In terms of the material of their work, Australian science-fiction writer Greg Egan is almost Tsushima’s exact opposite: he’s fizzing madly with ideas, each of them startling and clever enough for most lesser writers to spin out into 9-book series, whereas he despatches them in a 30-page short story and then moves on to something even weirder and wilder, often grounded in the extreme physics and mathematics he seems to work with professionally (the details of his life, and even his appearance, are something of a mystery). ‘Solidity’ is a case in point: something in reality breaks, and suddenly everybody starts slipping from parallel universe to parallel universe. The only thing that can keep you in the one ‘place’ is somebody else’s constant observation. How do you make a life, and even more impossibly, a functioning society, under these conditions?
First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, 2022, and available to read here; collected in Sleep and the Soul, Greg Egan, 2023
A Personal Anthology 