Paul Durham keeps making Copies of software simulations of his own brain and body which can be run in virtual reality, albeit seventeen times more slowly than real time. He wants them to be his guinea pigs for a set of experiments about the nature of artificial intelligence, time, and causality, but they keep changing their mind and bailing out on him, shutting themselves down. Maria Deluca is an Autoverse addict; she's unemployed and running out of money, but she can't stop wasting her time playing around with the cellular automaton known as the Autoverse, a virtual world that follows a simple set of mathematical rules as its “laws of physics”. Paul makes Maria a very strange he asks her to design a seed for an entire virtual biosphere able to exist inside the Autoverse, modelled right down to the molecular level. The job will pay well, and will allow her to indulge her obsession. There has to be a catch, though, because such a seed would be useless without a simulation of the Autoverse large enough to allow the resulting biosphere to grow and flourish — a feat far beyond the capacity of all the computers in the world.

In 2975, the orphan Yatima is grown from a randomly mutated digital mind seed in the conceptory of Konishi polis. Yatima explores the Coalition of Polises, the network of computers where most life in the solar system now resides, and joins a friend, Inoshiro, to borrow an abandoned robot body and meet a thriving community of “fleshers” in the enclave of Atlanta. Twenty-one years later, news arrives from a lunar gravitational waves from Lac G-1, a nearby pair of neutron stars, show that the Earth is about to be bathed in a gamma-ray flash created by the stars’ collision — an event that was not expected to take place for seven million years. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Atlanta to try to warn the fleshers, but meet suspicion and disbelief. Some lives are saved, but the Earth is ravaged. In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors resolve to discover the cause of the neutron stars’ premature collision, and they launch a thousand polises into interstellar space in search of answers. This diaspora eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an older group of a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe.

Sleep and the Soul contains ten stories from Hugo Award-winning author Greg Egan.“You and Whose Army?”“This Is Not the Way Home”“Zeitgeber”“Crisis Actors”“Sleep and the Soul”“After Zero”“Dream Factory”“Light Up the Clouds”“Night Running”“Solidity”

Del lives in a world of many skies: by passing through the Hoops embedded in the ground, her people can walk freely between land that lies beneath a new set of constellations for every circuit they make around the edge of a Hoop.

When archaeologists find a copy of the famed Book of All Skies, Del takes delivery of the manuscript in her role as conservator at the Museum of Apasa, hoping it will shed light on the fate of the Tolleans, the ancient civilisation that produced it. But when the book is stolen, the theft sets in motion a series of events that will see her travelling farther than she had ever imagined possible, and her understanding of her world and its history irrevocably transformed.

“Instantiation” is a collection of eleven science fiction stories by Hugo Award winning author Greg

• “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine”
• “Zero For Conduct”
• “Uncanny Valley”
• “Seventh Sight”
• “The Nearest”
• “Shadow Flock”
• “Bit Players”
• “Break My Fall”
• “3-adica”
• “The Slipway”
• “Instantiation”

In a world where the cells that make up our bodies are not committed to any one organism, Marla is confronted by the fickleness of her cytes, and resolves to understand them with help from Ada, a centuries-old Flourisher. Swappers like Ruth embrace fluidity, and meet with others to exchange cytes, seeking the perfect mix. But Ruth faces her own crisis, and as the technology to manipulate cytes advances, all three are drawn into a struggle to shape the future of life.