Axiomatic

Greg Egan
1995

Greg Egan is a master of the short story and in this collection he deals with many complex scientific concepts, including the moral and ethical aspects, with an ingenious skill. Typically they take a concept, put it into a real setting with normal people, and then there’s a twist.

Axiomatic is written with wit and insight about physics, psychology, quatum mechanics, biotechnology, and social politics, and these stories never fail to delight and inspire. This book is for anyone who reads scifi for a challenging insight into the possibilities of science, it is true speculative fiction.

My favourite examples include:

The Hundred-Light-Year Diary

The discovery of a time-reversed galaxy is at first neither believable or interesting, but it’s soon realised that by blocking or opening the shutter on a special telescope, simple messages can be passed from the future into the past, and the future diaries are born.

Each person can use one hundred words a day to record their life and send it back to a time before they are born, waiting to be read. Some find that they cannot cope with unexpected events that aren’t recorded in their diaries, and that small lies have been told. But what about the future world history? What if they aren’t telling the truth in their diaries?

The Safe-Deposit Box

“I dream a simple dream. I dream that I have a name. One name, unchanging, mine until death. I don’t know what my name is, but that doesn’t matter. Knowing that I have it is enough.”

One man wakes up each day with a new body, but the body belongs to someone else. Belonging to some other man who lives in the same city, was born within the same two months. These men apparently have no recollection of the days he spends being them.

Learning to Be Me

“I was six years old when my parents told me there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.”

The Ndoli device was nicknamed “the jewel”, monitored by a teaching device, it reads and follows your every thought and and action, corrected faster than thought by the teacher, so that it is identical to you. Someday, the organic brain will be removed and the reins will be handed over to the jewel, which will live forever, and it is you.

The Cutie

What do you do if you desperately want to be a father and can’t find a partner? You might buy a cutie. Cuties can be genetically modified before their life begins into whatever you want, and they are exactly perfect. They do everything a normal baby does, except learn. They are subhuman, less intelligent than a puppy but so much cuter, and they are programmed to die on their fourth birthday.

So what happens if there is a mistake when the cutie is created?

This collection includes: