Greg Egan’s The Extra

February 1st, 2006

Science fiction author Greg Egan’s stories often deal with themes of the nature of consciousness, mind transfers, artificial intelligence, and so forth. He is considered one of the best current hard science fiction writers, and he has won the Hugo Award, one of the two top awards in science fiction.

Egan wrote horror before he wrote science fiction, and it shows. But his stories are far from the usual fare. A typical horror story involving mind transfers or clones or the like might try to scare the reader with lurking clones of the main character, doing strange things out of sight. In The Extra and in many of his other stories, he reverses this convention. The premise is that the higher reasoning centers of a person’s brain are transplanted into another body, but the lower centers retain some consciousness; ordinarily we would see things from the perspective of the higher centers and the horror would come from the not-quite-consciousness of the lower centers in the old body—the horror of ambiguous personhood. But Egan writes from the perspective of the ignored, of the transient, of the minds that exist unacknowledged and powerless—in this case, the lower centers left over from the transplant, and this is far more unsettling than the other way could ever be…

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Relative State is devoted to exploring the topic of plural psychology. Ever since man first called himself ‘I’, there have been others… More

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