Tuesday, 23rd of October, 2007

Finally, Greg Egan has started writing fiction again, and not only do we have a new novel, Incandescence, coming out in 2008, we have a bunch of new short stories too.
There’ve been a couple of novellas in anthologies over the last year or so, and Asimov’s published the excellent “Dark Integers” (a sequel to Luminous, and an equally engrossing excursion into international espionage in the world of mathematical philosophy). Now there’s another new story, one that you can read online for free, if you’re willing to register at Technology Review (or, er, use BugMeNot).

I strongly recommend reading “Steve Fever”. It’s fun, quite short, and nicely demonstrates Egan’s touch - a personal story about strange technologies used to interrogate some pretty deep ideas about the world. It reminded me of Kathleen Ann Goonan’s remarkable nanotech quartet, especially Queen City Jazz, in which a nanotech virus infects people’s minds with an urge to travel down the Mississippi river. Goonan uses her solidly-thought-out scientific and technological ideas to tell a story about the history of America, its literature, blues and jazz music, and a kind of search for transcendence. Egan has often aimed at some of these themes himself (including transcendence within a scientific-materialist world), and Goonan was no doubt influenced by Egan’s astounding earlier works, so it’s nice to hear the echoes coming back again.

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