Affiliates
| Works by
Greg Egan
(Aka Gregory Mark Egan)
(Writer)
[1961 - ] |
Blood Sisters
All
DVD
Why waste years designing viruses for biological warfare when blind mutation
and natural selection was all that was required? The theory was, they'd set
up a few trillion copies of their system. The theory also included 520
people all sticking scrupulously to official procedure, day after day, month
after month, without a moment of carelessness, laziness or forgetfulness.
Apparently, nobody bothered to compute the probability of that or of finding
wonder drugs.
Luminous
(1998)
Luninous collects
together one original story plus nine previously unpublished in book form.
Greg Egan’s short fiction is at the cutting edge of the genre. His stories
range from near future predictions to far future, far space improvisations.
His grasp of the latest scientific breakthroughs is unparalleled in science
fiction. The stories include 'Transition Dreams', 'Cocoon', 'Our Lady of
Chernobyl', the title story 'Luminous' and 'The Planck Drive'. Egan's
particular interests range from the farther shores of chaos theory and black
hole science to bio-technology and cloning. -
Axiomatic
(1997)
From junkes who drink at the time-stream, to love affairs in time-reversed galaxies; from gene-altered dolphins that converse only in limericks, to the program that allows you to design your own child; from the brain implants called axiomatics, to the strange attractors that spin off new religions, Greg Egan's future is frighteningly close to our present.
An Unusual Angle
(1983)
He is the world's greatest film director. His
characters, his scenery, his costumes - all are authentic, zestful,
artistic, artful.
But nobody knows he is the world's greatest film director. Maybe nobody ever
will. For all of his masterpieces are stored in an impregnable canister :
the head of the film-maker. Inside his brain, nestling safely, reel upon
reel of film, magnificently photographed, brilliantly edited, not a frame of
it accessible to the viewing public.
An Unusual Angle is about the making of this great film. It is also
the film itself. Here is a blazing epic of stupendous events: four years of
an ordinary Australian secondary school. Few would have suspected before
that an `ordinary' school could provide the material of rich humour, zany
lunacy, and near tragedy.
-
Incandescence
(2008)
A million years from now, the galaxy is divided between the
vast, cooperative meta-civilisation known as the Amalgam, and the silent
occupiers of the galactic core known as the Aloof. The Aloof have long
rejected all attempts by the Amalgam to enter their territory, but have
permitted travellers to take a perilous ride as unencrypted data in their
communications network, providing a short-cut across the galaxy's central
bulge. When Rakesh encounters a traveller, Lahl, who claims she was woken
by the Aloof on such a journey and shown a meteor full of traces of DNA,
he accepts her challenge to try to find the uncharted world deep in the
Aloof's territory from which the meteor originated.
Roi and Zak
live inside the Splinter, a translucent world of rock that swims in a sea
of light they call the Incandescence. Living on the margins of a rigidly
organised society, they seek to decipher the subtle clues that can reveal
the true nature of the Splinter. In fact, their world is in danger, and as
the evidence accumulates Roi, Zak, and a growing band of recruits struggle
to understand and take control of their fate.
Meanwhile, Rakesh and
his travelling companion Parantham gradually uncover the history of the
lost DNA world, a search which ultimately leads them to startling
revelations that encompass both the Splinter, and the true nature and
motives of the Aloof.
-
Schild's Ladder
(2002)
For twenty thousand years, every observable phenomenon in
the universe has been successfully explained by the Sarumpaet Rules: the
laws governing the dynamics of the quantum graphs that underlie all the
constituents of matter and the geometric structure of spacetime. Now Cass
has stumbled on a set of quantum graphs that might comprise the
fundamental particles of an entirely different kind of physics, and she
has travelled three hundred and seventy light years to Mimosa Station, a
remote experimental facility, in the hope of bringing this tantalising
alternative to life. The “novo-vacuum” is predicted to begin decaying the
instant it's created, but even a short-lived, microscopic speck could shed
light on the origins of the universe, and test the Sarumpaet Rules more
rigorously than ever before.
Cass's experiment turns out to be more
successful than anticipated: the novo-vacuum is more stable than the
ordinary vacuum around it, and a region in which the new physics holds
sway proceeds to expand out from Mimosa at half the speed of light.
Six hundred years later, more than two thousand inhabited systems have
been lost to the novo-vacuum. On the Rindler, a ship that has
matched velocities with the encroaching border, people have come from
throughout inhabited space to study the phenomenon. Most are
Preservationists, hunting for a way to turn back the tide, but a few
belong to another faction: Yielders, who believe that the challenge of
adapting to survive on the far side of the border would reinvigorate a
civilisation that has grown stale and insular.
Tchicaya has come to
the Rindler to join the Yielders, but when Mariama — a childhood
friend whose example inspired him to abandon his own home world and
traditions for a life of travel — arrives soon after, he is shocked to
discover that she plans to help the Preservationists find a way to destroy
the novo-vacuum.
As a theoretical breakthrough leads to a sequence
of experiments that begins to reveal the true richness of the world behind
the border, tensions between the opposing factions grow. When a splinter
group responds to these revelations with violent, unilateral action,
Tchicaya and Mariama are forced into an uneasy alliance, and travel
together through the border, balancing old and new loyalties against the
fate of two incomparably different universes.
-
Teranesia
(1999)
Welcome to Teranesia, the island of butterflies, where
evolution has stopped making sense.
Prabir Suresh lives in
paradise, a nine-year-old boy with an island all his own: to name, to
explore, and to populate with imaginary creatures stranger than any exotic
tropical wildlife. Teranesia is his kingdom, shared only with his
biologist parents and baby sister Madhusree. The evolutionary puzzle of
the island's butterflies that brought his family to the remote South
Moluccas barely touches Prabir; his own life revolves around the beaches,
the jungle, and the schooling and friendships made possible by the net.
When civil war breaks out across Indonesia, this paradise comes to a
violent end. The mystery of the butterflies remains unsolved, but nearly
twenty years later reports begin to appear of strange new species of
plants and animals being found throughout the region — species separated
from their known cousins by recent, dramatic mutations that seem far too
useful to have arisen by chance from pollution, disease, or any other
random catastrophe.
Madhusree is now a biology student, proud of
her parents' unacknowledged work, and with no memories of the trauma of
the war to discourage her, she decides to join a multinational expedition
being mounted to investigate the new phenomenon. Unable to cast off his
fears for her safety, Prabir reluctantly follows her. But travel between
the scattered islands is difficult, and Madhusree has covered her tracks.
In the hope of finding her, Prabir joins up with an independent scientist,
Martha Grant, who has come to search for both clues to the mystery and
whatever commercial benefits it might bring to her sponsor. As Prabir and
Martha begin to untangle the secret of Teranesia, Prabir is forced to
confront his past, and to face the painful realities that have shaped his
life.
-
Diaspora
(1997)
In 2975, the orphan Yatima is grown from a randomly mutated digital mind
seed in the conceptory of Konishi polis. Yatima explores the Coalition of
Polises, the network of computers where most life in the solar system now
resides, and joins a friend, Inoshiro, to borrow an abandoned robot body and
meet a thriving community of “fleshers” in the enclave of Atlanta.
Twenty-one years later, news arrives from a lunar observatory: gravitational
waves from Lac G-1, a nearby pair of neutron stars, show that the Earth is
about to be bathed in a gamma-ray flash created by the stars' collision — an
event that was not expected to take place for seven million years. Yatima
and Inoshiro return to Atlanta to try to warn the fleshers, but meet
suspicion and disbelief. Some lives are saved, but the Earth is ravaged.
In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors resolve to discover the
cause of the neutron stars' premature collision, and they launch a thousand
polises into interstellar space in search of answers. This diaspora
eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an
older group of travellers: a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and
the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe.
-
Quarantine
(1992)
In 2034, the stars went out. An unknown agency
surrounded the solar system with an impenetrable barrier, concealing the
universe from humanity's gaze.
In 2067, Nick Stavrianos is hired to investigate the disappearance of a
mentally disabled woman, Laura Andrews, from the institution where she was
being cared for. Aided by a skull full of neural modifications, he follows
her trail to the Republic of New Hong Kong, where an organisation known as
the Ensemble has uncovered Laura's extraordinary secret: an ability that
could transform the world.
-
Permutation City
(1994) -- Winner 1995 John W. Campbell Memorial
Award
Paul Durham keeps making Copies of himself:
software simulations of his own brain and body which can be run in virtual
reality, albeit seventeen times more slowly than real time. He wants them to
be his guinea pigs for a set of experiments about the nature of artificial
intelligence, time, and causality, but they keep changing their mind and
baling out on him, shutting themselves down.
Maria Deluca is an Autoverse addict; she's unemployed and running out of
money, but she can't stop wasting her time playing around with the cellular
automaton known as the Autoverse, a virtual world that follows a simple set
of mathematical rules as its “laws of physics”.
Paul makes Maria a very strange offer: he asks her to design a seed for an
entire virtual biosphere able to exist inside the Autoverse, modelled right
down to the molecular level. The job will pay well, and will allow her to
indulge her obsession. There has to be a catch, though, because such a seed
would be useless without a simulation of the Autoverse large enough to allow
the resulting biosphere to grow and flourish — a feat far beyond the
capacity of all the computers in the world.
-
Distress
(1995)
Investigative reporter Andrew Worth turns down a
documentary on a mysterious new mental illness -- "Distress," or acute
clinical anxiety syndrome, for another assignment. He's on his way to the
artifical island of Stateless, where the world's top physicists are
gathering to decide on a new TOE, or Theory of Everything, to replace
Einstein's outmoded legacy.
Chief among the scientists is the brilliant African Nobel laureate, Violet
Mosala, the focus of Worth's story, who is the subject of mysterious death
threats. Worth begins his own investigation, but it takes on even more
urgency when he finds that Distress, the mental plague now affecting
millions, is linked somehow to the approaching "Aleph Moment" when the TOE
is finalized.The countdown has begun for a disaster that will reach all the
way back to the Big Bang. And beyond...
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