'Immortality, but at what price, in what form, and how could you be you? In the near future it’s possible to build a new you, a better you, one that could carry on forever. But if you could carry on, if you could make choices about who you would be forever, how much of your past would you bring with you? Would you be tempted to maybe…edit? Adam isn’t all that he used to be, but he wants to be.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
A woman wakes in a world where something, called the Calamity, has changed the functioning of gravity: instead of pulling everything down towards the centre of the planet, it now pulls them sideways. With no memory of her own past, she begins to question the nature of the Calamity.
A young man from the war-torn Middle East escapes into an alternate future, in which he and hundreds of other asylum seekers are locked up by the inhabitants of the more 'enlightened' time in which they land.
'Greg Egan gives us an alien technology only he could imagine–a wandering world that's inexplicably warm enough to support life.'
Source: Back cover, Godlike Machines.
