Dust jacket by Steve Montiglio

Subterranean Press is pleased to present the follow-up collection to Dark Integers and Other Stories. Crystal Nights is a full 50% longer than Greg Egan’s most recent collection, featuring all never-before-collected stories.

The nine stories in Greg Egan’s new collection range from parables of contemporary human conflict and ambition to far-future tales of our immortal descendants.

In “Lost Continent”, a time traveler seeking refuge from a war-torn land faces hostility and bureaucratic incompetence. “Crystal Nights” portrays a driven man’s moral compromises as he chases an elusive technological breakthrough, while in “Steve Fever” the technology itself falls victim to its own hype.

“TAP” brings us a new kind of poetry, where a word is more powerful than a thousand images. “Singleton” shows us a new kind of child, born of human DNA modeled in a quantum computer—who, in “Oracle”, journeys to a parallel world to repay a debt to an intellectual ancestor.

“Induction” chronicles the methods and motives behind humanity’s first steps to the stars. “Border Guards” reflects on the painful history of a tranquil utopia. And in the final story, “Hot Rock”, two immortal citizens of the galaxy-spanning Amalgam find that an obscure, sunless world conceals mind-spinning technological marvels, bitter factional struggles, and a many-layered secret history.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Lost Continent
Crystal Nights
Steve Fever
TAP
Induction
Singleton
Oracle
Border Guards
Hot Rock

From Booklist:
“Egan executes…with a mastery of setting and characterization not commonly associated with writing concerned with such ‘hard-science’ subjects as AI. May he find as much fame and fortune as he will satisfied readers.”

From SF Site:
"Here in Crystal Nights and Other Stories, he finds a way to balance the complexity of his ideas with enough story and character for the reader to care about them as stories and not just speculative essays on the latest in cosmology, physics or artificial intelligence research, and shows how good a writer Greg Egan can be.”

From Locus:
“Throughout, the tonic key of this collection is passionate engagement with a world in which understanding processes cannot be separated from moral vision, in which understanding is itself a kind of sacrament, a validation of our nature as thinking beings.”