Understudies

by Greg Egan

Short story published in the October 2025 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine. Available for for free on Clarke world's website.

Genres: Science Fiction

ebook

First published October 1, 2025

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 B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing like an Egan story to make you feel utterly inadequate.

[Adam Meek · Rating 3 out of 5]

As is often the case with Egan, the math was beyond me; but, luckily, that wasn't really important for the story or world building. Egan is really asking us to examine the fine line between performance enhancing tools and cheating.