Greg Egan is continuing to produce a fair amount new writing. I bought this book because it’s been a while since I last sat down with a good collection of short science-fiction stories and they’re how I first encountered Egan’s work. Unfortunately while many of the ideas in the stories here can be interesting and thought provoking, they’re also very small in scale. So small that they might rate a short blurb or a blog post but struggle under the weight and expectations of even a short story. Combined with Egan’s penchant for writing plain and straightforward stories with no dramatic twists, I’m left wondering: okay, so that happened, is that it?

As a collection of ten stories previously published elsewhere, there’s no real central theme and no shared world. But as the title of the volume which is also one of the included stories suggests, an argument could be made for sleep and the nature of one’s identity. It’s set in what at first appears to be a perfectly normal early 20th century America about a construction worker who is mistakenly buried alive after an accident. It’s left to the reader to gradually realize that this is a common event in this world as humans there never sleep and so are not expected to ever lose consciousness. That humans have a continuous stream of consciousness is how they know they are still themselves and any interruption is interpreted as death and the body being subsequently taken over by a demon. It is a neat idea but writing an elaborate plot about the poor man being hunted by bigots who want to bury him back in his grave feels both obvious and too much. Another sleep-themed story begins with children being afflicted by a strange malady which throws their internal circadian rhythms out of whack. When the condition spreads, society is forced to adapt by having people segregated into different time zones. It’s intriguing and there are some eerie parallels for us who lived through COVID-19 but there’s no deeper point to be made here either.

Then there are the stories that describe solving practical problems in plenty of step-by-step detail. These days, they’re often known as Andy Meir stories due to the success of The Martian but of course Egan and other writers have been writing this sort of thing for ages. One such story involves a tourist stranded on the Moon while another is about a project to help alleviate climate change by partially blocking radiation coming from the sun. They’re solid stories but there’s no great innovation or feat of the imagination in either of them. The latter story serves as a typical example of this book as a whole. Yes, it helps cut down incoming radiation by an appreciable percentage but it doesn’t exactly solve global warming by itself and it’s really just placing a plasma shield in space between the Earth and the Sun and so isn’t that exciting. The one noteworthy element of the story is about how the team needs to find the resources to carry out the project. They’re forced to participate in a sort of public reality show against memeable yet technically impossible projects. This is a very Black Mirror type of scenario and gaming it is a lot more interesting than the project itself and its technical details.

My favorite story in this collection presents another scenario of this type and takes aim at those inclined to conspiracy-thinking. In a world beset by climate change, the rising incidence and severity of natural disasters must surely convince even the most dubious skeptic. But of course never underestimate the stupidity of humans and so there are those who believe that the victims of such disasters are just crisis actors. It’s a clever idea but I think that Egan’s execution here is only mediocre as the characters in here are still his usual super-rational engineer / scientist type. Another story that I like combines both practical problem-solving and exotic science-fiction worldbuilding about a people who seem to live in forests that float in the air. It’s an okay story that makes you work to figure out what their world is like. It ends on a bitter note and indeed many of the stories here have a harder edge than I remember from earlier on in Egan’s writing career.

As a big fan of Egan, I found this collection to be worth my while but there’s nothing in here that blows me away either. It’s hard to imagine material of this quality converting any new readers. He does still have some cool ideas but he needs to work on a better format in which to deliver them.