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 produ...

Immortality can be yours . . . at a pricePermutation city is the tale of a man with a vision - how to create immortality - and how that vision becomes grows beyond his control. Encompassing the lives and struggles of an artificial life junkie desperate to save her dying mother, a billionaire banker scarred by a terrible crime, the lovers for whom, in their timeless virtual world, love is not enough - and much more - Permutation city is filled with the sense of wond...

It's late in the 21st century and bioengineering is now so common that people are able to modify their minds in any way they wish. It is an era which has been shaped by information systems so vast that security, in any form, is easily breached. Now you can be whatever you want to be, and do whatever you want to do. On Earth anyway.One night, thirty three years ago, the stars went out. 'The Bubble' - a perfect sphere centred on the sun - appeared in the sky, isolating the solar syst...

After the extinction of humans, how do you define humanity?Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive starships.And there are the holdou...

On the utopian, man-made island, Stateless, Nobel Prize winner Violet Mosala is close to solving the greatest problem of her career - the quest for the ultimate Theory of Everything (TOE) is almost over.Burned out by recording the abuses of biotech for his TV news syndicate, Andrew Worth grabs the chance to follow Violet's story. In contrast the world of theoretical physics seems like an anaesthetised mathematical heaven, where everything is cool and abstract.He could not h...

Cass has stumbled on something that might be an entirely different type of physics, and she's travelled three hundred and fifty light-years to Mimosa Station, a remote experimental facility, to test her theory. The novo-vacuum she creates is predicted to begin decaying the instant it's created, but even so short-lived a microscopic speck could shed new light on the origins of the universe.But instead of decaying, Cass's novo-vacuum is wildly successful and begins expanding, slowly ...

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...

Collected together here for the first time are twelve stories by the incomparable Greg Egan, one of the most exciting writers of science fiction working today.In these dozen glimpses into the future Egan continues to explore the essence of what it is to be human, and the nature of what - and who - we are, in stories that range from parables of contemporary human conflict and ambition to far-future tales of our immortal descendants.Return to the universe of the meta-civilisa...

THE HUNDRED LIGHT YEAR DIARY - Scientists can bounce messages from the future back to the present, but there's no guarantee they'll tell the truth ...LEARNING TO BE ME - Crystalline minds may take the place of human brains, but where does the self really lie?CLOSER - Lovers exchange bodies and minds, but their experiments go just that little bit too far, proving that you can have too much of a good thing

Sleep and the Soul contains ten stories from Hugo Award-winning author Greg Egan.• "You and Whose Army?"• "This Is Not the Way Home"• "Zeitgeber"• "Crisis Actors"• "Sleep and the Soul"• "After Zero"• "Dream Factory"• "Light Up the Clouds"• "Night Running"• "Solidity"

"Instantiation" is a collection of eleven science fiction stories by Hugo Award winning author Greg Egan:• "The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine"• "Zero For Conduct"• "Uncanny Valley"• "Seventh Sight"• "The Nearest"• "Shadow Flock"• "Bit Players"• "Break My Fall"• "3-adica"• "The Slipway"• "Instantiation"

LUMINOUS 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...