View source for Luminous (book)

{{Short description|Story collection by Greg Egan}}
{{Use Australian English|date=June 2024}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=June 2024}}

{{Infobox book
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| name           = Luminous
| image          = File:LuminousEgan.jpg
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| caption        = First edition cover
| author         = Greg Egan
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| publisher      = [[Millennium (publisher)|Millennium]]
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| pub_date       = 1998
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| isbn           = 1-85798-573-7
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| dewey          = 823/.914 
| congress       = PR9619.3.E35 L86 1999 
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'''''Luminous''''' is a collection of short [[science fiction]] stories by [[Greg Egan]] first published in 1998 by [[Orion Publishing Group|Millenium]].<ref name="ISFDB">{{cite web|title= '''Luminous'' by Greg Egan |publisher= ISFDB|url= https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?38911|access-date= 1 June 2024}}</ref>

==Contents==
''Luminous'' contains the following short stories:

* "[[Chaff (novelette)|Chaff]]" — An agent is sent to kill a geneticist who is working on important brain-altering research in a drug lord-controlled stronghold in the jungles of Colombia.
* "[[Mitochondrial Eve (novelette)|Mitochondrial Eve]]" — An organization is trying to trace a common maternal ancestor for recent humanity.
*"[[Luminous (short story)|Luminous]]" — A pair of researchers find a defect in mathematics, where an assertion (X) leads to a contradictory assertion (not X) after a long but finite series of steps. Using a powerful virtual computer made of light beams (Luminous), they are able to map and shape the boundary between the near-side and far-side mathematics, leading to a showdown with real consequences in the physical universe.
* "Mister Volition"
* "Cocoon"
* "Transition Dreams" — A woman is informed that the [[mind uploading]] she plans to undergo is going to cause subjective experiences she is not going to remember.
* "[[Silver Fire (novelette)|Silver Fire]]" — An epidemiologist traces the incidents of a fatal but rare disease through the rural USA.
* "[[Reasons to Be Cheerful (short story)|Reasons to Be Cheerful]]" — A boy discovers he has a serious brain tumor, which was causing him to be amazingly happy. With it removed, he becomes despondent, and undergoes a new and extensive treatment eventually, with a form of brain network, to try to get back to a more useful life many years later.
*"Our Lady of Chernobyl" — A man is hired to find a [[radioactive]] religious icon. The search turns deadly.
* "[[The Planck Dive]]" — Physicists about to undergo a one-way expedition into a black hole are visited by a stranger and his daughter.

==Critical reception==

Writing in ''Vector'' [[Brian Stableford]] noted: "Egan's second story-collection, ''Luminous'', is markedly better than his first. Axiomatic, and warrants comparison with such classic collections of Contes philosophiques as Jorge Luis Borges's ''Labyrinths'' and Primo Levi's ''The Sixth Day''...This is ''the'' science fiction book of the year, and it should be on every sf lover's shelf...For good or ill, this is the shape of things to come."<ref>{{cite web|title="Greg Egan – ''Luminous''" |publisher= Vector 203, January/February 1999, p24|url=https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Vector/Vector203.pdf|access-date= 1 June 2024}}</ref>

In ''SF Commentary'' Bruce Gillespie noted: "Greg Egan has achieved an evenness of texture and consistency of accomplishment in these stories that makes it difficult to remember them separately. They so nearly add up to one Eganworld that it’s hard to differentiate between their viewpoints. I’ve given four stars to most of them, and particularly liked 'Transition Dreams', 'Silver Fire', 'Chaff', and "The Planck Dive"."<ref>{{cite web|title="''Luminous'' by Greg Egan" |publisher= SF Commentary 80A, August 2010, p64|url=https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/SF_Commentary/sf_commentary_80a_gillespie_2010-08.pdf|access-date= 1 June 2024}}</ref>

==References==
{{reflist}}

{{Greg Egan}}

[[Category:Short story collections by Greg Egan]]
[[Category:1998 short story collections]]

{{1990s-sf-story-collection-stub}}