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 ...

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"

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...

In a world where the cells that make up our bodies are not committed to any one organism, Marla is confronted by the fickleness of her cytes, and resolves to understand them with help from Ada, a centuries-old Flourisher. Swappers like Ruth embrace fluidity, and meet with others to exchange cytes, seeking the perfect mix. But Ruth faces her own crisis, and as the technology to manipulate cytes advances, all three are drawn into a struggle to shape the future of life.

"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"

When electronics importer Cara Leon goes missing, private investigator Sam Mujrif is hired by her sister to investigate. Cara is eight times taller than Sam, but evidence soon points to players much smaller than either of them. As Sam and his cross-scale colleagues pursue the case, it becomes apparent that Cara's disappearance is linked to the development of technology with the potential to reshape their whole society, and radically alter the balance of power between the scales.

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 e...

Axiomatic is a collection of eighteen short stories:"The Infinite Assassin""The Hundred Light-Year Diary""Eugene""The Caress""Blood Sisters""Axiomatic""The Safe-Deposit Box""Seeing""A Kidnapping""Learning to Be Me""The Moat""The Walk""The Cutie""Into Darkness""Appropriate Love""The Moral Virologist""Closer""Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies"

Greg Egan's Perihelion Summer is a story of people struggling to adapt to a suddenly alien environment, and the friendships and alliances they forge as they try to find their way in a world where the old maps have lost their meaning.Taraxippus is coming: a black hole one tenth the mass of the sun is about to enter the solar system.Matt and his friends are taking no chances. They board a mobile aquaculture rig, the Mandjet, self-sustaining in food, power and fresh wat...

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 extra...

Phoresis and Other Journeys contains three novellas from Hugo Award-winning author Greg Egan.• "The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred": civil war in an asteroid colony sees refugees fleeing, by any means possible.• "Dispersion": a world where all life is divided into six cyclically invisible and intangible groups faces a terrifying new disease.• "Phoresis": the inhabitants of a double planet embark on an epic, multi-generational project to cross between the twin worlds...

In Yalda's universe, light has no universal speed and its creation generates energy. On Yalda's world, plants make food by emitting their own light into the dark night sky. As a child, Yalda witnesses one of a series of strange meteors, the Hurtlers, that are entering the planetary system at an immense, unprecedented speed. It becomes apparent that her world is in imminent danger — and the task of dealing with the Hurtlers will require knowledge and technology far beyond anything her civil...