And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight. We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature, art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent.

— Greg Egan

A recent survey of 2,000 male graduates of Harvard Business School found that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annual income. -- from "Eugene

— Greg Egan

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilization has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

— Greg Egan

Fatima found herself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganized. It looked like a fleshed embryo – though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Fatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted dark; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicles neurotransmitters against a radio-frequency MRI chirp. There were two bodies now. Twins? One was larger, though – sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum. One fleshed child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibers. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink and gray muscles working side by side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, fleshed and leaner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a fleshed's womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen's mind embedded in the same woman's brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of gray dust. Two fleshed children walked side by side, hand in hand. Or father and son, leaner and fleshed, citizen and leaner... Fatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through very. The figures strode calmly along a city's main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated. The artwork, unbidden, sent Fatima's viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses – and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger on to is shoulders – then the passenger's height flowing down to the bearer like an hourglass's sand.

— Greg Egan

Fleshes used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ‘competition’…as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the Galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

— Greg Egan

How does it feel to be seven thousand years old?"" That depends."" On what?"" On how I want to feel.

— Greg Egan

How’s work?’ Martin asked. Bedroom was now a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, which these days seemed to mean as much video journalism as prose. ‘Not bad.’ Bedroom smiled slightly. ‘Business people might be the last paying market left for real news. If they’re convinced that they’re getting fearlessly objective information, they’ll keep shelling out for it – while everyone else gives up caring and buries their head inside their favorite consensual reality.’ Martin laughed softly, self-conscious but grateful for a few words of real conversation, a lifeline out of the pit. ‘You’re not a fan of News Five Point Oh, then?’ ‘Don’t get me started. Higher Tribe is worse, but they’re all pathological. What isn’t filtered and spun is just invented out of whole cloth.’ ‘Yeah.’ The replacement of journalism by rumor aggregators and group-think salons was a serious matter, but Martin’s enthusiasm for talking shop was already beginning to falter.

— Greg Egan

Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it feel from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they or their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science?

— Greg Egan

In the nineteen sixties and seventies, there were people in all the democratic countries who didn’t have any real power, and they started going to the people who did have all the power and saying, “All these principles of equality you’ve been talking about since the French Revolution are very nice, but you don’t seem to be taking them very seriously. You’re all hypocrites, actually. So we’re going to make you take those principles seriously.” And they held demonstrations and bus rides, and occupied buildings, and it was very embarrassing for the people in power, because the other people had such a good argument, and anyone who listened seriously had to agree with them.‘Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and all the other social justice movements were getting more and more support. So, in the nineteen eighties, the CIA—’ she turned to Keith and explained cheerfully, ‘this is where X-Files Theory comes into it – hired some really clever linguists to invent a secret weapon: an incredibly complicated way of talking about politics that didn’t actually make any sense, but which spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded so impressive. And at first, the people who talked like this just hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless. But then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out the driver.‘So instead of going to the people in power and saying, “How about upholding the universal principles you claim to believe in?” the people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like “My truth narrative is in competition with your truth narrative!” And the people in power replied, “Woe is me! You’ve thrown me in the briar patch!” And everyone else said, “Who are these idiots? Why should we trust them, when they can’t even speak properly?” And the CIA were happy. And the people in power were happy. And the secret weapon lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone who’d played a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit what they’d done.

— Greg Egan

It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: Music for Leaving Airports 11 June 2008.

— Greg Egan