A common joke (in sci-fi circles) is that appreciating Egan’s fiction requires a PhD in physics. This possibly applies to a couple of the stories in this collection and is almost definitely true for his novel Diaspora, but most of the stories are accessible and simply excellent sci-fi.

The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary is a good example of this: it is set in a near-future society where everyone is able to send short messages back in time, creating a ‘lifetime diary’ which they can read in advance of the events. But Egan doesn’t just use this as a premise, he derives it from fully believable physics. The physics notwithstanding, the implications are extremely interesting – how does romance change? Is the future avoidable? It’s a great take on time loops: you can’t avoid the future any more than you can avoid the past. Into Darkness is one of the stories which I think I would have been able to appreciate much more with a degree in physics... wormhole dynamics are quite complex.

Egan frequently explores mind-body dualism: a recurring idea is the ‘Ndoli Device’, a small jewel implanted in people’s brains that exactly mimics the actions of the brain. When people get to a certain age, most of them undergo a common surgical procedure to destroy their biological brain (which will only degrade over time) and replace it with the immortal jewel. What’s the difference between this jewel and you? Learning to be Me is a fascinating exploration of the self.

There are also a couple of biology-based stories: The Moral Virologist and The Caress, the former of which is a darkly amusing and blithely scathing take on religious fundamentalism.

Axiomatic is not perfect, there are several cases where the characters seem to suddenly realise the predicament they are in (often stretching narrative convenience). But this doesn’t really matter to me. Egan is the closest I have found to Vonnegut’s fictional author Kilgore Trout.

The best stories :

• The Hundred-Light-Year Diary [see above]
• The Caress - a bit grotesque, biology-based. What are the limits of art?
• Safe-Deposit Box - in a constant state of change, what is the meaning of the self?
• Learning to be Me [see above]
• Into Darkness - wormholes spawn randomly across the Earth’s surface and destroy everything inside them once they collapse
• The Moral Virologist [see above]
• Closer - what does it mean to be intimately close to someone? What is gained and lost by fully understanding your partner?
• Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies - a global ‘meltdown’ causes everyone to share the same beliefs as people in their proximity. There is world peace because as soon as you cross a boundary, you’re instantly converted to a different religion.

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SPOILERS

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Premises

• "The Infinite Assassin" – An illegal recreational drug allows people to travel between parallel universes with disastrous side effects.
• "The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary" – After the invention of a method for sending messages back in time, the history of the future becomes common knowledge, and every person knows their own fate.
• "Eugene" – A married couple consults a genetic engineer to design their next child.
• "The Caress" – Police investigate the origin of a half-human, half-leopard chimera discovered in the basement of a murder victim.
• "Blood Sisters" – Two identical twin sisters are diagnosed with the same rare, fatal illness.
• “Axiomatic” – A man uses neural implants to change his view of life.
• **"**The Safe-Deposit Box" – A man inhabits the body of a different person every time he wakes up and has lived this way his entire life.
• "Seeing" – A shooting victim's brain damage causes a permanent hallucination that he is watching himself from a bird's-eye view.
• “A Kidnapping” – In a world where complex simulations can be built from your memories, what’s the difference between the simulation and the simulated
• “Learning to be Me” – Everyone has a small ‘jewel’ in their skulls, which functions as a backup brain (that doesn’t decay). A man deliberates whether or not he should follow the norm and ‘make the switch’ to the jewel.
• "The Vat" – A genius scientist falls in love.
• "The Cutie" – A man longing to be a father uses recent advances in biotechnology to impregnate himself with a "Cutie", a child with sub-human mental capacities, sub-human legal status, and a lifespan of four years.
• "Into Darkness" – A giant sphere of unknown origin jumps between random locations on the Earth's surface and restricts the movement of objects trapped inside in bizarre ways.
• "Appropriate Love" – A woman carries the brain of her severely injured husband inside her uterus for two years so that a new (brainless) body can be cloned to replace his.
• The Moral Virologist – Inspired by the AIDS epidemic, a fundamentalist Christian devotes his life to the creation of a virus that will kill those he views as sexually immoral.
• "Unstable Orbits in the Space Of Lies" – An unexplained event causes everyone on Earth to rapidly become ideologically sympathetic to people physically nearby, creating a world with clear geographic boundaries between religions and philosophies that cause instant conversion for those who travel between regions.

Commentary

The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary

• The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary describes a society in the near future that is able to send back short messages in time.
• But it doesn’t just use that as a premise, it actually derives it from fully believable circumstances (with a powerful enough telescope, you may be able to look somewhere into the universe where the arrow of time runs the opposite way). The telescope has to emit a photon when it looks at this galaxy: if the galaxy is obstructed, the telescope must stop emitting before the obstruction happened. Genius.
• Very very interesting perspective of time loops: treat messages from the future just like messages from the past. You can’t really avoid the future, any more than you can avoid the past.
• Messages from the future also have the same ‘historicity” problems as messages from the past.

The Caress

• Quite an unsettling story that leaves you wanting to know more about the future.
• I think it’s just right how obvious he makes the stuff (for example how emotionless the detective is on discovering the Chimera).

The Safe-Deposit Box

• Good scifi honestly
• I guess it does exemplify one of the minor annoyances in Egan’s stories: for plot purposes, the protagonists are often able to make ‘genius’ ansatzes that just so happen to be true. In this story, the protagonist hypothesises that he is the experimented child; in the Caress the detective figures out that it’s Lindhquist.

Learning to be me

• I guess the ‘twist’ (that the main character is the jewel) isn’t too hard to see, but it is a rich philosophical story about cartesian dualism

Into Darkness

• Reading this makes me wish I had a physics degree (I’ll get there one day).
• The completely natural descriptions of the characteristics of the wormhole are terrifying yet austerely ‘realistic’.

The Moral Virologist

• Scathing satire of religious conservatism; a brilliant example of hard sci-fi.

Closer

• What does it mean to be intimately close to someone? What is gained and lost by fully understanding your partner?