Border Guards

by Greg Egan

"The scent of the grass, the shouts of the players, the soles of his feet striking the ground, resonated with every other moment he’d spent the same way, bridging the centuries, binding his life together. He never truly felt the scale of it when he sought it out deliberately; it was always small things, tightly focused moments like this, that burst the horizon of his everyday concerns and confronted him with the astonishing vista."

In the city of Noether, Jamil decides on the spur of the moment to join a game of quantum soccer to celebrate his emergence from sadness. During the game, he encounters a stranger, a woman who’s travelled further than anyone in Noether, and who has witnessed the one thing that nobody in the city has ever faced: the death of another human being.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories

32 pages, ebook

First published October 1, 1999

About the author

Greg Egan specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind transfer, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism over religion.

He is a Hugo Award winner (and has been shortlisted for the Hugos three other times), and has also won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. Some of his earlier short stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror, while due to his more popular science fiction he is known within the genre for his tendency to deal with complex and highly technical material (including inventive new physics and epistemology) in an unapologetically thorough manner.

Egan is a famously reclusive author when it comes to public appearances, he doesn't attend science fiction conventions, doesn't sign books and there are no photos available of him on the web.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Simona · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is filled with emotion. Yes, even the characters experience the emotions, which is not a given in Egan's books (unless the emotion is a thrill of discovery). That is not a criticism of that style choice. What I find amazing, is that everytime he writes about uploaded, practically immortal characters, they always concern themselves with studies. Always mathematics, but I assume, that other characters study other areas. This is the future, where you can change your own brain, which is a completely foreign framework and I have zero intuition as to what would actually happen with humans, so I can I can imagine him being right.

I read it on 1 sitting, sweet, short,... and with quantum football.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novelette, available on the author's website, seems to exist in the same shared universe as some of his other short stories that have to do with The Jewel. I've read a couple of them in his collection Axiomatic.

There's a lot going on here, not the least of which is the game of quantum soccer, which is worth looking at the technical notes on if you want to try to get a grasp of it.

Overall, another great Egan story!

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Loved the tie in with another short story from Axiomatic.

[Davidros · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emotion is a big part of Egan's work, but I think this is the first of his I have read that is truly beautiful. This is probably my favourite short story ever.

Also, quantum football.