Our Lady of Chernobyl

Our Lady of Chernobyl is a collection of short fiction by the Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan, published in 1995 by MirrorDanse, in Sydney. The book has a purple drawing of a brain on the cover and contains four short stories.

The stories

All of the four stories were first published in Asimov's Science Fiction or Interzone. All stories but Beyond the Whistle Test were also published in the more widely available (but as yet unreleased in the United States) collection Luminous. The collection was published in France, in French, as Notre-Dame de Tchernobyl.

Chaff (1993)

Colombian drug cartels have made the Amazon Rainforest into biotechnological nightmare/utopia. A United States operative enters in search of an itinerant scientist and questions his convictions about the nature of identity.

Beyond the Whistle Test (1989)

A full understanding of certain neural pathways results in the creation of a song that gets permanently stuck in the heads of listeners.

Transition Dreams (1993)

An elderly man agrees to have his mind (or, if you prefer, in information stored in his brain) copied to computer. In this story Egan takes the materialist stance where such copying must act on data, and because acting on integrated brain data is equivalent to causing experiences akin to REM sleep, the man is told that in the process he will undergo unremembered dreams. This story further explores a subset of the territory covered in Permutation City.

Our Lady of Chernobyl (1994)

Our Lady of Chernobyl was first published in Interzone #83, May 1994, then reprinted in Our Lady of Chernobyl, Notre-Dame de Tchernobyl (French translation), Luminous, Hayakawa's SF Magazine (Japanese translation), and the Italian edition of Luminous, as "Nostra Signora Di Chernobyl".

Those familiar with some of Egan's other work may be a bit surprised—there's no physics here, no philosophical explorations of the nature of consciousness and reality. This one's SF noir, albeit with a subtext that meditates on religion from an atheist perspective, a dark tale revealed to the reader as it is revealed to the Private Investigator protagonist, in fits and starts.