“Instantiation” by Greg Egan

Main Index / Reviews Index / Fiction Reviews Index / 2020 Reviews Index

Rating: 4/5 Stars

A collection of Egan’s recent stories, this collection shows the strength and breath of the author’s imagination in stories that span from personal crisis, financial and biological, to ones that envelop the whole world and involve characters that think about and solve complex problems. “The Slipway” stands out as a story that involves scientists solving an astronomical problem, yet remains personal by showing that scientists are human and argue about but finally agree on the solution to a Hard SF problem.

• “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine”: in a future when people are being replaced by machines at their jobs, one man loses his job and struggles to find work and support his family. But unusual events, like a parent who apparently makes a living secretly writing monthly porn novels or a relative who believes the machines are out to get him, start to make him wonder what kind of future is in store, especially when his own desperate plan to get money suddenly appears to succeed. Could it be yet another plan by the machines for those out of work?
• “Zero For Conduct”: an Afghan girl who is very smart ‘dabbles’ in chemistry and creates a long sought after material. But now living in Iran, she has to resort to trickery and deception to get enought money first to secure a patent on it before she can earn her well deserved riches. This, she will have to do with the help of her relatives who recognise her cleverness amidst a society that does not pay much heed to the intelligence of women.
• “Uncanny Valley”: a famous script writer uploads a copy of himself into another body. But for unknown reasons parts of his memory are left out of the copy, rendering it almost complete. Now, after his death, the copy wants to find out why some memories were left out; and it may involve it in finding the uncomfortable truth about a period in the past when the script writer was just starting out and gets involved in a potential plagiarism case.
• “Seventh Sight”: a young boy fitted with a implant to replace his failing eyesight ‘upgrades’ the implants by unlocking additional features that enable him to see additional shades of colour. He also get involved with a group of teens who have also done the ‘upgrades’. But what happens when technology catches up with them and let’s everybody see the world in additional shades of colour like them?
• “The Nearest”: a detective investigates a disturbing family murder case. But as the case proceeds, the detective is suddenly thrown into shock when she discovers that those closest to her are not who they say they are. As she runs and hides, she learns of other people who have also discovered that those nearest to them have been ‘replaced’ by unfamiliar replicas. But further investigations would reveal the actual truth behind the epidemic of unfamiliarity.
• “Shadow Flock”: a lecturer at a university is suddenly involved in an ‘evil’ Mission:Impossible type mission when her brother is held hostage. Her skills at programming groups of small drones to perform tasks in a changing environment are key to a group’s desire to steal crypto-money from several people. With no way to get the police involved and no guarantees she and her brother might be okay at the end of the caper, she subtlety modifies her code to ensure they can get away somehow but maybe not to safety.
• “Bit Players”: what looks at first to be a strange world where the rules of gravity have gone haywire turns out to be a virtual creation, with characters who act out lives for the players who enter the world. But the characters, whose templates were scans of real people, have feelings and ambitions and they want to push at the boundaries of their created world.
• “Break My Fall”: a trip to Mars, aided by spinning slingshots made from asteroids, turns into a crisis when the sun starts to misbehave and the fleet must seek shelter. But an emergency requires the members of one ship to take life-or-death risks to save another ship in danger.
• “3-adica”: a sequel to “Bit Players”, this story has some of the characters in another game. They have discovered how to exploit flaws and bugs in the rendering software of the games engine to transport themselves to from game to game, looking for the game called 3-adica, whose unusual mathematical rules may give them space to live out their own lives free from observation of the system administrators. But they first have to survive in this game while gathering the materials needed for that final jump, a game featuring vampires in Victorian times.
• “The Slipway”: an amateur astronomer discovers strange new stars in the sky that shouldn’t be there. But it is only after more astronomers and theorists look at the strange growing patch of new stars in the sky do they start to realise the truth of what happened. A story that shows the way scientific discoveries are really made as well as taxing the ability of the reader to comprehend what has happened.
• “Instantiation”: a sequel to “3-adica”, the characters safely living unnoticed in a place of their own making among the game worlds now need an escape, for the company that runs the games is losing money and may shut down. But to do that, they need to lure a player who uses a gaming system with a known flaw back into a game so they can exploit the flaw to move to other servers. Complications arise when they realise the player may be logging their data movements so they need an audacious plan to deceive the player and hide their movements.

Book read from 2020/06/29 to 2020/07/22