'Greg Egan’s Phoresis is, at around 40,000 words, a long novella and close to the same length as many of the massmarket, full-length paperback novels I grew up on. Into that relatively small space Egan has packed the story of several multiple-generation, low-tech engineering projects that range from geoengineering to interplanetary exploration and colonization, while also creating an exotic planetary system and non-human characters who, despite their physiological strangeness, clearly model psychological and intellectual traits to which we might well aspire.' (Introduction)