This recommendation for a top notch SciFi short story collection was anything but. After a promising introduction by the author, the entire collection was a let down—from absurd premises to underdeveloped characters and inadequately described futuristic environments. 

The title story Dark Integers and its prequel Luminous, describe a defect in our presumed working of integers: contradictory results proved from the same axioms. This much is fine and consistent with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. But then the story gets downright preposterous with the assertion that this defect in our results/axioms causes a breakdown in the physical universe and sets up a clash with other civilizations who are threatened by the physical breakdown since they have a different axiomatic system! The stories are set up as a cold war thriller across civilizations, including a company on Earth looking to profit from the defect. 

Atoms and quarks don’t do math to figure out how they should behave!—that at least is our core belief. We do math to try to best model the physical environment we perceive. It’s possible our math doesn’t work or worse, has contradictions, but that is a limitation of our math. Not that of the universe!

The other stories have more believable premises and storylines but Mr. Egan doesn’t do a great job building out the futuristic environments his stories are set in nor his characters. Consequently, one is never sure of their motivations and aspirations and can never truly relate to them. 

Riding the Crocodile and Glory are stories set in the same futuristic world of an intra-galactic coalition called Amalgam, across sentient species. Lives of beings are no longer constrained by their physical forms and their conscience can be transferred like software across bodies and also transmitted across worlds. The varied beings of the amalgam freely trade residence and resources. What is the purpose of their lives is never explained? How do they communicate and trade? How do they ensure technological compatibility? How do they contain ambitions of empire among the various species? How many species exist? All of these could bear some fleshing out to make the stories far more interesting than they are in their current form. 

The Hugo winning Oceanic was perhaps the best story of the five. Not really SciFi as much as an exploration of a possible origin of religious beliefs and mythology but set in a distant world of émigrés from Earth. Once again, missing many basic pieces of set up, leaving the reader with a sense of incompleteness that detracts somewhat from the overall point of the story.

Overall, a disappointing collection and unlikely to make me want to pick up another book by Greg Egan.