AustLit

'I’m not afraid to admit that I felt trepidation before embarking on this novel. A world where the most significant difference between people isn’t color or creed, but instead their scale – that is, their relative heights – and that comes with a website explaining how the science of that scaling works? The very idea – people on seven different scales, where Scale Seven is 1:64 of Scale One – seemed entirely likely to break my brain. But... it’s a new Greg Egan book, the first since 2021’s The Book of All Skies. I figured that if I managed – indeed, thoroughly enjoyed – his Orthogonal Universe trilogy, complete with vector diagrams as part of the story, then I was prepared to give this new wild, likely-to-be-immaculately- thought-out, proposition a go.' (Introduction)

Greg Egan’s Sleep and the Soul collects his very newest short-form work: nine stories originally published between 2019 and 2022, plus one that is, as of this writing, not even officially out yet. This is the seventh collection of Egan’s short work I have reviewed over nearly three decades, and I notice (again) how he demonstrates one of the fundamental generating mechanisms of science fiction: what Samuel Delany (and then Joanna Russ) called ‘‘subjunctivity,’’ the posing and elaborating of the conjectural what-ifs that generate enabling devices and story possibilities – the raw materials of ‘‘worldbuilding.’'(Introduction)