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Geek's Guide to the Galaxy - A Science Fiction Podcast

604. The Best of Greg Egan Part 2 Review (with Anthony Ha)

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy - A Science Fiction Podcast

David Barr Kirtley

Arts

4.61K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2025

⏱️ 104 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Anthony Ha joins us to discuss six more stories from the book The Best of Greg Egan. Stories discussed: “Silver Fire” (1:30), “Reasons to be Cheerful” (16:42), “Oceanic” (28:10), “Oracle” (44:19), “Singleton” (1:04:54), “Dark Integers” (1:16:32). Ad-free episodes are available to our paid supporters over at patreon.com/geeks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, I'm David Barr-Curtley, author of the book Save Me Please and other stories, and welcome to episode 604 of Geeks Guide to the Galaxy.

0:27.4

Today on the show, we'll be discussing six stories from the book The Best of Greg Egan.

0:31.9

And the stories are, Silver Fire, Reasons to Be Cheerful, Oceanic,acle, singleton, and dark integers. And this will include

0:41.7

spoilers for all of those stories, so just be aware of that. And this is a follow-up to our previous

0:47.2

discussion of the best of Greg Egan back in episode 592, so definitely check that out if you missed it.

0:53.8

And I'm joined today by my good friend Anthony Ha,

0:56.7

making his 32nd appearance on the show. His short fiction appears in Lady Churchill's Rosebud

1:02.0

Aristolate and in the chat book Love Songs for Monsters. And his story, A Brief History of the

1:07.4

Afterlife, recently appeared in the March-April issue of Asimov's magazine.

1:11.8

He currently works as weekend editor at TechCrunch and is a co-host of the podcast original content.

1:18.6

And now here's our interview with Anthony Ha.

1:21.8

All right, so we're here with Anthony Ha. Welcome to the show.

1:24.9

Thank you so much for having me back. I am excited to talk more about

1:28.7

Greg Egan. Absolutely. Okay. And so the first story we're going to talk about in this batch is called

1:35.6

Silver Fire. And so in this story, there is a fairly rare but really horrific disease going around called Silverfire.

1:47.0

And the U.S. government contacts Claire, our main character, who's an epidemiologist, and they say

1:55.1

that there's some weird fluctuations in the data, which lead them to believe that there may be an asymptomatic carrier

2:03.0

spreading this disease. And they would like her to run this down and see if that's actually

2:09.4

the case. And so she goes around and, you know, questions the family members of people who've

2:15.9

been infected and stuff like that and starts to

2:19.1

get the idea that there are these weird raves and that people may be getting infected at these

2:27.6

raves and that starts her on her on her investigation so anthony what did you think of Silverfire?

...

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