Axiomatic

Axiomatic gathers eighteen stories Greg Egan published between 1989 and 1992, each one built around a single premise from neuroscience, physics, or biotechnology and followed to its conclusion. A device lets a man rewrite his own values for a night. A backed-up consciousness watches its original die. A scientist discovers the laws of arithmetic are not as fixed as everyone believed. Egan treats each idea as a working machine and tests what it does to the people forced to live with it. The stories run dense and cold, more interested in the shape of a concept than in comfort, and they ask the same questions about identity, free will, and the self that drive Chiang's work.