Axiomatic: Short Stories of Science Fiction
Greg Egan
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 1597805408
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
—The Guardian
Axiomatic is a wonderful collection of eighteen short stories by Hugo Award–winning author Greg Egan. The stories in this collection have appeared in such science fiction magazines as Interzone and Asimov’s between 1989 and 1992.
From junkies 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; from bioengineering to the new physics; and from cyberpunk to the electronic frontier, Greg Egan’s future is frighteningly close to our own present.
Included in this collection are such wonderful stories as:
“Axiomatic”
“Into Darkness”
“The Safe-Deposit Box”
“Blood Sisters”
And many more!
Axiomatic is the perfect collection for any science fiction fan, especially one who enjoys Greg Egan’s work. The stories are imaginative and insightful, and written only the way that Greg Egan can do so.
Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
same neural connections with all the same weighting factors - but they’ll almost certainly be in different states. I’ll have to black you out, to correct that. Then you’ll wake - “ Who’ll wake? “ - in identical electromechanical bodies. Clones can’t be made sufficiently alike. “You’ll spend the eight hours alone, in perfectly matched rooms. Rather like hotel suites, really. You’ll have HV to keep you amused if you need it - without the videophone module, of course. You might think you’d
I’d come for, and I knew that it wouldn’t be on display, but I browsed a while longer, partly out of genuine curiosity, partly just to give myself time. Time to think through the implications once again. Time to come to my senses and flee. The cover of Synaesthesia showed a blissed-out man with a rainbow striking his tongue and musical staves piercing his eyeballs. Beside it, Alien Mind-Fuck boasted ‘a mental state so bizarre that even as you experience it, you won’t know what it’s like!’
I ought to. For each colour, I sketch a shaky pencil line that joins up all of its outermost points, and then another for all its innermost points. None of these lines intersects another. It’s no perfect set of concentric circles by any means, but each curve is roughly centred on that patch of blue in the north-east. A region which contains, amongst many other things, the Pearlman Psychiatric Institute. I pack everything back into the safe-deposit box. I need to give this a lot more thought.
and run. This time, I find no shelter on the street, and I simply hit the ground. Again, nothing. I struggle to calm myself, to visualise the possibilities. If the gap without bombs hadn’t fully passed the gap without me, when the first bombs went off, then I’d still have been missing from a part of the surviving flow — allowing exactly the same thing to happen all over again. I stare at the intact building, disbelieving. I am the ones who succeed. That’s all that defines me. But who,
was equally impossible to be certain that even another unswitched person had an inner life in any way the same as my own — but it didn’t seem unreasonable to be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people whose skulls hadn’t yet been scraped out with a curette. I drifted apart from my friends, I stopped searching for a lover. I took to working at home (I put in longer hours and my productivity rose, so the company didn’t mind at all). I couldn’t bear to be with people whose