We’ll admit it. We can’t get enough of Greg Egan, especially his short fiction. The hardcover of his 80,000 word collection, Dark Integers and Other Stories, sold out immediately when we released it last year, and we’ll be publishing a trade paperback of it this spring.

In addition, we have a much longer (120,000 words) hardcover collection by Greg already in the pipeline, Crystal Nights and Other Stories.

Here’s the book’s full description:

The nine stories in Greg Egan’s new collection range from parables of contemporary human conflict and ambition to far-future tales of our immortal descendants.

In “Lost Continent”, a time traveler seeking refuge from a war-torn land faces hostility and bureaucratic incompetence. “Crystal Nights” portrays a driven man’s moral compromises as he chases an elusive technological breakthrough, while in “Steve Fever” the technology itself falls victim to its own hype.

“TAP” brings us a new kind of poetry, where a word is more powerful than a thousand images. “Singleton” shows us a new kind of child, born of human DNA modeled in a quantum computer—who, in “Oracle”, journeys to a parallel world to repay a debt to an intellectual ancestor.

“Induction” chronicles the methods and motives behind humanity’s first steps to the stars. “Border Guards” reflects on the painful history of a tranquil utopia. And in the final story, “Hot Rock”, two immortal citizens of the galaxy-spanning Amalgam find that an obscure, sunless world conceals mind-spinning technological marvels, bitter factional struggles, and a many-layered secret history.

Posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 8:57 am.