Search Worlds Without End

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.

BSFA nominated short fiction. It originally appeared in Interzone, #50 August 1991. The story is included in the collections Axiomatic (1995) and The Best of Greg Egan (2019).

The protagonist enters a store selling mods not only for every variety of psychedelic experiences, but for altering one's personality traits, sexual orientation, and even religion. The protagonist seeks a custom-made mod that will suspend his moral convictions long enough for him to murder his wife's killer.

BSFA nominated short fiction. It originally appeared in Interzone, #41 November 1990. It can also be found in the anthology Nanotech (1998) edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collections Axiomatic (1995) and The Best of Greg Egan (2019).

From junkies who drink at the time-stream to love affairs in time-reversed galaxies; from gene-altered dolphins that converse only in limericks to the program that allows you to design your own child; from the brain implants called axiomatics to the strange attractors that spin off new religions, Greg Egan's future is frighteningly close to our own present.

Table of Contents

• The Infinite Assassin - (1991) - short story
• The Hundred Light-Year Diary - (1992) - short story
• Eugene - (1990) - short story
• The Caress - (1990) - novelette
• Blood Sisters - (1991) - short story
• Axiomatic - (1990) - short story
• The Safe-Deposit Box - (1990) - novelette
• Seeing - (1995) - short story
• A Kidnapping - (1995) - short story
• Learning to Be Me - (1990) - short story
• The Moat - (1991) - short story
• The Walk - (1992) - short story
• The Cutie - (1989) - short story
• Into Darkness - (1992) - novelette
• Appropriate Love - (1991) - short story
• The Moral Virologist - (1990) - short story
• Closer - (1992) - short story
• Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies - (1992) - short story

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #44 February 1991. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Hackers (1996), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Axiomatic (1995).

Locus Award winnen and Hugo Award nominated novelette. It was first published in Interzone, #148 October 1999. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 5 (2000), edited by David G. Hartwell, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2000), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Beyond Singularity (2005) edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, as well as the collection Oceanic (2009).

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

This novelette originally appeared in Interzone, #78 December 1993. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Genometry (2001), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story can also be found in the collections Our Lady of Chernobyl (1995) and Luminous (1998).

A couple arranges to have the internal states of their brain jewels gradually made more similar so they can temporarily become a single person.

Ditmar winning short fiction. It originally appeared in Strange Plasma, #5, 1992. It can also be found in the anthologies Cybersex (1996) edited by Richard Glyn Jones and The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (2010). The story is included in the collections Axiomatic (1995) and The Best of Greg Egan (2019).

Tiptree and Hugo Award nominated story. Originally published in Asimov's May 1994. Later anthologized in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection (1995) and collected in Luminous (1998).

BSFA nominated short fiction. This novelette originally appeared in Interzone, #215 April 2008. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology (2012), edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly. The story is included in the collections Oceanic (2009) and Crystal Nights and Other Stories (2009).

Read the full story for free at Interzone.

The nine stories in Greg Egan's new collection range from parables of contemporary human conflict and ambition to far-future tales of our immortal descendants.

In "Lost Continent", a time traveler seeking refuge from a war-torn land faces hostility and bureaucratic incompetence. "Crystal Nights" portrays a driven man s moral compromises as he chases an elusive technological breakthrough, while in "Steve Fever" the technology itself falls victim to its own hype.

"TAP" brings us a new kind of poetry, where a word is more powerful than a thousand images. "Singleton" shows us a new kind of child, born of human DNA modeled in a quantum computer who, in "Oracle", journeys to a parallel world to repay a debt to an intellectual ancestor.

"Induction" chronicles the methods and motives behind humanity s first steps to the stars. "Border Guards" reflects on the painful history of a tranquil utopia. And in the final story, "Hot Rock", two immortal citizens of the galaxy-spanning Amalgam find that an obscure, sunless world conceals mind-spinning technological marvels, bitter factional struggles, and a many-layered secret history.

Greg Egan is the author of seven novels and over fifty short stories. He is a winner of the Hugo Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay
• Lost Continent - (2008) - novelette
• Crystal Nights - (2008) - novelette
• Steve Fever - (2007) - shortstory
• TAP - (1995) - novelette
• Induction - (2007) - shortstory
• Singleton - (2002) - novella
• Oracle - (2000) - novella
• Border Guards - (1999) - novelette
• Hot Rock - (2009) - novella

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2007. The story can also be found in the anthology Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. It is included in the collections Dark Integers and Other Stories (2008) and Oceanic (2009).

Greg Egan's first new collection in a decade contains five stories, set in three worlds.

In "Luminous," two mathematicians searching for a flaw in the structure of arithmetic find themselves pitted against a ruthless arms manufacturer. In "Dark Integers," their discovery has become even more dangerous, as they struggle to prevent a war between two worlds capable of mutual annihilation.

"Riding the Crocodile" chronicles a couple's epic endeavor a million years from now to bridge the divide between the meta-civilization known as the Amalgam and the reclusive Aloof. "Glory," set in the same future, tells of two archaeologists striving to decipher the artifacts of an ancient civilization.

In the Hugo-winning "Oceanic," a boy is inducted into a religion that becomes the center of his life, but as an adult he must face evidence that casts a new light on his faith.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Greg Egan
• Luminous - (1995)
• Riding the Crocodile - (2005)
• Dark Integers - (2007)
• Glory - (2007)
• Oceanic - (1998)

The boldest and most wildly speculative writer of our time, Greg Egan has envisioned a quantum Brave New World -- a masterful saga of a time when not only human life, but fleshly reality itself, will be nothing but a memory...

It is the thirtieth century.The "world" has evolved into a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knitting the solar system into one scape from the outer planets to the sun. Humanity, too, has reconfigured itself. Most people have chosen immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others have opted for disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world. A few holdouts stubbornly remain fleshers struggling to shape an antiquated existence in the muck and jungle of Earth.

And then there is the Orphan, a genderless digital being grown from a mind seed.

When an unforeseen disaster ravages the fleshers, it awakens the polises to the possibility of their own extinction from bizarre astrophysical processes that seemingly violate fundamental laws of nature. It is up to the Orphan and a group of refugees to find the knowledge that will save them all--a search that will lead them on a quantum adventure to a higher dimension beyond the macrocosmos....

Seth is a surveyor, along with his friend Theo, a leech-like creature running through his skull who tells Seth what lies to his left and right. Theo, in turn, relies on Seth for mobility, and for ordinary vision looking forwards and backwards. Like everyone else in their world, they are symbionts, depending on each other to survive.

In the universe containing Seth's world, light cannot travel in all directions: there is a "dark cone" to the north and south. Seth can only face to the east (or the west, if he tips his head backwards). If he starts to turn to the north or south, his body stretches out across the landscape, and to rotate as far as north-north-east is every bit as impossible as accelerating to the speed of light.

Every living thing in Seth's world is in a state of perpetual migration as they follow the sun's shifting orbit and the narrow habitable zone it creates. Cities are being constantly disassembled at one edge and rebuilt at the other, with surveyors mapping safe routes ahead.

But when Seth and Theo join an expedition to the edge of the habitable zone, they discover a terrifying threat: a fissure in the surface of the world, so deep and wide that no one can perceive its limits. As the habitable zone continues to move, the migration will soon be blocked by this unbridgeable void, and the expedition has only one option to save its city from annihilation: descend into the unknown.

In a world not quite our own, every living thing is born into one of six discrete "fractions" that are incompatible with - and often invisible to - each other. These fractions have coexisted peacefully for centuries, but now a disease has appeared that seems to drag the infected parts of the body into a different fraction. The effects are devastating. Individual victims suffer painful, protracted deaths. Entire communities turn against one another, and a state approaching perpetual war takes hold.

This is an absorbing account of people determined to confront, comprehend and ultimately overcome a disease that has no recognizable cause, that threatens to obliterate the bonds that hold the human community together.

Investigative reporter Andrew Worth turns down a documentary on a mysterious new mental illness -- "Distress," or acute clinical anxiety syndrome, for another assignment. He's on his way to the artifical island of Stateless, where the world's top physicists are gathering to decide on a new TOE, or Theory of Everything, to replace Einstein's outmoded legacy.

Chief among the scientists is the brilliant African Nobel laureate, Violet Mosala, the focus of Worth's story, who is the subject of mysterious death threats. Worth begins his own investigation, but it takes on even more urgency when he finds that Distress, the mental plague now affecting millions, is linked somehow to the approaching "Aleph Moment" when the TOE is finalized.

The countdown has begun for a disaster that will reach all the way back to the Big Bang. And beyond...

This novelette originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, July 1992. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection (1993), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Hugo Awared nominated novelette. It was originally published in The New Space Opera (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Two (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois, Space Opera (2014), edited by Rich Horton and The Final Frontier (2018), edited by Neil Clarke, as well as the collections Dark Integers and Other Stories (2009) and Oceanic (2009).

Read the full story for free at the Eos website (pdf).

The long-awaited new novel from Greg Egan! Hugo Award-winning author Egan returns to the field with Incandescence, a new novel of hard SF. The Amalgam spans nearly the entire galaxy, and is composed of innumerable beings from a wild variety of races, some human or near it, some entirely other. The one place that they cannot go is the bulge, the bright, hot center of the galaxy. There dwell the Aloof, who for millions of years have deflected any and all attempts to communicate with or visit them. So when Rakesh is offered an opportunity to travel within their sphere, in search of a lost race, he cannot turn it down. Roi is a member of that lost race, which is not only lost to the Amalgam, but lost to itself. In their world, there is but toil, and history and science are luxuries that they can ill afford. Rakesh's journey will take him across millennia and light years. Roi's will take her across vistas of learning and discovery just as vast.

This short story originally appeared in Foundation, #100 Summer 2007. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collections Oceanic (2009) and Crystal Nights and Other Stories (2009).

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.

Locus nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, January 1992. The story is included in the collections Axiomatic (1995) and The Best of Greg Egan (2019).

The story explores the consequences of a man's brain jewel failing to synchronize with his brain.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #37 July 1990. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection (1991), edited by Gardner Dozois, Immortals (1998), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, and Beyond Flesh (2002), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Axiomatic (1995).

This novella was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, March/April 2021.

Read the full story for free at Asimov's.

LUMINOUS collects together one original story plus nine previously unpublished in book form. Greg Egan is a master of the genre and his short fiction is at the cutting edge of the genre. His stories range from near future predictions to far future, far space improvisations. His grasp of the latest scientific breakthroughs is unparalleled in science fiction. The stories include 'Transition Dreams', 'Cocoon', 'Our Lady of Chernobyl', the title story 'Luminous' and the as yet unpublished 'The Planck Drive'. Egan's particular interests range from the farther shores of chaos theory and black hole science to bio-technology and cloning.

Table of Contents:

• Chaff - (1993)
• Mitochondrial Eve - (1995)
• Luminous - (1995)
• Mister Volition - (1995)
• Cocoon - (1994)
• Transition Dreams - (1993)
• Silver Fire - (1995)
• Reasons to Be Cheerful - (1997)
• Our Lady of Chernobyl - (1994)
• The Planck Dive - (1998)

Aurealis winning and Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1995. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection (1996), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections Luminous (1998) and Dark Integers and Other Stories (2008).

Hugo and Locus Award winning novella. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 1998. I can be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999) and The Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels (2007), both edited by Gardner Dozois and the collections Dark Integers and Other Stories (2009) and Oceanic (2009).

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

Collected together here for the first time are twelve stories by the incomparable Greg Egan, one of the most exciting writers of science fiction working today. This superb collection also includes the title story, the Hugo Award-winning 'Oceanic': a boy is inducted into a religion that becomes the centre of his life, but as an adult he must face evidence that casts a new light on his faith.

Table of Contents:

• Lost Continent - (2008) - novelette
• Dark Integers - (2007) - novelette
• Crystal Nights - (2008) - novelette
• Steve Fever - (2007) - shortstory
• Induction - (2007) - shortstory
• Singleton - (2002) - novella
• Oracle - (2000) - novella
• Border Guards - (1999) - novelette
• Riding the Crocodile - (2005) - novella
• Glory - (2007) - novelette
• Hot Rock - (2009) - novella
• Oceanic - (1998) - novella

Hugo Award nominated novella. It was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2000. It can be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 6 (2001) edited by David G. Hartwell, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition (2005), also edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections Oceanic (2009) and Crystal Nights and Other Stories (2009).

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

Table of Contents:

• Chaff - (1993) - novelette
• Beyond the Whistle Test - (1989) - short story
• Transition Dreams - (1993) - short story
• Our Lady of Chernobyl - (1994) - novelette
• Bibliography - essay by uncredited

Taraxippus is coming: a black hole one tenth the mass of the sun is about to enter the solar system.

Matt and his friends are taking no chances. They board a mobile aquaculture rig, the Mandjet, self-sustaining in food, power and fresh water, and decide to sit out the encounter off-shore. As Taraxippus draws nearer, new observations throw the original predictions for its trajectory into doubt, and by the time it leaves the solar system, the conditions of life across the globe will be changed forever.

This is a novella of approximately 41,800 words.

The story of a man with a vision - immortality : for those who can afford it is found in cyberspace. Permutation city is the tale of a man with a vision - how to create immortality - and how that vision becomes something way beyond his control. Encompassing the lives and struggles of an artificial life junkie desperate to save her dying mother, a billionaire banker scarred by a terrible crime, the lovers for whom, in their timeless virtual world, love is not enough - and much more - Permutation city is filled with the sense of wonder.

Welcome to Tvibura and Tviburi, the richly imagined twin planets that stand at the center of Greg Egan's extraordinary new novella, Phoresis.

These two planets--one inhabited, one not--exist in extreme proximity to one another. As the narrative begins, Tvibura, the inhabited planet, faces a grave and imminent threat: the food supply is dwindling, and the conditions necessary for sustaining life are growing more and more erratic. Faced with the prospect of eventual catastrophe, the remarkable women of Tvibura launch a pair of ambitious, long-term initiatives. The first involves an attempt to reanimate the planet's increasingly dormant ecosphere. The second concerns the building of a literal "bridge between worlds" that will connect Tvibura to its (hopefully) habitable sibling.

These initiatives form the core of the narrative, which is divided into three sections and takes place over many generations. The resulting triptych is at once an epic in miniature, a work of hard SF filled with humanist touches, and a compressed, meticulously detailed example of original world building. Most centrally, it is a portrait of people struggling--and sometimes risking everything--to preserve a future they will not live to see. Erudite and entertaining, Phoresis shows us Egan at his formidable best, offering the sort of intense, visionary pleasures only science fiction can provide.

It causes riots and religions. It has people dancing in the streets and leaping off skyscrapers. And it's all because of the impenetrable gray shield that slid into place around the solar system on the night of November 15, 2034.

Some see the bubble as the revenge of an insane God. Some see it as justice. Some even see it as protection. But one thing is for certain -- now there is the universe, and the earth. And never the twain shall meet.

Or so it seems. Until a bio-enhanced PI named Nick Stavrianos takes on a job for an anonymous client: find a girl named Laura who disappeared from a mental institution by the most direct possible method -- walking through the walls.

A 12-year-old boy develops a deadly brain tumor that inadvertently floods his system with Leu-enkephalin, the neuropeptide that triggers happiness. Unwaveringly optimistic at his chance of survival, the risky surgery that saves his life also ends the euphoric bliss, leaving his brain with a cavernous hole where the pleasure centers used to be. The 18 years of sadness that follow are a downward spiral of despair, and as a last resort he agrees to another treatment that gives him conscious control over what makes him happy. As he attempts to re-enter the world beyond the hospitals and his gloomy apartment, he faces the ultimate dilemma of self-control ... how happy would you be if you could make yourself as happy as you want?

Locus nominated novelette, Aurealis nominated short story. This novelette originally appeared in Interzone, #118 April 1997. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Luminous (1998).

This novella originally appeared in the anthology One Million A.D. (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Galactic Empires (2017), edited by Neil Clarke. The story is included in the collections Dark Integers and Other Stories (2008) and Oceanic (2009).

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

The Age of Death ended countless millennia ago. No longer burdened by limited lifespans, the immortal humans who populate inhabited space now have the luxury to travel vast distances effortlessly and to tinker with the intricate mechanics of spacetime. But one such experiment in quantum physics has had a catastrophic and unanticipated result, creating an enormous, rapidly expanding vacuum -- a region of new physics -- with the frightening potential to devour countless inhabited solar systems.

Tchicaya abandoned his homeworld four thousand years ago to travel the universe, freely choosing, as have others of his bent, to endure the hardships of distance and loneliness for the sake of knowledge and experience. Aboard the Rindler, a starship trawling the border of the allconsuming novo-vacuum, he feels his endless life has new purpose. For the Rindler is the center for the scientific study the phenomenon -- a common ground for Preservationists and Yielders alike, those working to halt and destroy the encroaching worlds-eater ... and those determinedto investigate its marvels while allowing its growth to continue unchecked. Tchicaya has allied himself firmly with the latter camp.

The passing decades -- and inevitable expansion of the void -- widen the great rift between the two factions, intensifying what was once simply ideological differences into something more angry, explosive, and dangerous. And the arrival of Tchicaya's fiery first love, Mariama, and her immediate embracing of the Preservationist cause, intensifies an inner turmoil he has been struggling with since his distant childhood.

But everything onboard the Rindler -- and, ultimately, in the inhabited universe itself-is on the cusp of further cataclysmic change, as the Yielders' explorations threaten to transform discord into violent action and potential xenocide. For new evidence suggests that something unthinkable is developing at an astounding rate deep within the mysterious, 600-light-years-wide void -- something neither Tchicaya and his compatriots nor Mariama and hers could ever have imagined possible: life.

This novelette originally appeared in Coming Soon Enough: Six Tales of Technology's Future (2014), edited by Stephen Cass. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection (2015), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine (2015), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

BSFA and Sturgeon Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Interzone, #176 February 2002. The story can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 8 (2003), edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collections Oceanic (2009) and Crystal Nights and Other Stories (2009).

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

This novella was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September/October 2021.

This short story orginally appeared Technology Review, Nov/Dec 2007. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Oceanic (2009) and Crystal Nights and Other Stories (2009).

Read the full story for free at Technology Review.

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, November 1995 and can also be found in the collection Crystal Nights and Other Stories (2009).

Read the full story for free at Infinity Plus.

Prabir Suresh and his younger sister, Madhursee, live in a remote paradise called Teranesia, where their biologist parents are studying an unexplained genetic mutation among the island's butterflies. Then civil war erupts across Indonesia, shattering their idyllic world and their lives.

Twenty years later, Prabir is still plagued by feelings of guilt and an overwhelming responsiblity for his sister, now a biologist herself. Against his advice, Madhurse is returning to Teranesia to solve the mystery of the butterflies and study strange new plant and animal species that have been emerging throughout the region-species seperated from their known cousins by dramatic mutations that seem far too efficient to have arisen by chance.

Afraid for her safety, Prabir joins forces with independant scientist Martha Grant to find her. But what he will discover on Teranesia is far more dangerous and wondrous than he can ever fear--or imagine..

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. The book opens with "Learning to be Me," about a society in which the organic human brain can be replaced by a miraculous piece of technology called "the jewel," a "mock brain" that confers, among other things, a kind of immortality on its recipients.

"Bit Players"--the opening movement in a trio of tales that continues with "3-adica" and "Instantiation"--posits a world in which cheaply generated software beings are exploited for the basest commercial purposes. (Other sets of interconnected stories--all of them reprinted here--include the mathematically-themed "Luminous" and "Dark Integers," and a pair of stories centered on the complex marriage of a physicist and a mathematician: "Singleton" and "Oracle.")

"Reasons to be Cheerful," concerns a young boy whose brain tumor has an unexpected effect on his life, moods, and view of the world. "Axiomatic" tells the story of a society in which "implants" can be used to alter the human personality, with potentially lethal results. And the Hugo Award-winning novella "Oceanic" is 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.

Table of Contents:

• Learning to Be Me - short story
• Axiomatic - short story
• Appropriate Love - short story
• Into Darkness - novelette
• Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies - short story
• Closer - short story
• Chaff - novelette
• Luminous - novelette
• Silver Fire - novelette
• Reasons to Be Cheerful - novelette
• Oceanic - novella
• Oracle - novella
• Singleton - novella
• Dark Integers - novelette
• Crystal Nights - novelette
• Zero for Conduct - novelette
• Bit Players - [3-adica Universe] - novelette
• Uncanny Valley - novelette
• 3-adica - [3-adica Universe] - novella
• Instantiation - [3-adica Universe] - novella

This short story originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, January 1990. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection (1991), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Alien Shores: An Anthology of Australian Science Fiction (1994), edited by Peter McNamara and Margaret Winch. The story is included in the collection Axiomatic (1995).

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It origianlly appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, November-December 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Sturgeon- and Locus-Award nominated novella

Camille is desperate to escape her home on colonized asteroid Vesta, journeying through space in a small cocoon pod covertly and precariously attached to a cargo ship. Anna is a newly appointed port director on asteroid Ceres, intrigued by the causes that have led so-called riders like Camille to show up at her post in search of asylum.

Conditions on Vesta are quickly deteriorating -- for one group of people in particular. The original founders agreed to split profits equally, but the Sivadier syndicate contributed intellectual property rather than more valued tangible goods. Now the rest of the populace wants payback. As Camille travels closer to Ceres, it seems ever more likely that Vesta will demand the other asteroid stop harboring its fugitives.

With "The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred," acclaimed author Greg Egan offers up a stellar, novella-length example of hard science fiction, as human and involving as it is insightful and philosophical.

This short story originally appeared in Aurealis, #3 (1991). It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Axiomatic (1995).

When a detective, a new mother, is assigned to the case of a horrific triple murder, it appears to be a self-contained domestic tragedy, a terrible event but something that doesn't affect the rest of the community. But it slowly becomes clear that something much darker may be at play, something that spreads out from the scene of the crime to corrode the closest relationships of everyone it touches.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Locus Award winning and Hugo and Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 1998. It can also be found in the collection Luminous (1998).

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

Immortality, but at what price, in what form, and how could you be you? In the near future it's possible to build a new you, a better you, one that could carry on forever. But if you could carry on, if you could make choices about who you would be forever, how much of your past would you bring with you? Would you be tempted to maybe...edit? Adam isn't all that he used to be, but he wants to be.

BSFA nominated short fiction. This story can be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3 (2018), edited by Neil Clarke, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Wilde Stories 2018: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction (2018), edited by Steve Berman.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Far in the distant, post-human future, the Cater-Zimmermann community set out to refute the theory that the universe is created exclusively for mankind by cloning themselves a thousand times over and sending each copy to a different star within the galaxy. One of the copies of Cater-Zimmermann, Paolo Venetti, arrives at Orpheus; a water-world inhabited by floating mats that perform as a Turing machine

This short story originally appeared in the anthology New Legends (1995), edited by Greg Bear and Martin H. Greenberg. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection (1996), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (1999), edited by David G. Hartwell and Damien Broderick
• Explorers: SF Adventures to Far Horizons (2000), edited by Gardner Dozois
• The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell
• Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois
• The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction (2006), edited by Mike Ashley

The story was later incorporated in the novel Diaspora (1997).

This short story originally appeared in Meanjin v56 #1, 1997, and was reprinted on infinity plus, april 1999. The story can als be found in the anthologies:

• Not the Only Planet: Science Fiction Travel Stories (1998), edited by Damien Broderick
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998)
• Year's Best SF 3 (1998), edited by David G. Hartwell
• Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), edited James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel.

Read the full story for free at Infinity Plus.

For millions of years, life on Earth has taken its cues from the rising and setting of the sun, and for most of human history we've followed the same rhythm. But if that shared connection was broken, and we each fell under the sway of our own private clock, could we still hold our lives together? One family is about to find out.

Read the full story for free at Tor Reactor.

In 2012, journalist Martin Seymour travels to Iran to cover the parliamentary elections. With most would-be candidates disqualified this turns out to be the expected non-event, but shortly afterward a compromising image of a government official captured on a mobile phone triggers a political avalanche.

Nasim Golestani, a young Iranian scientist living in exile in the United States, is hoping to work on the Human Connectome Project -- which aims to construct a detailed map of the wiring of the human brain -- but when government funding for the project is cancelled and a chance comes to return to her homeland, she chooses to head back to Iran.

Fifteen years later, Martin is living in Iran with his wife and young son, while Nasim is in charge of the virtual world known as Zendegi, used by millions of people for entertainment and business. When Zendegi comes under threat from powerful competitors, Nasim draws on her old skills, and data from the now-completed Human Connectome Project, to embark on a program to create more life-like virtual characters and give the company an unbeatable edge.

As controversy grows over the nature and rights of these software characters, tragedy strikes Martin's family. Martin turns to Nasim, seeking a solution that no one else can offer ... but Zendegi is about to become a battlefield.

This novelette originally appeared in Twelve Tomorrows (2013), edited by Stephen Cass. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (2014), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Asimov's Readers' Award Finalist Novella

In a future where massive online multiplayer videogame characters are sentient composites of real people, one character decides they’ve had enough of being used for worldbuilding scenery, and makes plans to use a flaw in the operating system to escape to a safe place that's only rumored to exist.

This story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September-October 2018. The story is included in the collection The Best of Greg Egan (2019).

Read this story for free at Asimov's.

The AIs who escaped from Sludgenet's control in 3-Adica now face a different threat; Sludgenet is going out of business, and they're utterly dependent on its hardware resources.

This story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March-April 2019. The story is included in the collection The Best of Greg Egan (2019).

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.

Greg Egan's The Clockwork Rocket introduced readers to an exotic universe where the laws of physics are very different from our own, where the speed of light varies in ways Einstein would never allow, and where intelligent life has evolved in unique and fascinating ways. Now Egan continues his epic tale of alien beings embarked on a desperate voyage to save their world....

The generation ship Peerless is in search of advanced technology capable of sparing their home planet from imminent destruction. In theory, the ship is traveling fast enough that it can traverse the cosmos for generations–and still return home only a few years after they departed. But a critical fuel shortage threatens to cut their urgent voyage short, even as a population explosion stretches the ship's life-support capacity to its limits.

When the astronomer Tamara discovers the Object, a meteor whose trajectory will bring it within range of the Peerless, she sees a risky solution to the fuel crisis. Meanwhile, the biologist Carlo searches for a better way to control fertility, despite the traditions and prejudices of their society. As the scientists clash with the ship's leaders, they find themselves caught up in two equally dangerous revolutions: one in the sexual roles of their species, the other in their very understanding of the nature of matter and energy.

In a universe where the laws of physics and the speed of light are completely alien to our own, the travelers on the ship Peerless have completed a generations-long struggle to develop advanced technology in a desperate attempt to save their home world. But as tensions mount over the risks of turning the ship around and starting the long voyage home, a new complication arises: the prospect of constructing a messaging system that will give the Peerless news of its own future.

While some see this as a guarantee of safety and a chance to learn of their mission's ultimate success, others are convinced that the knowledge will be oppressive or worse-that the system could be abused. The conflict over this proposed communication system tears the travelers' society apart, culminating in terrible violence. To save the Peerless and its mission, its leaders must travel to a world where time runs in reverse.