Rating: 
Summary: Greg Egan does Short Stories
Review: Short stories are possiblly the best format for Egan's idea dense writing. This wonderful book never makes you stop thinking.I knew I was in for a good read when one of the early stories useda set of measure zero to describe time travel. From an objective standpoint this may be Egan's best book but the ideas didn't affect me quite as strongly as permutation city did so I am rating this only as a four.
Rating:
Summary: Greg Egan does Short Stories
Review: Short stories are possiblly the best format for Egan's idea dense writing. This wonderful book never makes you stop thinking. I knew I was in for a good read when one of the early stories useda set of measure zero to describe time travel. From an objective standpoint this may be Egan's best book but the ideas didn't affect me quite as strongly as permutation city did so I am rating this only as a four.
Rating:
Summary: Good Shorts
Review: This is a decent collection of short stories from Greg Egan. They are a little more accessible (as far as the technical aspects of the ideas explored) than the ones in the "Luminous" collection, but they also seem a little less polished. This is a good book to have around for whenever you need a short story fix.
Rating: 
Summary: A Mind
Review: This is my first Egan book, so I will not compare it to his other books. Egan's short stories - almost all of them close to 20 pages long - are all very different, and all based on a unique idea that Egan spins out as the story progresses. This, together with an affinity in the choice of themes, reminds me of Jorge L. Borges. In particular, it reminds me of those aspects of Borges that fascinates and captivates me. Like Borges, Egan has a tidy mind and a tidy writing style. Not too many characters, and no strays to "spice up" the story. Rather, he invents quirks to the main storyline itself. My favourite in this book is "Learning to be me"; though the theme is familiar, the twist isn't.
Rating:
Summary: SF with Science AND Philosophy
Review: This is what SF was made for. The science part is fun -- and Egan clearly knows his stuff. But this is more than science for its own sake. Egan uses the science angle to explore philosophical stumpers in otherwise impossible ways. The stories are wonderfully original and distinct, but two philosophic threads tie them together. The stories explore questions of determinism and free will or questions of where our identity resides and what are its irreducible components. Some stories explore both. So it's not just a bunch of unconnected Egan shorts hustled between two covers. The cumulative impact exceeds what any one of these stories could have hoped for on its own. Thoughtful and thought-provoking.
Rating:
Summary: Great ideas, great stories, a bit much to take in one lump
Review: Utterly fascinating and mind-blowing. So much so, that halfway through it, I felt in danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer force of new ideas and had to stop to let what I'd already read sink in. If you read a story in this collection and it *doesn't* blow your mind, you are experiencing cognitive saturation and should take a short break to allow your mind to return to something resembling its normal size and shape before continuing -- that is, if you want the full effect. It's quite interesting picking out the themes and tropes Egan is most fond of exploring -- even more fun if you've read his longer work, since some of the ideas in his novels can be found here in their distilled essence. The only thing I found somewhat wearying is his constant use of first-person narration, which isn't a problem in small doses (and is actually quite engaging much of the time), but which by repeated use gives the unintentional impression that most of Egan's protagonists have very similar personalities, or are even, impossibly and insupportably, in some way the same person, a vaguely disorienting effect that causes the stories to blur together in the reader's memory. This is unfortunate because the stories are well worth recalling as distinct entities.
Rating:
Summary: The Most Original SciFi Author Now Writing
Review: What John Varley was to the 1970s and early 1980s, Greg Egan is to the 1990s and 2000s: An author who thinks about what it will be like for the human mind and soul to encounter the technological advances that can change the nature of consciousness itself. After reading a story like one of these you are too stunned to think, because the concepts themselves are so mind-blowing. This book, by the way, is only the beginning: Egan's later stories (many of which can be found in Gardner Dozois's annual collections of science fiction) and Egan's novels (especially Diaspora) show more of the same.
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