Another book I grabbed at the CBC Calgary Book Sale last month, Axiomatic is a collection of short stories by Greg Egan. The first time I read this book was when Reyn and I were in Turkey. I’d never heard of Greg Egan and then these stories of jewels in brains and designer viruses and belief attractor zones were so intensely weird. Now, after reading a small pile of Greg Egan novels, I realize these stories are actually the more accessible chunk of his work.
There are two stories that are very similar in the collection. Both are about runners going into a disaster zone. Both involve describing these weird landscapes formed by the anomalous event. This was the only part of the book I wasn’t a big fan of, feeling like I’d already read that. It sort of highlighted the “ideas man” aspect of his writing. Apart from that one near repeat, the book was as good as I remembered it, and I’m super glad I own it now, since it’s long out-of-print.
Axiomatic is one of my favorite books. One of the stories I think you are talking about “Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies” I actually found to be pretty original, but yes, Egan’s writing can be very abstract. It’s because he’s a computer programmer, maybe.