The Best of Greg Egan

Paperback, 736 pages

English language

Published March 17, 2021 by Orion Publishing Co.

ISBN:
978-1-4732-3229-7
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4 stars (1 review)

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 …

2 editions

reviewed The Best of Greg Egan by Greg Egan

A collection for Hard SF stories that are thoughful and emotional

4 stars

A collection of stories selected by Greg Egan, it showcases some stories that have made people, like me, who enjoy the genre of 'Hard SF' (speculative science fiction based on the rules of nature) pay attention to what he has to say about the nature of the world around us. Some stories here overlap with another of his collection, "Instantiation", which I have already read, so the individual review for those stories are the same.

"Luminous" was the story that got 'hooked' on Egan: a wonderful tale about regions of the universe that obey different mathematical rules and what it says about the people who will fight against corporations that are eager to take advantage of the situation (by manipulating the mathematical rules that drive the stock market).

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