Download or read book Permutation City written by Greg Egan and published by Greg Egan. This book was released on 1994-04-26 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Durham keeps making Copies of himself: software simulations of his own brain and body which can be run in virtual reality, albeit seventeen times more slowly than real time. He wants them to be his guinea pigs for a set of experiments about the nature of artificial intelligence, time, and causality, but they keep changing their mind and baling out on him, shutting themselves down. Maria Deluca is an Autoverse addict; she’s unemployed and running out of money, but she can’t stop wasting her time playing around with the cellular automaton known as the Autoverse, a virtual world that follows a simple set of mathematical rules as its “laws of physics”. Paul makes Maria a very strange offer: he asks her to design a seed for an entire virtual biosphere able to exist inside the Autoverse, modelled right down to the molecular level. The job will pay well, and will allow her to indulge her obsession. There has to be a catch, though, because such a seed would be useless without a simulation of the Autoverse large enough to allow the resulting biosphere to grow and flourish — a feat far beyond the capacity of all the computers in the world.
Download or read book Permutation City written by Greg Egan and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-12-30 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immortality can be yours . . . at a price Permutation city is the tale of a man with a vision - how to create immortality - and how that vision becomes grows beyond his control. Encompassing the lives and struggles of an artificial life junkie desperate to save her dying mother, a billionaire banker scarred by a terrible crime, the lovers for whom, in their timeless virtual world, love is not enough - and much more - Permutation city is filled with the sense of wonder and dread. Can what makes you human be distilled into data? And what happens if you can't afford to pay? Readers are having their minds blown by PERMUTATION CITY: "Egan tells the story masterfully. I can only marvel at how he finds his inspiration for a high-tech tale in an ancient wisdom like Kabbalah, and then proceeds to out-Kabbalah even the Kabbalists with his creativity" - Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ "Egan questions what it really means to be human in a way that it's quite unsurpassed in my mind" - Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ "THIS is why I read SF. THIS is the sense of wonder I'm looking for in a SF story. Forget everything you read about virtual reality, artificial life & consciousness - nothing compares to the concepts and the worldbuilding in this book. This is ultimate postcyberpunk ever" - Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ "I can say without qualification that Greg Egan is the greatest science fiction author I've ever read" - Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Download or read book Diaspora written by Greg Egan and published by Greg Egan. This book was released on 1997-09-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2975, the orphan Yatima is grown from a randomly mutated digital mind seed in the conceptory of Konishi polis. Yatima explores the Coalition of Polises, the network of computers where most life in the solar system now resides, and joins a friend, Inoshiro, to borrow an abandoned robot body and meet a thriving community of “fleshers” in the enclave of Atlanta. Twenty-one years later, news arrives from a lunar observatory: gravitational waves from Lac G-1, a nearby pair of neutron stars, show that the Earth is about to be bathed in a gamma-ray flash created by the stars’ collision — an event that was not expected to take place for seven million years. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Atlanta to try to warn the fleshers, but meet suspicion and disbelief. Some lives are saved, but the Earth is ravaged. In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors resolve to discover the cause of the neutron stars’ premature collision, and they launch a thousand polises into interstellar space in search of answers. This diaspora eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an older group of travellers: a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe.
Download or read book Teranesia written by Greg Egan and published by Gollancz. This book was released on 2010-12-30 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a young boy, Prabir Suresh lives with his parents and sister on an otherwise uninhabited island in a remote part of the Indonesian peninsula. Prabir names it Teranesia, populating it with imaginary creatures even stranger than the evolutionarily puzzling butterflies that his parents are studying. Civil war strikes, orphaning Prabir and his sister. Eighteen years later, rumours of bizarre new species of plants and animals being discovered in the peninsula that was their childhood home draw Prabir's sister back to the island - Prabir cannot bear for her to have gone out alone and he follows, persuading a pharmaceutical researcher to take him along as a guide.
Download or read book In the Orbit of Sirens written by T. A. Bruno and published by Song of Kamaria. This book was released on 2020-10-04 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nightmarish machines have driven humanity into the depths of space. The survivors are forced to adapt to a planet filled with monsters.
Download or read book Instantiation written by Greg Egan and published by Greg Egan. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Instantiation is a collection of 11 stories by the Hugo award winning author Greg Egan: “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine” “Zero For Conduct” “Uncanny Valley” “Seventh Sight” “The Nearest” “Shadow Flock” “Bit Players” “Break My Fall” “3-adica” “The Slipway” “Instantiation”
Download or read book Quarantine written by Greg Egan and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-12-30 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's late in the 21st century and bioengineering is now so common that people are able to modify their minds in any way they wish. It is an era which has been shaped by information systems so vast that security, in any form, is easily breached. Now you can be whatever you want to be, and do whatever you want to do. On Earth anyway. One night, thirty three years ago, the stars went out. 'The Bubble' - a perfect sphere centred on the sun - appeared in the sky, isolating the solar system from the rest of the universe. For thirty-three years, humanity has lived with the religious cults and terrorism which spawned in the wake of the darkness. We are now alone. Humanity has been cut off. Quarantined.
Download or read book The Best of Greg Egan written by Greg Egan and published by Gollancz. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greg Egan is arguably Australia's greatest living science fiction writer. In a career spanning more than thirty years, he has produced a steady stream of novels and stories that address a wide range of scientific and philosophical concerns: artificial intelligence, higher mathematics, science vs religion, the nature of consciousness, and the impact of technology on the human personality. All these ideas and more find their way into this generous and illuminating collection, the clear product of a man who is both a master storyteller and a rigorous, exploratory thinker. The Best of Greg Egan contains twenty stories and novellas arranged in chronological order, and each of them is a brilliantly conceived, painstakingly developed gem, including the Hugo Award-winning novella "Oceanic", a powerful account of a boy whose deeply held religious beliefs are undermined by what he comes to learn about the laws of the physical world. This book really does represent the best of Greg Egan, and it therefore takes its place among the best of contemporary SF. Startling, intelligent and always hugely entertaining, it provides an ideal introduction to one of the most accomplished and original writers working today. This is an important and provocative collection, and it deserves a place on the serious science fiction reader's permanent shelf.
Download or read book Dichronauts written by Greg Egan and published by Start Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seth is a surveyor, along with his friend Theo, a leech-like creature running through his skull who tells Seth what lies to his left and right. Theo, in turn, relies on Seth for mobility, and for ordinary vision looking forwards and backwards. Like everyone else in their world, they are symbionts, depending on each other to survive. In the universe containing Seth's world, light cannot travel in all directions: there is a “dark cone” to the north and south. Seth can only face to the east (or the west, if he tips his head backwards). If he starts to turn to the north or south, his body stretches out across the landscape, and to rotate as far as north-north-east is every bit as impossible as accelerating to the speed of light. Every living thing in Seth’s world is in a state of perpetual migration as they follow the sun’s shifting orbit and the narrow habitable zone it creates. Cities are being constantly disassembled at one edge and rebuilt at the other, with surveyors mapping safe routes ahead. But when Seth and Theo join an expedition to the edge of the habitable zone, they discover a terrifying threat: a fissure in the surface of the world, so deep and wide that no one can perceive its limits. As the habitable zone continues to move, the migration will soon be blocked by this unbridgeable void, and the expedition has only one option to save its city from annihilation: descend into the unknown.
Download or read book Greg Egan written by Karen Burnham and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greg Egan (1961- ) publishes works that challenge readers with rigorous, deeply-informed scientific speculation. He unapologetically delves into mathematics, physics, and other disciplines in his prose, putting him in the vanguard of the hard science fiction renaissance of the 1990s. A working physicist and engineer, Karen Burnham is uniquely positioned to provide an in-depth study of Egan's science-heavy oeuvre. Her survey of the author's career covers novels like Permutation City and Schild's Ladder and the Hugo Award-winning novella "Oceanic," analyzing how Egan used cutting-edge scientific theory to explore ethical questions and the nature of humanity. As Burnham shows, Egan's collected works constitute a bold artistic statement: that narratives of science are equal to those of poetry and drama, and that science holds a place in the human condition as exalted as religion or art. The volume includes a rare interview with the famously press-shy Egan covering his works, themes, intellectual interests, and thought processes.
Download or read book Schild s Ladder written by Greg Egan and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-12-30 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cass has stumbled on something that might be an entirely different type of physics, and she's travelled three hundred and fifty light-years to Mimosa Station, a remote experimental facility, to test her theory. The novo-vacuum she creates is predicted to begin decaying the instant it's created, but even so short-lived a microscopic speck could shed new light on the origins of the universe. But instead of decaying, Cass's novo-vacuum is wildly successful and begins expanding, slowly but inexorably taking over the universe ... SCHILD'S LADDER: a wild ride through the far future by one of the world's most respected and acclaimed writers.
Download or read book Incandescence written by Greg Egan and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-06-10 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A million years from now, the galaxy is divided between the vast, cooperative meta-civilisation known as the Amalgam, and the silent occupiers of the galactic core known as the Aloof. The Aloof have long rejected all attempts by the Amalgam to enter their territory, but have permitted travellers to take a perilous ride as unencrypted data in their communications network, providing a short-cut across the galaxy's central bulge. When Rakesh encounters a traveller, Lahl, who claims she was woken by the Aloof on such a journey and shown a meteor full of traces of DNA, he accepts her challenge to try to find the uncharted world deep in the Aloof's territory from which the meteor originated. Roi and Zak live inside the Splinter, a world of rock that swims in a sea of light they call the Incandescence. Living on the margins of a rigidly organised society, they seek to decipher the subtle clues that can reveal the true nature of the Splinter. In fact, the Splinter is orbiting a black hole, which is about to capture a neighbouring star, wreaking havoc. As the signs of danger grow, Roi, Zak, and a growing band of recruits struggle to understand and take control of their fate. Meanwhile, Rakesh is gradually uncovering their remote history, and his search for the lost DNA world ultimately leads him to a civilisation trapped in cultural stagnation, and startling revelations about the true nature and motives of the Aloof.
Download or read book Axiomatic written by Greg Egan and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-12-30 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE HUNDRED LIGHT YEAR DIARY - Scientists can bounce messages from the future back to the present, but there's no guarantee they'll tell the truth ... LEARNING TO BE ME - Crystalline minds may take the place of human brains, but where does the self really lie? CLOSER - Lovers exchange bodies and minds, but their experiments go just that little bit too far, proving that you can have too much of a good thing
Download or read book Distress written by Greg Egan and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-12-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the utopian, man-made island, Stateless, Nobel Prize winner Violet Mosala is close to solving the greatest problem of her career - the quest for the ultimate Theory of Everything (TOE) is almost over. Burned out by recording the abuses of biotech for his TV news syndicate, Andrew Worth grabs the chance to follow Violet's story. In contrast the world of theoretical physics seems like an anaesthetised mathematical heaven, where everything is cool and abstract. He could not have been more wrong. One by one Mosala's rival quantum physicists are disappearing from the scientific summit at Stateless. But why? Is it something to do with Violet herself, or is there some other, more esoteric, force at work undermining the Theory of Everything Conference?
Download or read book A Fire Upon The Deep written by Vernor Vinge and published by Tor Science Fiction. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now with a new introduction for the Tor Essentials line, A Fire Upon the Deep is sure to bring a new generation of SF fans to Vinge's award-winning works. A Hugo Award-winning Novel! “Vinge is one of the best visionary writers of SF today.”-David Brin Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence. Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. Tor books by Vernor Vinge Zones of Thought Series A Fire Upon The Deep A Deepness In The Sky The Children of The Sky Realtime/Bobble Series The Peace War Marooned in Realtime Other Novels The Witling Tatja Grimm's World Rainbows End Collections Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge True Names At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Summers at Castle Auburn written by Sharon Shinn and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-04-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A woman blessed, or cursed, with a talent for witchcraft returns to Castle Auburn where she spent her childhood in joy-only to find an aura of dread awaiting her.
Download or read book Prime Suspects written by Andrew Granville and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An outrageous graphic novel that investigates key concepts in mathematics Integers and permutations—two of the most basic mathematical objects—are born of different fields and analyzed with separate techniques. Yet when the Mathematical Sciences Investigation team of crack forensic mathematicians, led by Professor Gauss, begins its autopsies of the victims of two seemingly unrelated homicides, Arnie Integer and Daisy Permutation, they discover the most extraordinary similarities between the structures of each body. Prime Suspects is a graphic novel that takes you on a voyage of forensic discovery, exploring some of the most fundamental ideas in mathematics. Travel with Detective von Neumann as he leaves no clue unturned, from shepherds’ huts in the Pyrenees to secret societies in the cafés of Paris, from the hidden codes in the music of the stones to the grisly discoveries in Finite Fields. Tremble at the ferocity of the believers in deep and rigid abstraction. Feel the frustration—and the excitement—of our young heroine, Emmy Germain, as she blazes a trail for women in mathematical research and learns from Professor Gauss, the greatest forensic detective of them all. Beautifully drawn and exquisitely detailed, Prime Suspects is unique, astonishing, and witty—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience mathematics like never before.
