Luminous (book)

Luminous

First edition cover
Author	Greg Egan
Publisher	Millennium
Publication date	1999
ISBN	1-85798-573-7
Dewey Decimal	823/.914
LC Class	PR9619.3.E35 L86 1999

Luminous is a collection of short science fiction stories by Greg Egan.

Luminous contains the following short stories:

• "Chaff" — An agent is sent to kill a geneticist who is working in a drug lord-controlled stronghold in the jungles of Colombia, and working on important brain-altering research.
• "Mitochondrial Eve" — An organisation is trying to trace a common maternal ancestor for recent humanity.
• "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"
• "Silver Fire"
• "Reasons to Be Cheerful" — A boy discovers he has a serious brain tumour, 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"

The title story has since seen a sequel entitled "Dark Integers". The sequel was published in the October/November 2007 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction.