I had no idea this collection of short stories by Greg Egan existed until it popped up as a Kindle recommendation for me. Needless to say I immediately snapped it up though I had already read two of the eleven stories it includes elsewhere. I was also quite pleased that three of the stories, including Bit Players that I’ve read before and liked a lot, are all part of a larger story and could actually be taken together as a short novel.

It’s impossible to corral this collection into any one thing but it is possible to say that they’re all about humans, or at least human in every way that matters, and are set in the near future. Given the exotic beings that Egan has written about and how far in the future some of his novels take place in, that’s an important distinction to make. The most exotic of the bunch here are the composites that feature in the series of three connected stories. Essentially they are composite intelligences made out of brain scans of humans that have fallen into the public domain and so are used to cheaply fill in for AI characters in virtual game worlds. The stories deal with the composites who pretty much instantly realize what has happened to them and want out, but as they have no rights, they will quickly be deleted by the system if they behave out of character for the game worlds they are in and receive complaints from human customers. It seems a little implausible to me that computation would be so inexpensive that companies can so casually create new instances of these AIs at will enough to populate entire worlds. But they are solid stories and I enjoyed reading about the trashy game worlds and how the composites work to exploit the flaws in them.

One thing that struck me reading this how collection is how Egan seems bitter about the near future in a way I haven’t seen in him since his earliest short story writing days. The first story in this book talks about a scenario in which employers use machine learning to capture the skills of employees and then fire them. Needless to say this feels very close to our own present and Egan here paints a very depressing picture of how everyone is jobless and left at the end of their respective ropes, are left stringing along by the system just on the edge of survival by unthinking algorithms that have learned how best to solve this and all kinds of problems. I’m not sure that it makes sense from an economics perspective that human labour have zero value but I was surprised by this story as Egan is usually one of those science-fiction writers who are very optimistic about the future. I suppose the year 2020 is getting to everyone. Seventh Sight, about a group of people who gain the ability to see more colors through implants and how that changes the wiring in their brains is similarly dark. At first, they revel in how this makes them special compared to everyone else but they soon find that it seems to confer to them no advantage whatsoever and other people soon catch up, in functionality if not in outlook, when new mobile phones come with this new ability built-in.

A couple of stories I thought were especially weak. Shadow Flock is how Egan would plan a heist on the super-secure cryptocurrency wallets some people like to keep with the help of drones the size of insects. It’s solid enough work but seems a little beneath a writer of Egan’s stature. Uncanny Valley is a noir-like story about an AI of sorts who investigates his creator and past self. Although I’m not completely sure what happens in this story this treads the same kind of ground as stories about repressed memories or past lives that many other writers have explored, just with a science-fiction bent. Egan’s attempt here doesn’t feel like anything special to me. I did rather like Zero For Conduct which is an amazing story about female empowerment about a brilliant Afghani refugee girl in Pakistan. In my mind, I kept pushing for her not to take more risks and to take her discoveries to a higher authority but her dreams are much bigger than mine and good for her that it is so.

In fact one common thread through these stories is how far Egan pushes them. Instead of introducing twists in the stories to make them more interesting, he pushes each scenario to its absolute limit, exploring them far beyond the usual bounds which would be enough for a satisfactory stories for most other writers. Even in the midst of their deepest bitterness and despair, his characters never stop exercising their power of thought and reason to find solutions to their problems. In terms of pure imagination and original insight, this collection isn’t as strong as some of his other stories. But it is a solid collection of stories and I really enjoy reading his unique voice.