peteg's blog - noise - books - 2019 04 18 GregEgan Artifacts

Greg Egan: Artifacts (collected shorts).

/noise/books | Link

Kindle. A (possibly bootlegged) collection of shorts, some of which look like Egan working things out in public. Thematically he's fixated on equating consciousness with computation (Dust which became Permutation City — Paul Durham makes me think of Le Roux; Wang's Carpets) and corporate totalitarianism (Beyond the Whistle Test sounds like Facebook; Yeyuka on medical technology monopolies). There's an extended riff on Tim Buckley's big tunes in Worthless, with a namecheck of This Mortal Coil's eternal cover. Reification Highway tries to make sense of solid logic: a fuel, a mystical space of nonstandard substances? Is "Chalmer" a dig at the type theorists? Tap and others has it that infrared is the local wireless tech. Others riff on deals with the devil, vampires, made up physics, the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, whatever.

It's more hard-boiled noir than cyberpunk.