Collected short fiction.., p.1
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 1
PLEASE NOTE
THIS EBOOK HAS BEEN ABRIDGED TO REMOVE ALL STORIES PUBLISHED SUBSEQUENT TO 2010
TEASER EXCERPTS ONLY REMAIN
Table of Contents
Some Interviews (In Lieu of an Introduction) Piffle interview (1997)
noise! interview (1998)
The Way Things Are (1998)
Aurealis interview (2009)
Virtual Worlds and Imagined Futures (2009)
Stories - The Complete Short Fiction of Greg Egan 3-adica
Appropriate Love
Artifact
Axiomatic
Before
Beyond the Whistle Test
Bit Players
Blood Sisters
Border Guards
Break My Fall
The Caress
Chaff
Closer
Cocoon
Crystal Nights
The Cutie
Dark Integers
The Demon’s Passage
The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine
Dispersion
Dust
Eugene
The Extra
Fidelity
The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred
Glory
Hot Rock
The Hundred-Light-Year Diary
In Numbers
In the Ruins
Induction
The Infinite Assassin
Instantiation
Into Darkness
A Kidnapping
Learning to Be Me
Light Up the Clouds
Lost Continent
Luminous
Mind Vampires
Mister Volition
Mitochondrial Eve
The Moat
The Moral Virologist
The Nearest
Neighbourhood Watch
Oceanic
Only Connect
Oracle
Orphanogenesis
Our Lady of Chernobyl
Perihelion Summer
Phoresis
The Planck Dive
Reasons To Be Cheerful
Reification Highway
Riding the Crocodile
The Safe-Deposit Box
Scatter My Ashes
Seeing
Seventh Sight
Shadow Flock
Silver Fire
Singleton
The Slipway
Steve Fever
Tangled Up
TAP
This is Not the Way Home
Transition Dreams
Uncanny Valley
Unstable Orbits In The Space Of Lies
The Vat
The Walk
Wang’s Carpets
The Way She Smiles, The Things She Says
Worthless
Yeyuka
"You and Whose Army?"
Zeitgeber
Zero for Conduct
Foundations Foundations Table of Contents
1: Special Relativity Spacetime
Rotations in Space
Spacetime Geometry
Rotations in Spacetime
Time Dilation
The Flight to Sirius
Doppler Shift and Aberration
2: From Special to General Gravity as Spacetime Curvature
Manifolds
Curved Geometry
Parallel Transport
The Curvature Tensor
3: Black Holes Mass
Velocity and Acceleration
Energy and Momentum
The Stress-Energy Tensor
Conservation of 4-momentum in Curved Spacetime
The Einstein Tensor
The Bianchi Identity
The Schwarzschild Solution
4: Quantum Mechanics The Birth of Quantum Mechanics
Complex Numbers
Wave Mechanics
Matrix Mechanics
The Uncertainty Principle
The Action Principle
Bibliography and Publication History Novels
Collections
Stories
Interviews
Non-fiction
Forthcoming Work
About This ebook
Some Interviews (In Lieu of an Introduction)
From the author's website at — http://www.gregegan.net/INTERVIEWS/Interviews.html
Piffle interview (1997)
noise! interview (1998)
The Way Things Are (1998)
Aurealis interview (2009)
Virtual Worlds and Imagined Futures (2009)
Piffle interview (1997)
Interview by Russell B. Farr
First published in Piffle & Other Trivia #26, September 1997. Copyright © Greg Egan and Russell B. Farr, 1997. All rights reserved.
* * * * *
Greg, thank you for agreeing to this interview. Please, in your own words, tell us about yourself.
I was born in Perth in 1961. I have a BSc in Mathematics. I’ve worked as a computer programmer, mostly in jobs supporting medical research of one kind or another. But I’ve been writing full-time now since 1992.
You’ve professed an interest in both music and movies. What are some of the artists you are currently listening to, and some of the best and worst movies you’ve seen recently?
Most of the music I’m interested in comes from people who date back at least to the ’80s: Elvis Costello, Hunters & Collectors, Paul Kelly, The Smiths, The Violent Femmes. I buy new albums from the ones who are still putting things out, but I spend a lot of time listening to their old work. I listen to JJJ regularly, and I like a lot of what I hear, but I’m rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was ten years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants.
The best movies I’ve seen recently? I thought “Underground” was very powerful, though that’s going back a bit. “Lone Star”, “Black Rock” and “Swingers” were all worth seeing. And I loved “Mars Attacks!”. “Lost Highway” certainly wasn’t the worst thing I’ve seen this year, but it was the most disappointing, because I admire David Lynch so much, and I think he made some bad decisions with “Lost Highway”.
Do you ever feel the urge to go back into film-making?
No. My technical skills were very much at an amateur level, and by now they’re both rusty and obsolete, so at most it would be a hobby that would take up more time and money than I can spare. Depending on how the technology evolves, I might end up doing some computer animation one day, but to learn what I’d need to learn and then create something substantial would mean putting writing aside for at least a year or two, and I’m not willing — or financially able — to do that right now.
Until a few years ago, your avoidance of conventions and other public appearances was as well known as your writing, much to the chagrin of many. Now, four novels, two collections and numerous Year’s Best inclusions later, do you feel the last laugh is yours?
I think my non-attendance at conventions was never of the slightest interest to more than a handful of people: a tiny fraction of Australian fandom, which itself is a tiny fraction of the SF readership. A story in Asimov’s is read by hundreds of thousands of people; the proportion for whom it would cross their mind upon seeing my name that I wasn’t in attendance at Something-or-Othercon is negligible. But it’s not a matter of having the last laugh, any more than I’m having the last laugh on … I don’t know, the AFL for succeeding as a writer despite never going to their football matches. Fandom is about fandom, it’s a great big social club; science fiction is just the pretext. I don’t think many people in fandom really think otherwise. Bruce Gillespie says this all the time, and if I’m not qualified to know, he certainly is.
In your 1993 interview for Eidolon, you mention that it was “too early to quit my day job forever”. How are the prospects of quitting the day job forever now?
I’ve supported myself by writing since 1992, and I’m probably very nearly unemployable by now — not because my computer skills are all that dated, but because employers are likely to be put off by the long gap. So I hope I can keep this up indefinitely, but there’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to. Even if I have no trouble producing new work for another forty years, the publishing industry is sure to go through some major upheavals.
You’ve been extremely critical of what you describe as “Miracle Ingredient A”, or a truly unique Australianness perceived in much sf written by Australians. While this may well be the case, do you also agree there is a need to support Australian sf writers in order for them to hone their skills?
I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published, which involve slightly lower hurdles in terms of quality than the major magazines. And there are fiction fanzines and low-paying semi-prozines all around the world, including Australia, that exist precisely to fill that need. But the last thing I’d suggest is that anyone has a moral obligation to buy those magazines if they don’t actually enjoy the contents. Being rewarded for anything other than the quality of their work is the fastest way to screw-up a writer — and it isn’t only new ones who suffer from that.
How do you see the state of sf writing and publishing in Australia at present, both in terms of how it used to be and how it rates internationally?
Australian sf book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it’s easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely. (Though not necessarily a UK one, because the Australian sales are such a big slice of the market for UK editions.) But I think the whole concept of “the state” of SF writing in Australia is meaningless. There are a lot of writers doing a lot of different things. Some years there are more and some years there are less. The idea that Australian SF writers go through cycles of improving and diminishing quality together — like vineyards having good and bad seasons — is just hilarious to me.
Gardner Dozois described you as “Perhaps the hottest and fastest-rising new writer to debut in SF in the nineties”. You’ve certainly established a voice for yourself in the genre, where do you see your writing going from here?
I don’t have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me — some of which change, some of which don’t. If there’s any recent trend that might be showing up in my work soon, it’s that I’ve put a conscious effort into updating my maths and physics education, which had grown very rusty. I’m reading postgraduate-level physics textbooks these days, rather than relying on popularisations, which is a good thing, I think. Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I’ve been led astray like that myself at times, but I hope my work in the future will come from a much more informed position.
You’ve had three stories nominated for the Hugo Award, including two in the same category in the same year. How did you feel when you heard they’d been nominated? Have you ever given any thought to winning such an award?
I hadn’t given much thought to the prospect of a Hugo nomination at the time it happened, but obviously once you’re nominated, winning one seems a bit less far-fetched than before.
Going back to the 1993 interview, you said that you were “not really qualified to call myself a novelist yet”, and while you were writing 7 or 8 short stories a year you could see that tapering off. Has this happened?
Definitely. I had no short fiction at all published in ’96, and I’ll only have two stories published this year. Part of the reason is the time I’ve spent on novels, but also I’ve been taking longer to write stories lately. “Reasons to Be Cheerful”, which was published in Interzone in April, took me three months. I think it was time well spent, though; I’m happy with every word in that story. Obviously you can never say “No one could have done this better”, but when you can honestly say that you wouldn’t personally change a thing, it’s a good feeling.
Do you want to concentrate more on your short stories, which have been nominated for the Hugo, or your novels, one of which has won the Aurealis Award?
I think I’ll always want to do both; the ratio will vary, but unless I made a conscious decision to stick to a particular form, I’d always find myself with an idea that really had to be one and not the other. And there are advantages to doing both. If I did want to write short stories exclusively, then I’d have to get a day job; there’s no way I could make my living at it. And writing nothing but novels would be exhausting; I’d probably have to waste as much time between books recovering and psyching myself up for the next one as I now spend writing short stories.
Your most recent novel, Distress, was released at the end of 1995 to rave reviews. I believe your next novel is titled Diaspora, what can readers expect from this one and when can they expect to read it?
Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software. But some conscious software inhabits robots that interact with the physical world, and there are also some organic humans still around. The story concerns a violent astrophysical event which ravages the “fleshers”; that triggers a search by the survivors for a better understanding of the phenomenon, and for sanctuary from any future recurrences. It turns out to be a very long, and very far-reaching journey.
It’s published in the UK on 15 September, so it should reach Australia by November or December.
What else can readers expect to see from Greg Egan in print in the near future?
I’ll definitely have a story called the “The Planck Dive” in Asimov’s early next year, which is basically about why it might be interesting to jump into a black hole. That will be followed by a 20,000-word novella called “Oceanic”, which is too complicated to summarise in a few words. I’ve only just started the next novel, though, so that’s not going to be in print before ’99. It’s called Teranesia, and it’s about evolution, the Indian Rationalists Association, the breakup of Indonesia, quantum mechanics, and sex.
Lastly, is Piffle & Other Trivia a silly name?
Extremely.
noise! interview (1998)
Interview by Marisa O’Keeffe
First published in noise! online magazine, January 1998. Copyright © Greg Egan and Marisa O’Keeffe, 1998. All rights reserved.
* * * * *
Perhaps you could start by talking about Diaspora, what you hoped to achieve with it, and whether you feel you have achieved what you wanted. What direction is your work now taking you in? What drives you in your work? What vision do you have? How has your work changed over the years? What has become more important to you and what has become less important to you (thematically or otherwise)?
One of the main things I wanted to do with Diaspora was imagine what the future might be like if one branch of our descendants ends up inhabiting computers, and to show this world through the eyes of an insider who finds it all perfectly normal. In an earlier book of mine, Permutation City, people are just beginning to be able to make copies of their minds that run as software, and it’s all still very difficult and traumatic, but when Diaspora begins there’s a whole civilisation that has existed in this form for nine hundred years. So instead of adopting a contemporary perspective and treating the idea as deeply unsettling, I wanted to take it for granted and have some fun with the possibilities — without the characters having to have an existential crisis every five minutes because they’re “only software”. I wanted to make it seem perfectly ordinary to be software, and very strange and limiting to have any kind of body, let alone one made of flesh.
I think I’ve succeeded in presenting that point of view, though the more I’ve succeeded, the more off-putting it might be for some readers. If it’s disturbing to read about characters in the 21st century having a hard time being software, it can be even more disturbing to imagine people so different from us that they have no problem with it at all.
Diaspora probably took me about as far in that direction as I want to go. When I write about the far future, I’m not interested in pretending that all our current problems — things like disease, poverty, war and racism — are going to be with us for the next ten thousand years. Human nature is a physical thing, and eventually we’ll transform it as much as we like. But those “temporary” problems are still enormously important to us, right now. So, although I’ve written a couple of short stories since Diaspora which share the idea that in the long run we’ll find software the most convenient form — especially for space travel — I’m backing off now, and concentrating on the near future.
I suppose I have a vision of a universe that we’re increasingly able to understand through science — and that includes understanding who we are, where we came from, and why we do the things we do. What drives me is the desire to explore both the details of this vision, for their own sake — things like quantum mechanics and cosmology, simply because they’re beautiful and elaborate and fascinating — but also the ways in which we can adapt to this situation, and use what we’re learning constructively.
I’m not sure that my work has changed in any particular way over the years, though I hope I’m improving stylistically, and getting better at characterisation. I think Distress was better in both respects than the previous novels; it’s hard to talk about “characterisation” in Diaspora, since the worst mistake would have been to make the characters too similar to 20th-century flesh-and-blood people. What’s important to me in every book is to push the ideas as far as I can, and to be as honest about the subject as I can. That never changes, but it does lead to different trade-offs. If you’re dealing with some fairly elaborate technical issues, as I was in Permutation City and Diaspora, the writing has to be as direct and transparent as possible; trying to make it too subtle or poetic just renders it incomprehensible. In Distress there was room for more expressive writing, and I also felt I could risk leaving some things unsaid.
