Greg Egan - Gardner Dozois

From Supermen, Tales of the Posthuman Future:

"Looking back at the century that has just ended, it's obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the Big New Names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new "hard science" writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and he is still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov's Science Fiction, and has made sales as well as to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere. Many of his stories have also appeared in various "Best of the Year" series, and he was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story "Cocoon," which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov's Readers Award. His first novel Quarantine appeared in 1992; his second novel Permutation City won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella "Oceanic." His other books include the novels Distress and Diaspora and three collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chemobyl. His most recent book is a major new novel, Teranesia. He has a Web site at http://www.netspace.netau/^gregegan/.

Almost any story by Egan would have served perfectly well for this anthology. In fact, with the possible exception of Brian Stableford, Egan has probably written more about the posthuman future than any other writer of the last decade— being one of the key players in shaping current ideas about that future— and there were more than a dozen possibilities to choose from, including stories such as "Learning to Be Me," "Dust," "Fidelity," "Reasons to be Cheerful," "The Planck Dive," "Tap," "Oceanic," and many others ("Wang's Carpets" would have been perfect, but I had already used it in another of these anthologies). In fact, if I'd had room here to include two stories by any one author (which I didn't have), Egan would have been the one.

I finally settled on the dazzlingly imaginative story that follows, as it takes us as deep into that posthuman future as anything that Egan has yet written, for a compelling study of old loyalties and new possibilities."


4.5 out of 5