Call number
Genres
Publication
London: Millennium, 1998
Pages
295
Description
Luminous collects together one original story plus nine previously unpublished in book form. Included are: Transition Dreams; Cocoon; Our Lady of Chernobyl; and The Planck Drive.
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
Physical description
295 p.; 8 inches
ISBN
1857985524 / 9781857985528
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User reviews
LibraryThing member richard_hesketh
What a place to experiment with ideas.. wonderful. A book to come back to, time and time and Time (What IS That?) again....
LibraryThing member bianca.sayan
I wasn't terribly crazy about this collection of short stories, but Egan's writing style is reassuring and a reliable form of escapism.
LibraryThing member iansales
Egan is one of those authors whose fiction I’m repeatedly told I’d like, but everything by him I’ve read in the past has left me a little bit cold – which is one novel, and a handful of stories in Interzone over the years. Nevertheless, if I see one of his books going cheap in a charity
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shop, I buy it. And even now, when perhaps my taste in fiction is somewhat more discriminating and I look for different things in the fiction I read than I did twenty or thirty years ago… Egan’s fiction still leaves me mostly cold. There were a couple of good stories in this collection – I especially liked ‘Silver Fire’, about a epidemic in the US; and ‘Our Lady of Chernobyl’ had some narrative impetus to it, even if the central conceit was weak – but many still felt cold to me, peopled by little more than walking, talking ideas. And ‘The Planck Dive’ is just a really dull physics lectures with a bunch of character interactions to provide something for the reader to connect with. Interestingly, although most of the stories in Luminous were written in the mid-1990s, they’re chiefly set in this decade, the second of the twenty-first century. Egan got one or two things right, but he also got a lot wrong – and yet he still manages to catch the flavour of now better than many other sf authors of the time who wrote stories set in the early twenty-first century. I’ll still keep my eye open for Egan books in charity shops, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to call myself a fan. Show Less