Axiomatic is a 1995 collection of short science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 stories by Greg Egan

Greg Egan

Greg Egan is an Australian science fiction author.Egan published his first work in 1983. He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness...

.

According to amazon.co.uk, in the Axiomatic stories: "Egan delivers shocking body-blows to received ideas in thought-experiment stories that like Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

's philosophical squibs are booby-trapped with terrible truths and paradoxes." The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

describes it as "[w]onderful mind-expanding stuff, and well-written too."

Neural Mods

Several Axiomatic stories involve "neural mods", usually presented as small tubes containing powder inhaled through the nose, which alter the brains of their users in highly specific ways with advanced nanotechnology

Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is the study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with developing materials, devices, or other structures possessing at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometres...

.

In the collection's eponymous story "Axiomatic", the protagonist enters a store selling mods not only for every variety of psychedelic experiences, but for altering one's personality traits, sexual orientation, and even religion. The protagonist seeks a custom-made mod that will suspend his moral convictions long enough for him to murder his wife's killer. In "The Walk", an executioner offers his victim a mod that will cause him to accept the killer's personal philosophy, and thus help him cope with his death.

Neural mods feature prominently in Greg Egan's first science fiction novel, Quarantine

Quarantine (novel)

Quarantine is a hard science fiction novel by Greg Egan.Within a detective fiction framework, the novel explores the consequences of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics , which Egan acknowledges was chosen more for its entertainment value than for its likelihood of being...

.

The Jewel

Two stories, "Learning to Be Me" and "Closer", involve a different kind of neural implant called a "jewel"—a small computer inserted into the brain at birth that monitors its activity in order to learn how to mimic its behavior. By the time one reaches adulthood, the jewel's simulation is a near-perfect predictor of the brain's activity, and the jewel is given control of the person's body while the redundant brain is discarded. In this way, people with the jewel can eliminate the cognitive decline associated with aging by implementing their minds on a machine. Also, by transplanting the jewels into cloned bodies genetically altered to develop without brains, they can live youthfully forever.

"Learning to Be Me" explores the consequences of a man's jewel failing to synchronize with his brain, while in "Closer" a couple arranges to have the internal states of their jewels gradually made more similar so they can temporarily become a single person.

Minds uploaded to computers

Minds are transferred to computers in a different style in "A Kidnapping". People wishing to upload themselves into computer simulations to avoid death are periodically scanned so that a recent copy of the individual can be simulated in the event of death. Due to limited computing resources, however, uploaded people are simulated slower than their physical counterparts, making communication between them difficult.

This system of uploading minds features prominently in Greg Egan's novel Permutation City

Permutation City

Permutation City is a 1994 science fiction novel by Greg Egan that explores many concepts, including quantum ontology, via various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulated reality. Sections of the story were adapted from Egan's 1992 short story "Dust" which dealt with many of the same...

.

Other stories in Axiomatic

• "The Infinite Assassin" -- An illegal recreational drug allows people to travel between parallel universe
  Parallel universe (fiction)
  A parallel universe or alternative reality is a hypothetical self-contained separate reality coexisting with one's own. A specific group of parallel universes is called a "multiverse", although this term can also be used to describe the possible parallel universes that constitute reality...
  
  s with disastrous side effects.
• "The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary" -- After the invention of a method for sending messages back in time, history of the future becomes common knowledge, and every person knows their own fate.
• "Eugene" -- A married couple consults a genetic engineer
  Genetic engineering
  Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification, is the direct human manipulation of an organism's genome using modern DNA technology. It involves the introduction of foreign DNA or synthetic genes into the organism of interest...
  
   to design their next child.
• "The Caress" -- Police investigate the origin of a half-human, half-cheetah chimera
  Chimera (genetics)
  A chimera or chimaera is a single organism that is composed of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated from different zygotes involved in sexual reproduction. If the different cells have emerged from the same zygote, the organism is called a mosaic...
  
   discovered in the basement of a murder victim.
• "Blood Sisters" -- Two identical twin sisters are diagnosed with the same rare, fatal illness.
• "The Safe-Deposit Box" -- A man inhabits the body of a different person every time he wakes up, and has lived this way his entire life.
• "Seeing" -- A shooting victim's brain damage causes a permanent hallucination that he is watching himself from a bird's-eye view
  Bird's-eye view
  A bird's-eye view is an elevated view of an object from above, with a perspective as though the observer were a bird, often used in the making of blueprints, floor plans and maps.It can be an aerial photograph, but also a drawing...
  
  .
• "The Moat" -- Sperm taken from a rape victim are found to contain DNA altered to be invisible to genetic testing.
• "The Cutie" -- A man longing to be a father uses recent advances in biotechnology to impregnate himself with a "Cutie", a child with sub-human mental capacities, sub-human legal status, and a lifespan of four years.
• "Into Darkness" -- A giant sphere of unknown origin jumps between random locations on the Earth's surface and restricts the movement of objects trapped inside in bizarre ways.
• "Appropriate Love" -- A woman carries the brain of her severely injured husband inside her uterus for two years so that a new (brainless) body can be cloned to replace his.
• "The Moral Virologist" -- Inspired by the AIDS
  AIDS
  Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
  
   epidemic, a fundamentalist Christian devotes his life to the creation of virus that will kill those he views as sexually immoral.
• "Unstable Orbits in the Space Of Lies" -- An unexplained event causes everyone on Earth to rapidly become ideologically sympathetic to people physically nearby, creating a world with clear geographic boundaries between religions and philosophies that cause instant conversion for those who travel between regions.

Reviews of Axiomatic

• Danny Yee
  Danny Yee
  Danny Yee is best known for his large collection of book reviews on a great diversity of subjects. Starting in 1992 via email, in 1993 via Usenet, and especially with their subsequent publication on the World Wide Web, Yee's mostly self-published reviews are widely consulted by readers evaluating...
  
  , 1995: "There are more original ideas in Axiomatic than I've seen in a science fiction collection for ages, and anyone who likes hard science fiction
  Hard science fiction
  Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both. The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Islands of Space in Astounding Science...
  
   will revel in them."
• Christina Schulman, 1998: "Egan's ideas stretch your head the way the better cyberpunk
  Cyberpunk
  Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983...
  
  does, without cyberpunk's self-indulgent grime and alienation."