Book description
"Wonderful, mind-expanding stuff, and well written too."-The Guardian
Axiomatic is a wonderful collection of eighteen short stories by Hugo Award-winning author Greg Egan. The stories in this collection have appeared in such science fiction magazines as Interzone and Asimov's between 1989 and 1992.
From junkies who drink at the time-stream…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Axiomatic as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Your older self writes a diary and sends it back in time to you. It reveals that between two pathways, you will take a right. You arrive at that crossroads, and no matter how willing you are to defy your unveiled fate, you can’t avoid choosing right again. I often find this type of super-deterministic scenario in science fiction, invariably raising philosophical questions about free will. Nevertheless, Egan is the only author to offer a satisfactory psychological solution to why the protagonist can’t change their fate. And this is just the first of the short stories in this collection. Axiomatic…
From Mario's list on where reality dissolves into strangeness and wonder.
Philip K. Dick was not so lucky as to be able to read and absorb the entire library of Philip K. Dick’s writings before beginning his own writing. But Greg Egan was. As a result, Greg Egan’s short stories in his collection, Axiomatic, show the directions that Philip K. Dick may have gone in if he had been able to live two lifetimes. (It is noteworthy that, on this website, John L. Casti recommends Greg Egan’s novel Permutation City, also one of my favorites.)
In his short story, The Hundred Light-Year Diary, Egan imagines a world where you…
From Michael's list on the mind as more than a brain.
If you love Axiomatic...
The High House
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
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