everyone else in the world is concerned, “I” will still be me: talk, think, love, hate, etc. just as I’ve always done.

But is it really me?

Up till Egan, all such stories used some aspect of teleportation to initiate the transfer, or duplication?, of the original personality into another, duplicate body; and without much consideration of the existential implications, nor complications. The deepest soul delving usually restricts itself to the question of “what do we do with the duplicates?” (Read Frederick Pohl’s “Eschaton Sequence”, where the many duplicates of the heroes marry each other.) In other stories, the stored personality—an insurance policy—is activated and restored into a cloned body upon the original’s death so that there’s no confusion . (Read Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga.)

But here, Egan is deeply questioning the implications of such a process, such that this first story, repelled me…I’m convinced that my personality is not me and, hence, copying my personality and eliminating the original source is just plain murder.

[Axiomatic]

The theme of the second story is how to temporarily induce artificial attitudes in oneself, despite one’s normal repulsion.

[Appropriate Love]

This story explores the implications of saving someone’s life by storing the brain while a new body was grown for it.

[Into Darkness]

This story is so bizarre that it would take almost as long as the actual story to explain it. The point is that people are sporadically, inexplicably and randomly killed?/disappeared?/tortured? while the hero risks his own live to try to save a few of them. The incongruity and callousness of the concept still repels me.

[Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies]

This story makes sense to me, for some reason. Inexplicably, around the world, groups of people sharing particular belief systems have started generating an emotional attraction such that anyone approaching close enough becomes ensnared by the attraction and end up joining the group for life. The Catch-22 of the story is that the people who manage to avoid being captured by any of the larger groups of ‘belief systems’—by travelling at the outskirts of the “attractors”, where the attractions ‘balance’ out—may actually be part of their own special belief system, which keeps them moving in the same predictable pattern in-and-around the stable systems.

“You can’t get there from here” and “You can’t win for losing.”

[Closer]

This story continues from the first story, where the artificial personality modules living inside the replaceable bodies—potentially forever—try to entertain themselves as they explore the potential of their new lives. “Am I real?” “Are other people real?” “What’s it like to be my wife/husband?” “What’s it like to be me?”. All of this speculation leads to a merry-go-round of bodies and personality explorations…to the point where I decided I’d had enough and I stopped reading the book.

In general, Greg Egan is an accomplished writer and I can find no fault with his style. He communicates his emotional and intellectual concepts quite emphatically and convincingly. Maybe that’s the problem for me…I found myself being engulfed in his tales…and I felt overwhelmingly uncomfortable in them. I think Egan is searching for meaning in life and is exploring various possibilities in the hope of making sense of at least some of it: are we our personalities? Must we suffer? What can we believe? What should we believe?

I’ve found my answers and I’m no longer interested in the questions. So I closed the book here. Not wanting to discourage anyone I've declined to rate this book.

This is an outstanding collection, and although it's significantly heftier than Stories of Your Life or Exhalation, I want to press it on everyone who likes Chiang. Some of Egan's best short work from the past 30 years, it shows him exploring a connected set of topics, including AI rights, what constitutes self when technology allows us to edit that, and the project of science itself. I'm particularly a fan of "Oracle", which pits the worldviews of a thinly-disguised Alan Turin & C.S. Lewis against each other, and I was also taken with a series of linked stories about digital consciousnesses in a cheap game-world figuring out how to preserve themselves and survive. ( )

Science or non-science-fiction, I detest authors who make it blatant that they don't understand the basic rules of nature. Have heard from so many students from my time and from today about maths and sciences: but what use is this information in real life? Well, if you want to become an author and don't want to look stupid, just learn your high-school maths and sciences! Having said that, I have learned so much from good science fiction writers! “Hmm, that wouldn't be a dig at any author in particular would it?” you might wonder. I have one in mind in fact who made a mistake when setting up his Space Opera. I think they used a spreadsheet to track details, but got a formula wrong - and it could just have been a data entry error. As a result, mass and volume weren't going up by the same proportion resulting in very low density ships. Fortunately it was spotted fairly early on, and most of the time the author had only given one of the values which greatly reduced the need for corrections. Hasn't stopped this from being a bestselling series that spans over a quarter century…Some other SF writers I have in mind couldn't go as far as formulas and spreadsheets! People who don't understand how ice skates work, how a cold blooded animal lives and behaves, for example, or what a controlled experiment means. I really don't want to say who, because it will start another discussion. And some of those writers write for young children! Imagine children stuck with images that have no real counterpart in real life! As a result, I get very annoyed at excuses like, 'I don't need to learn science, I will become (insert any job name).' I have seen the results and there is no excuse not to learn maths and sciences, at least at high school level.

A rather more famous science fiction writer came up with an extraordinarily popular novel set on a desert planet painted in exhaustive detail with lots of information on the biology, geology and geography of the planet. He was three books into the series before someone asked him, without any vegetation, the planet generated a breathable atmosphere for its inhabitants. His response was that subterranean worms living on the planet farted out oxygen and refused to discuss it ever again (I think you won’t need me to say the series’ name, right?). Another SF author wrote a story about a gigantic inhabitable ring circling a star. He made a mistake in his equations and didn't realise the ring would not be able to maintain a coherent orbit and would disintegrate pretty quickly, leading to engineers gleefully pointing this out to him in letters and at conventions (where they came up with a song about it). Sequels revealed the existence of rocket engines which kept the structure stable (these engines would need to be the size of Jupiter to provide enough thrust, but still).

Fortunately, this a Greg Egan collection. So, no danger of that happening here. My favourite stories:

Learning to Be Me

Axiomatic

Appropriate Love

Into Darkness

Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies

Closer

Chaff

Luminous

Silver Fire

Reasons to be Cheerful

Oceanic

Oracle

Singleton

Dark Integers

Crystal Nights

Zero For Conduct

Bit Players

Uncanny Valley

3-adica

Instantiation

Wait. It seems I selected all of the stories in the collection... ( )

The Best of Greg Egan by Greg Egan is a very highly recommended collection of twenty stories spanning 1990 to 2019. Egan is a Modern Master of science fiction from Australia and all of these stories are winners.

The twenty stories in this collection are arranged chronologically and were all chosen by Egan as being the best of those covering his career from the last thirty years. As Egan writes in the afterward: "If there is a single thread running through the bulk of the stories here, it is the struggle to come to terms with what it will mean when our growing ability to scrutinize and manipulate the physical world reaches the point where it encompasses the substrate underlying our values, our memories, and our identities. While the prospect of engineering our minds might still seem remote, anyone who has read a few case studies by the late Oliver Sacks will understand that we have already confronted the materiality of the self in the starkest terms."

These are all intelligent, hard science fiction stories with technical and scientific advancements as an integral part of the plot, but they also explore relationships, personal identity, and morality of the characters. The writing is exceptional and intelligent. Some of the stories are interconnected. All of them have well-developed, diverse and interesting characters. This is a door-stopper of a collection but it was well worth the time invested in reading it. For all of you who enjoy and appreciate hard science fiction, The Best of Greg Egan would make a great addiction to your science fiction collection. This is an amazing collection and I enjoyed every story.

Contents include: Learning to Be Me; Axiomatic; Appropriate Love; Into Darkness; Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies; Closer; Chaff; Luminous; Silver Fire; Reasons to Be Cheerful; Oceanic; Oracle; Singleton; Dark Integers; Crystal Nights; Zero for Conduct; Bit Players; Uncanny Valley; 3-adica; Instantiation; and an Afterword.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Subterranean Press
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2019/10/the-best-of-greg-egan.html ( )