Tag: Greg Egan

‘Learning to Be Me’ by Greg Egan

“My parents were machines. My parents were gods. It was nothing special. I hated them.”

Another story about what it means to be human, and a story about narrators and viewpoints. (Also a story about society’s relationship to technology, and memory and identity, and the will to live, and morality.) Everyone has a backup implanted in their brain, which is trained to mimic the brain’s behavior by being reset whenever it thinks something different. But how can you tell whether you’re the backup? Like “Hell Is the Absence of God”, this story is an elegant dialectic proceeding from its starting assumption. But where Chiang’s story encompasses multiple points of view in a detached, ironic way, “Learning to Be Me” is wholly personal.

First published in Interzone #37 in 1990. Collected in The Best of Greg Egan, Gollancz, 2021

‘Solidity’ by Greg Egan

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