Review of Luminous by Greg Egan

Greg Egan's new short story collection Luminous disappoints

Luminous, by Greg Egan. Published in the UK in September 1998 by Millennium at £9.99. ISBN 1-85798-552-4. Follow the links at the bottom of this review to order Luminous from Bookpages, or other Greg Egan books from Bookpages or Amazon.com.

Greg Egan is Australia's leading SF author. His novels Quarantine, Permutation City, Distress and Diaspora and short story collection Axiomatic have received considerable acclaim. Luminous is his second mass-market short story collection (he has also had the novel An Unusual Angle and the short story collection Our Lady of Chernobyl published by Australian small presses).

It contains ten stories, all previously published in Interzone or Asimov's Science Fiction, ranging chronologically from 1993 to 1998.

Axiomatic was one of the finest short story collections of the 1990s, and I greeted the publication of Luminous with some excitement. Egan has almost single-handedly revived the "sense-of-wonder" that is so often cited as the distinguishing feature of good SF, by extrapolating well from a forbidding array of modern science and technology, including quantum mechanics, genetic engineering, computing, number theory and the philosophy of mind.

However, I found Luminous to be something of a disappointment. The stories, while individually good, are covering ground that Egan has already thoroughly explored, and there are no stories as original as "Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies" and "The Infinite Assassin" or as hard-hitting as "The Cutie", from the earlier collection. In fact, they all seemed rather similar in some ways.

Every story but one is in the first person, and all of Egan's viewpoint characters feel in some ways like the same character. They are all in some way isolated from humanity, almost autistic in their inability to interact on a human level with those around them (a point which is made explicitly in Distress). The scientific extrapolation is still ingenious and convincing, but is treading much the same ground as his earlier stories.

If you haven't read Axiomatic, then read that first. If you have read Axiomatic, you'll probably rush out to buy Luminous whatever I might say, but be prepared for a disappointment. It's by no means a bad collection, and Egan remains the SF writer with the greatest command of modern science and technology, but it lacks some of the originality of his earlier works.

Order Luminous from Bookpages
(UK-based, delivers worldwide)

Order other Greg Egan books from Bookpages
(UK-based, delivers worldwide)

-- Mike Scott

26 Sep 1998