Six months after I say that I should not read short stories in book form, here I am again. But it's Greg Egan! It also has long-ish short stories, rather than 5-page wonders, so reading one or two a day is a stately pace that finishes the book in a week.
Greg Egan differs from the usual sci fi short story pattern by breaking his stories in half. The normal plan is to take one scientific idea or advance and play through its implications. Mr. Egan starts there but shifts the theme of the story while playing through. One story starts with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics ("MWI") and transitions into child-rearing difficulties. The mid-story switch is not always entirely satisfying, but it efficiently packs in another layer of story without needing more exposition. It is as if the second half is the story he meant to tell, but he felt that he needed the first half to introduce the ideas that led to it. (Kind of like how Ender's Game
came to be as an extended introduction to Speaker for the Dead
.)"Lost Continent" is a current events story by sci fi proxy. The allegory felt ham-fisted once it developed enough to be noticeable. The story is about a temporal refugee from the Middle East after agents from centuries ahead arm one side of a religious conflict. Slaughter ensued there, more one-sided than the internecine violence that preceded it, while bureaucracy and despair abound in the refugee camp. It is an evocative way to re-cast issues of Western foreign policy and refugees, but not a must-read. Strong on characters, light on plot.
"Crystal Nights" is a rejoinder to the author's own Permutation City, giving more attention to the morality of evolving a sentient species. Evolution, for those just joining us, is a horrible process involving billions of senseless deaths.
The introduction takes this as a refutation of the Simulation Argument. Mr. Egan denies the premise that our descendants are likely to want to run simulations of human history, because the slaughterbench of history is too horrible for anyone to intentionally put people through it. It is a variation on the Problem of Evil: this world is too horrible to plausibly assert a [x] creator. I do not find Mr. Egan's argument compelling, however, because humans already commit atrocities grand and small on a daily basis. That something "is both silly and odious" does not mean that it will not happen, and we only need two simulations for the majority of sentient lives to have been created in them. "Two" is not a number to be dismissed as "sensationalist nonsense." Multiply the percent of people who don't think simulated intelligences' qualia "count" by the population that will be able to afford to run them by the percent of people who would "shake the ant farm," and we might be living in one of the nicer simulations. Mr. Egan is somehow not seeing this while talking to people who have no problems running programs that would create, abuse, and annihilate trillions of sentient consciousnesses. If you can commit atrocities with the push of a button, some people are going to push that button, even before adding in thoughts like "for a great purpose."
"Crystal Nights" is, however, a good story, light on characters but strong on ideas. It is still stronger on character than the typical Asimov short story.
"Steve Fever" is also mostly an idea story. It involves a young man who gets caught up in nanomachines and the history of how the situation arose. It enacts but does not discuss the same problem that "Crystal Nights" does on a much smaller scale. One could describe one of the major story elements as moving towards immortality through continuous resurrection and self-annihilation, which I do not expect to make any sense if you have not read it. Interesting ideas, but the only interesting story is in the exposition of the backstory. You cannot have most of the page count as dead space in a short story.
"TAP" is a murder mystery that considers the notion of a virtual reality brown note, a bit of code that kills the person experiencing it. The titular TAP is a virtual reality language, a system for expressing entire concepts and experiences with single digital "words." The plot starts with the question of whether a "death word" is possible for TAP and, if so, who might have done it (or did an old woman just have a heart attack). The ideas in play are the politics, sociology, and philosophy of having that kind of digital telepathy. Along with a theme of generational and technological change, a key factor is that TAP expresses both analytically and experientially: you can fully experience the concept/experience encoded in the "word," or you can regard it from the outside, seeing its parts without becoming one of them. I leave the implications to the author and the reader. I note that "TAP" also mentions pay phones. Cell phones were not big in 1995, but having pay phones in this story comically evokes those 1950s sci fi stories with giant computers using paper print-outs and punch cards. The story makes good use of characters, plot, and ideas, but ends with less ado than the build up would suggest.
"Induction" is two short, related stories stapled together. It treats upon technical development and galactic exploration from a concrete, human perspective. More compactly than anything else I have seen from Greg Egan, this highlights the tensions and ambiguities in uploading, which becomes both a way of engaging the galaxy and a reason not to bother. "Hot Rock" touches on this as well.
"Singleton" is the first of three longer (50-page) stories. It takes MWI very seriously and considers the implication that, for every success you have or decision you make, some alternate you fails or fails to live up to his convictions. Everything happens, but you only experience one path. And what is to be done about that? The story transitions to a variant on parenting an oppressed child when the protagonist creates a daughter who exists equally in every Everett branch.
"Oracle" combines the entire book in a way that might not be entirely approachable if you are not familiar with the science involved. Most of these short stories focus on one idea from the philosophy of science or of mind, but this one flirts with everything else in the book. A debate summarizes Gödel, Escher, Bach in 5 pages, which is too short where GEB can be verbose, and both are perhaps too clever for their own good. Our hero is Alan Turing, in a different history where England was kept from destroying him. Our villain is C.S. Lewis, who is a self-righteous, irrationalist monster that preys on children before they are coherent enough to resist delusions (read "TAP" for a parallel thought), later moving to grander tragedies in the name of faith. That can be uncomfortable. A pro-faith reading of the story is possible, in which C.S. Lewis is the hero, but not plausible given the author.
"Border Guards" opens with the book's fourth take on quantum physics, this time using it for soccer via probability amplitude manipulation. I found it absorbing but with low pay-off for consuming a third of the story. The story goes on to refute The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. You may not think of fiction as the sort of thing you can "refute," but there it is.
"Hot Rock" is a surprisingly straightforward science fiction story. After all the quantum mechanics, uploading, machine intelligence, nanotech, here is a standard "explore the new planet" story that takes all those as givens. It is not bad, but it is nothing special or unique, which makes it one of the weaker contributions.
Greg Egan's writing assumes that intelligence is substrate-irrelevant and identity is information theoretical. That is, you can (theoretically) back your brain up to a computer, and that backup copy is still "you." We have stories here where people are digitally transmitted over light years (another tremendous presumption: something you would still call your culture/species will still exist after a 3000-year round trip), and everyone seems comfortable with "reboot from backup" as a worst case scenario. You may recall Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in which restoring someone from a backup is so common that it is used to escape inconveniences like colds. This is a common transhumanist notion, but it must be rather shocking for those who do not share upload-friendly theories of identity. It would be suicide combined with creating your own doppleganger. Because if that copy is not also you, but just someone else who remembers having been you, you still die, even if someone who thinks of himself as you keeps going. Worse, if that copy is just a non-sentient program mocked up to act like you, you don't even have that thinking person left behind. To me, Permutation City is required reading for all intelligent, forward-looking people; for many, uploading is farcical at best and terrifying as a prospect.
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