Axiomatic (1995)

Great stuff. My favorite author as a kid was Isaac Asimov, and his Foundation and Robot novels gave me a permanent appetite for books that try to take ridiculous ideas about the future as seriously as possible, factory-farmed MFA-approved "literary" qualities be damned. The average story in this collection of 18 is twenty pages long, but each one has an absurd number of nutcase ideas per page, and it's wonderful. There's no way I can summarize all of the stories so I only want to talk about two, both of which I found genuinely disturbing; more Philip K Dick than Asimov. The first, The Safe-Deposit Box, involves a man who has been suffering through continuous metempsychosis ever since childhood, his consciousness jumping from body to body so that he wakes up every day in a new body. The soap opera possibilities of getting to nail different women every day are brought up, but Egan's description of what it would be like to grow up as a child, having no frame of reference whatsoever beyond the hard-won knowledge that somewhere behind the evanescent faces you see in the mirror is you, was seriously haunting. You could probably fill a novel with all the different facets of that kind of emotional solitude, but he wrapped it up in a few pages. It's one of those instances where the plain, unadorned style of the typical science fiction author is perfectly appropriate, and though the actual sci-fi part of the story is brief and totally overshadowed by the main character's description of the ever-changing but inescapable prison of his life, I think it's one of the most interesting short stories I've read in a while. Maybe all the more so because I think it's genuinely unfilmable; I just don't think there would be any way to really convey the quiet horror of not having an individual life of your own, not even a name, on the screen. Learning to Be Me, the other story, has a take on "helplessness in the face of fate" that's similar in a way, set in a world where implantable jewels in people's skulls learn and gradually mimic consciousness almost perfectly, so that in your mid-twenties you can get all that useless brain-matter excised and enjoy the benefits of having your thoughts manifested in flawless silicon instead of fallible neurons. So far so good, not much different from the familiar idea of uploading your consciousness to a computer except that the computer becomes you. The difference is that even though from the outside it's impossible to tell if a person is still entirely flesh and blood or just a meat puppet with an immortal silicon homunculus pulling the strings, from the inside it's quite different, and when the main character has a sync error between his jewel and his actual brain, all those familiar Cartesian ideas about the soul become more than academic. Imagine what it would be like to know that you've failed a Turing test and the penalty is death, or that you were trapped in the Chinese room. The bottom line is that I have no idea how Egan writes all these minor masterpieces again and again, the dude is plainly and simply a genius. ( )

Excellent collection of smart, thought provoking Sci-Fi stories. ( )

Greg Egan is one of the many authors whose work(s) I haven't explored yet. But as this anthology appeared in several lists the past few years, I decided to give it a go and only after having read a few reviews to be sure I wouldn't buy a pig in a poke. Kevin's review (see here) and advice ultimately convinced me to buy the book. For the French readers (pour les lecteurs/lectrices français[es]): Mathieu's review.

This anthology contains 18 stories (I won't go into detail), which appeared between the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, and deal with humanity's possible future. It's all hard science-fiction (from bioengineering over chemistry to physics), but you don't have to be well-educated to understand the stories Egan has written. However, you do need a certain basic understanding (or you can look up what you don't understand) of certain scientific aspects, I won't deny that.

The stories are presented (some of which were not previously published), in a very readable manner, about what it means to be human and how the future could look different when more and more technological developments dominate society (from certain drugs to neural implants, e.g. the Ndoli Jewel). So, yes, there's also a good slab of, for example, philosophy.

While not every story hit the bull's-eye, the vast majority did. I can definitely recommend this book to anyone, SF-fan or other. The writing is, in my opinion, fairly accessible and smooth, the themes diverse in number, and you get food for thought about humanity and the impact of technology, certainly in this day and age. ( )

I'd rate this 2.5 stars if I could, but I can't. I read this after /loving/ Egan's book Permutation City, but found this collection of short stories wanting. It feels a lot like the feeder ideas that went into Permutation City, but explored less well here than there. Most of the stories washed over me without leaving a trace; but The Darkness and the time travel one were absolute masterpieces and have both stuck with me (except, evidently, the title.)

The overarching theme of the stories (like Permutation City) is "what does it mean to be me?" Axiomatic explores this question under the lens of twins, parallel universes, time travel, P-zombies, designer embryonics, brain transplants, body transplants, and the merging of two minds. A few of them are interesting, but it gets repetitive, and there are many more misses than hits here.

If you're looking for some dark ass, heavy, depressing short stories with a hard SF twist, this might be the book for you. There are a few gems to be found here, but I'd strongly suggest reading other books in between these stories. ( )

One thing I found about Greg Egan's novels and short stories, is that they are so densely layered and packed with information (that often swamps the plot and characters) that they are very good to re-read. When I do this I tend to forget how well the story and characters work or don't work, and absorb what Egan's main drivers, which are ideas and concepts, and how they might work when extrapolated from current scientific knowledge to the nth degree. I'd suggest this as a great read to anyone with a degree or more in advanced physics. I think the average SF fan will be better off just reading the Wikipedia plot description.

A few notes and rating on some of the stories and the Physics (or lack thereof) behind it:

The Infinite Assassin: Physics -> MWI/Parallel Universes (4 stars)

“The number of parallel worlds is uncountable infinite – infinite like the real numbers, not merely like the integers – making it difficult to quantify these things without elaborate mathematical definitions, but roughly speaking, it seems that I’m unusually invariant: more alike from world to world than most people are. How alike? In how many worlds? Enough to be useful. Enough to do the job.”

The kind of "multiverse" that the physicists are referring to when they discuss the cold spot is the Bubble Multiverse, which necessarily demands that each universe is a separate entity. The kind of "multiverse" quantum physicists mean is the Quantum Multiverse, in which a new and entirely separate reality is created each time something happens that could have happened differently due to probabilistic quantum events. While they may exist simultaneously, the existence of one, even if it were proven, does not attest to the existence of the other. What Egan is writing about here is not MWI but parallel universes.

There's a strange paradox with the multi-verse. If there's infinite universe and infinite possibilities, then there's an infinite amount of universes where someone has figured out a way to destroy the entire multi-verse. And even if they choose not to destroy it, there's an infinite amount of universes where they do destroy the multi-verse, and so we shouldn't exist anymore...

observable universe...
multiple observable universe...
multi-o-universe......
we should be calling it oniverse and multoverse :^3

The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary: Physics -> Time-Reverse Universe (5 stars)

“I climbed out of bed and started dressing, although I had no reason to hurry home [he’s shagging someone other than his wife]. Alison [his wife] knew all about us; apparently, she’d known since childhood that her husband would turn out to be a piece of shit.”

“The ignorance cults say that knowing the future robs us of our soul; by losing the power to choose between right and wrong, we cease to be human.”

The Time-Reversed Universe according to Janus model

The theory describes two sheets or parallel universes in CPT-symmetry interacting through gravity, both originating from the same initial singularity. In Janus model, four species of matter coexist:

1- Positive mass matter (baryonic matter). Baryonic matter refers to all matter composed of elementary particles called baryons. In practice, this corresponds to protons, neutrons, their constituents (bosons, quarks), to which leptons are implicitly added (such as electrons and neutrinos) and which compose atoms and molecules and all directly visible structures in the observable universe (stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, etc.).
2- Positive mass antimatter (C-symmetry with respect to the first specie). This is the antimatter according to Dirac definition which is not very abundant compared to the first type. C-symmetry reverses not only the sign of the electrical charge but also the other quantum charges qi including the baryonic number, but not the spin. ζ-symmetry is the translation into symplectic geometry of this C-symmetry between matter and Dirac's antimatter. ζ-symmetry, in the 5-dimensional evolution space used in the Janus model, causes symmetry C (called q-symmetry in Janus model) in the space of the moment.

Together with positive energy photons, these first two species are the components of the universe known until now: it is the first sheet of the universe (a.k.a. the positive sector).
The 4 species of matter in the positive and negative sectors according to the Janus model.

3- The negative mass material (CPT-symmetry with respect to the first specie, with an anti-linear and anti-unit operator T), which is not very abundant with respect to the fourth specie. CPT-symmetry simultaneously reverses quantum charges, parity (the spatial image seen in a mirror) and time.
4- Negative mass antimatter (PT-symmetry with respect to the first specie, with a linear and unitary operator T). Using symplectic geometry, the Janus model demonstrates that this PT-symmetry is also a ζ-symmetry and a q-symmetry which automatically go together, so the quantum charges are also reversed.

The fourth specie, the so-called “Feynman antimatter”, is the primordial antimatter.

I could go on and on and write about the other stories the same way. There’s almost always a golden nugget buried there waiting to be discovered by the reader... ( )