Fiction Reviews
The Best of Greg Egan
(2026) Greg Egan, Gollancz, £16.99, pbk, 724pp, ISBN 978-1-473-23229-7
So here is an author I knew little about before picking this one up.
Unusually (for me), I’m going to start with some quotes from the publisher’s notes.
According to his publisher, “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. [This collection is…] the clear product of a man who is both a master storyteller and a rigorous, exploratory thinker.”
Now I know that that is not how you should start a review. But this is one of those occasions where I think the publisher has it about right. I can’t say I disagree with that at all.
However, there are twenty stories and an afterword here. I am not going to write about every story, as to some extent this is one of those collections that seemed to work best when I knew nothing about the stories I was about to read.
The stories here are published here in chronological order, so to some degree you might expect them to improve towards the end, as the writer develops his skills and hones his craft, or as the present-day technology evolves. To some extent this is true. The more recent stories at the end are perhaps broader in scope, but generally each story was just as thought-provoking as the next.
Some of the stories create quite an unsettling future about the way humans could interact with machine intelligence, AI and the like. It is not always positive, but it is provocative. In these days when AI seems to be mentioned in the news every day, these are stories of what could happen, with their consequences. Not all the answers are positive, nor all the outcomes beneficial for everyone. Egan looks at each idea, rolls it around a bit and draws logical conclusions at the end.
As individual stories they are good, and more often than not, very, very good. As I rather expect with any story collection, there were stories that I liked more than others, ('Luminous', 'Dark Integers', 'Axiomatic', 'Oceanic') and others that were just weird ('Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies'). 'Silver Fire' (1995) was a story of tracking down the cause of a global viral pandemic that now, post-CoVID-19, seems scarily prescient, not only for the virus itself but also for the public’s abandonment of science. On the whole, and rather unusually for me, there were no stories that I really didn’t like.
My only area of difficulty was that there were times when the hard science aspects of a story – the mathematics, the science – were beyond me. Now, I can see that for readers with a scientific background that such elements are a huge plus, even when they resulted in big information dumps. As a non-scientist, all I can say is that their use seemed appropriate and sounded right. My enjoyment of the stories was not diminished by my lack of scientific knowledge.
It didn’t surprise me that the characterisation is almost Clarkean in their lack of depth, although Greg was surprisingly frank about things such as sex. These are stories based on ideas, and the ideas are many and complex. Greg’s stories look at science and religion, morals and ethics, social ideals and even seΧ in a way that is uncommon in many, if not most, science fiction stories today. Generally, the stories are intelligent and original, often involving variations on the themes of humanity, consciousness, and the consequences in society as this integration of humans and machine intelligences continues.
But what really works is when at the end you put all of these pieces together. As Greg says in his Afterword, the overall theme of the stories “is the struggle to come to terms with what it will mean when our growing ability to scrutinise and manipulate the physical world reaches the point where it encompasses the substrate underlying our values, our memories, and our identities.”
This mosaic of stories shows us possible futures that might or might not be what we expect or want, and that as a result as humans we may have to make difficult choices for ourselves in the future. There are no easy answers, no quick-fix, despite what you may read, see or hear, and Egan does well in putting them out there for us to examine.
The Best of Greg Egan was, to my surprise, a book that matched the praises given to it in its publicity material. It made me realise that Greg is an underrated writer who deserves to be better known, not least by me. The Best of Greg Egan is a good place to start. Recommended.
Mark Yon
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