Greg Egan is a master of the short story. In this collection he deals with many complex scientific concepts, including the moral aspects, with an ingenious skill.

He deals with the idea of consciousness extensively, from the definition of consciousness as human in Learning to Be Me and A Kidnapping, to effect on the mind of extreme circumstance such as in The Safe-Deposit Box. He explores the flexibility of beliefs and morals in Axiomatic, The Walk and Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies.

The moral culpability of human action and technology is covered in The Hundred Light-Year Diary, The Cutie and Appropriate Love, while the immoral actions of fanatics show up in The Moat and The Moral Virologist.

Greg Egan writes with wit and insight about physics, psychology, quatum mechanics, biotechnology, and social politics, and never fails to delight and inspire. This is something that anyone who reads scifi for a challenging insight into the possibilities of science, it is true speculative fiction.