Author: Greg Egan
A collection of Greg Egan’s short science fiction stories.
The Infinite Assassin
Whatever the physically possible choices are, my alter egos have made - and will continue to make - every single one of them. My stability lies in the distribution, and the relative density, of all these branches - in the shape of a static, pre-ordained structure. Free will is a rationalisation.
So cool. I had to keep googling things like the set of measure zero & cantor set to understand. But I still cannot make sense of the final few paragraphs, the superspace branching out thing.
Basically, there are infinite universes, and some people can move between the universe through gradient descent, but not without consequences. When they move, they drag their surroundings along with them. Some powerful ones then create whirlpools when traversing, and an organization exists to stop the whirlpools from propagating too far. The organization will make many assassins to navigate to the sources (mutants) of the whirlpools and kill them. The area close to a whirlpool is ever-changing, 10 centimeters across and there will be another universe, so when an assassin shoots the source person, the assassin will be dragged to another universe before the bullet hits. However, there are infinite instances of the same (more or less) assassin as well, so as long as enough instances of the assassins occupying different universes shoot the mutant they see, enough instances of the mutant will be killed, and an instance of the assassin will be whirled into universes where the mutant was killed by another instance of the assassin previously occupying the world (I think).
The problem is, the antagonist for some reason has the power to share sense data across all instances of herself in different universes, and she distributes the assassins across different universes to a Cantor set, which has infinite cardinality but a set with measure zero i.e. of zero length and zero density, thereby making the power of the assassin to be effectively zero. Even though the assassins kill an infinite amount of the mutants, it’s still an insignificant amount as the assassins exist in a Cantor set.
8/10. A very slow read, since it’s really hard to understand. Not a story to be read on a plane unless you already have a firm grasp of set theory, measure theory, etc., because you’ll need to be googling or asking ChatGPT otherwise.
Greg Egan is really good. His science fictions are actual science fictions, the kind The Three-Body Problem is, unlike the pseudo-sciences of classic sci-fi writers, the high school physics of Neal Stephenson, or whatever bs Philip K Dick is writing. Even the most recent read, Children of Time, lacks sturdiness in a lot of the imaginations.
I think this story is what I thought Ubik would be when I was reading it, but Ubik turned out to be a hot pile of bullshits.
The Hundred-Light-Year Diary
If ‘choice’ wasn’t grounded absolutely in cause and effect, what would decide its outcome? Meaningless random glitches from quantum noise in the brain?
Seen the same concept in Ted Chiang’s “What’s Expected of Us” in the Exhalation collection, but this one is far more detailed and technical and expanded.
I still don’t understand how the future can be seen from the original experimental machine tho.
Again, I’m not sure what he’s talking about in the final few scenes.
Greg Egan really has a firm grasp of the consciousness of human beings, the so-called free will, what makes us what we are. I’ve been thinking about this a few days ago actually, that the choices we made are decided by a recursion, an iterative process where all factors are external when expanded, and free will is nowhere to be seen.
This type of seeing immutable future story never really explained how exactly are we restricted from doing actions different to what it should be. They just say es lo que hay, you just can’t. But why??
7/10. Greg Egan’s stories really are intellectually provoking.
Eugene
I do not understand. How is the present altered by the future without actual time travel?? If it’s not real time travel then who disbursed all the money they have?
Asked ChatGPT but it doesn’t understand as well.
Gonna rate it as if it’s actual time travel. 6/10.
Full-on eugenics is not a new concept to the 2023 me, and thinking that life is lame so deleting its own existence is not very imaginative. Also, I think the author underestimated the randomness too much. Billions of people ever exist on Earth there will be someone like Eugene, perfect body, perfect brain, perfect environment, purely by chance, but they won’t invent time travel or something adjacent to that before the age of eight.
The Caress
Not sure what he’s trying to say. Also it’s not mindblowing at all, having read tons of 倪匡. And 倪匡’s stories are several decades before Greg Egan’s even.
5/10
Blood Sisters
Okay. But I’m not sure how that is “triple blind”, more like single blind imo or if the doctors don’t know, it’s just a regular double-blind.
Kind of interesting, but not really.
6/10
The emotional depiction is pretty good tho, but I didn’t read Greg Egan for that sort of thing but real hard sci-fi.
Axiomatic
Using an implant wouldn’t rob me of my free will; on the contrary, it was going to help me to assert it.
I thought, Amy would have despised me for this. That shook me, but only for a moment. Amy was dead, which made her hypothetical feelings irrelevant. Nothing I did could hurt her now, and thinking any other way was crazy.
After all, my assessment of myself, as being unable to kill had been based on decades of observation (much of it probably out of date). What’s more, that assessment, that self-image, had come to be as much a cause of my actions and attitudes as a reflection of them - and apart from the direct changes the implant was making to my brain, it was breaking that feedback loop by providing a rationalisation for me to act in a way I’d convinced myself was impossible.
My one mistake was thinking that the insight I gained would simply vanish when the implant cut out. It hasn’t. It’s been clouded with doubts and reservations, it’s been undermined, to some degree, by my ridiculous panoply of beliefs and superstitions, but I can still recall the peace it gave me, I can still recall that flood of joy and relief, and I want it back.
Saw a reddit comment saying Axiomatic is absolutely fucking mindblowing. Well it isn’t, but it’s a nice short sci-fi story, the type I like. Based purely on logic and ration.
7.5/10
The Safe-Deposit Box
I’m honestly not sure what the big reveal is saying. So the protagonist’s original physical brain is destroyed bit by bit every day, and somehow it made his consciousness fly around and occupy a different person every day? How does that make any sense?
I think the sci-fi part is lame as hell if I didn’t miss anything, but it’s pretty interesting if treating it as a fantastical speculative fiction. How will a human develop his identity and personality if he wakes up as a different person each day, but each host his shares at least some similarities so that he won’t be completely crazy?
7.5/10
Lol what? That’s crazy, also a bit derogatory. 你的名字 is nothing like this story. One is a, as Greg Egan said, saccharine pop film, another is a short sci-fi story exploring human consciousness.
Seeing
Fascinating. Greg Egan really reminds me of 倪匡 with his grounded but wild imaginations.
7.5/10
A Kidnapping
This is fucking incredible. Halfway through it, I was thinking about how unoriginal Black Mirror and Ken Liu are, because the idea of creating a digital copy of humans has been echoed by them so many times with little variation while standing on the shoulders of Greg Egan and other science fiction works. But then Greg Egan took a turn, and revealed his true self: the ultimate rational way of thinking. This really is what set Greg Egan apart from other speculative fiction writers. The ability to present the ultimate rationality, as psychopathic as they may sound in normies’ eyes.
9/10. Really fucking mindblowing, while making perfect sense.
It’s really the true quality of Greg Egan, how he dealt with consciousness and rationality.
Learning to Be Me
The ending sequence is again a bit ambiguous. It said, “They could honour their contractual obligations and turn the teacher on again, erasing their satisfied customer, and giving the traumatised organic brain the chance to rant about its ordeal to the media and the legal profession. Or, they could quietly erase the computer records of the discrepancy, and calmly remove the only witness.” But what is traumatized is the jewel isn’t it? And the only witness is also the jewel, yet it’s the jewel who ultimately survives and takes over. The organic brain should have felt nothing abnormal in the final week shouldn’t it? The brain should not be receiving inputs from the jewel.
Nevertheless, the story makes you think about the whole consciousness transfer thing again. I’m always so confident about transferring your conscious to another medium won’t be a transfer but a copy and remove, so the original you would be dead that’s for sure. But what about the cliche que your brain cells are constantly dying and being replaced fact? How can you confidently declare that you have always been the same you? Tho it’s so frequently mentioned, I’ve never given enough thought about it for some reason.
Apart from the thought-provoking premise, the story also gave a turn by making the protagonist finding out he’s actually a jewel.
Solid 8/10, but I really can’t read any more of these conscious transfer thing anymore without some significant innovations. I’ve read way too much of these.
The VAT
“Will” isn’t the cause of anything, it’s an afterthought for the sake of peace of mind.
Evolution, he reasons, has not had time to trim human consciousness down to the most productive, most essential elements. His brain is capable of many arbitrary, even self-defeating, modes; perhaps that is the price to pay for its flexibility, perhaps there is no easy sequence of mutations which could remove such disadvantages without sacrificing much more.
Harold knows that this has no more power to change his feelings than it does to change the weather on Jupiter or the electron’s charge-to-mass ratio; it’s merely another aspect of the state of his brain.
Okay. I have zero idea what it’s talking about.
Apparently this story is replaced by “The Moat” in later editions of the book.
Got some solid quotes from the story tho.
Very 意識流. ?/10.
The Walk
It’s seeing the life of your body as the life of one person that’s the illusion. The idea that “you” are made up of all the events since your birth is nothing but a useful fiction. That’s not a person: it’s a composite, a mosaic.’
Again, I have no idea what he’s talking about in the final scene. But yet again, from others’ reviews, it doesn’t seem to be important. Greg Egan’s confusing final scenes seem to never be a major twist.
This story is like an afterthought of the conscious transfer or duplication. or like, making a logically equivalent but more mind-blogging example of duplicating conscious. This and “Leaning to be Me” are all like this.
Honestly, there’s really nothing more that need to be said. Logically, as long as you don’t know, it doesn’t matter to you if you die next second, or that if you’re only created a second ago. It just wouldn’t make any difference to you. So all the transferring or duplicating consciousness thing, is just a masturbation. So you just do whatever makes you feel. Good.
And this story is about explaining to you that knowing there will be someone just like you in the world , is already better than growing yourself into you from a 5yo kid who was nothing like you, so if you’re happy about the latter, you should be happy about the former as well and peacefully die.
7/10
The Cutie
A fortnight after Diane left me, I bought the Cutie kit, by EFT from Taiwan.
Umm what? That is so random.
Okay, so Greg Egan was still treating Taiwan as a random island of cheap labor and copycat companies. Kind of makes sense given the time it was written.
Better than my money goes to some fifteen-year-old trader hacker in Taiwan or Hong Kong or Manila, who’s doing it all so that his brothers and sisters won’t have to screw rich tourists to stay alive.
Dude has zero knowledge about the world. Typical Aussie, or awareness of the world outside of Europe and the US. Typical Eurocentric white yank.
What’s this magic thing called ‘humanity’, anyway? Isn’t half of it, at least, in the eyes of the beholder?
Okay. A cool idea. A Redditor said the last line was a twist, but I fail to see that.
7/10
This is the author I describe as my favourite living science fiction writer2, the hard-science heir to Philip K. Dick. (I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms. It isn’t.)
That’s actually a very great description. Greg Egan has a very similar vibe to Philip K. Dick. He’s what I originally thought Philip K. Dick to be 30 pages into Ubik.
Into Darkness
I was like, okay, I can’t believe it ends like this. An open ending. But then I saw a Redditor claiming it to have a satisfying resolution, so I read again, and then I realized what it was saying.
I won’t say it’s satisfying, but it’s the ending that makes perfect sense. Very epic.
This is actually what I thought every story of this collection would be like after reading “The Infinite Assassin”. It’s not as difficult as “The Infinite Assassin” tho.
8.5/10
Appropriate Love
Why the fuck does he always have to be so poetic when wrapping up a story?
After reading the ending like 5 times, I still don’t think it’s relevant to the story.
A pretty cool idea tho. It’s like the more barbaric version of 倪匡’s 後備. You can create clones, but someone still need to carry it.
You can store your brain with some equipment, but it would be expensive, and there’s a cheaper option: you can maintain a brain in your uterus, supplying all the required nutrition in an organic and cheap way, like you’re carrying a child. Wild idea.
You store the brain until the clone is born and grown, and then you put the brain into the body. Sin embargo, since there will be some discrepancy between a brain and a newly formed body, a computer interface is required to handle the information exchange.
7/10
The Moral Virologist (1990)
What a fucking bizarre story, Hilarious, like something I’d write in my 大兵日記. But again, I don’t understand the ending.
I was deeply troubled by the ending for quite some time, and even went to a very stupid website to look for an explanation (the writer of that page has zero reading comprehension skills). And then I finally realized that, in the story, the innocent babies might be killed only because of breast-feeding from their mothers. So as long as babies don’t drink mommies’ milk it would be fine. Therefore, the protagonist just appended “MOTHERS BREAST-FEEDING INFANTS” to the ad declaring the sinful ones. It all makes sense now.
6/10. An interesting idea, but poor execution. The plot alignment is so dumb, designing a mechanism but left a half-sized hole, and then covering half of the half-sized hole and calling it a day. Yeah sure.
Closer
Language had evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical world, not to describe subjective reality. Love, anger, jealousy, resentment, grief - all were defined, ultimately, in terms of external circumstances and observable actions.
Hmm. I don’t think I agree with it. I think language isn’t all about external and observable things, but it does only exist to make people realize your internal feelings by providing an interface to remind people of their similar feelings. So for truly subjective feelings that none of the others share, they can’t be expressed with languages.
“What could it actually mean, though? To know what it’s like to be someone else? You’d have to have their memories, their personality, their body - everything. And then you’d just be them, not yourself, and you wouldn’t know anything.
My memory. I think. Or perhaps my reconstruction. You know, half the time when I’ve told you something that happened before we met, the memory of the telling has become far clearer to me than the memory itself. Almost replacing it.
This neat division of “memory” and “personality” Bentley uses; is it really so clear? Jewels are neural-net computers; you can’t talk about “data” and “program” in any absolute sense.
The past, after all, was no more knowable than the external world. Its very existence also had to be taken on faith - and, granted existence, it too could be misleading.
And I knew, now, that what Sian had always wanted most in a lover was the alien, the unknowable, the mysterious, the opaque. The whole point, for her, of being with someone else was the sense of confronting otherness. Without it, she believed, you might as well be talking to yourself.
A very interesting inspection of consciousness, personality, memory, perception, and relationship. A story that ought to be read at midnight with lofi soul music.
8/10
Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies
(Or perhaps, as some have suggested, everyone’s mental privacy was so thoroughly breached that the sum of our transient thoughts forms a blanket of featureless white noise covering the planet, which the brain filters out effortlessly.)
Interesting, but obviously doesn’t make sense if you really think about it.
I picture my hunger as an object — another weight to carry, not much heavier than my pack — and it gradually recedes from my attention.
Orbiting each other can only lead to a spiralling together, an end to all distinctions.
8/10
A cool social model. Everyone would unconsciously telepathically radiate their beliefs, so naturally mathematically multiple groups of people are formed. Each group of people has the same belief and lives in the same area, forming basins. But there is a group pf people trying their best to insulate themselves from these belief radiations, and they do so by carefully traversing in the city, walking in the neutral area whenever possible, and never stopping moving so that the beliefs can be cancelled out.
That’s basically it. The ending isn’t very meaningful, but the mechanism and the resemblance to the real world are cool.
And … the end. A beautiful story to finish this wonderful collection.
Closing Thought
Overall a very decent collection. The average quality of the short stories is pretty good, and the variance isn’t too big either, unlike most of the other sci-fi / speculative fiction short story collections I’ve read, like that of Ted Chiang and Ken Liu. Most of their works comprised 2 or 3 good stories but a swarm of mediocre ones.
8.5/10