It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: Music for Leaving Airports 11 June 2008.

He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes including the nature of consciousness. Egan's short stories have been publiGreg Egand in a variety of genre magazines including regular appearances in Interzone and Asimov's Science Fiction. Egan does not attend science fiction conventions does not sign books and appears in no photographs on the Web though both SF fan sites and Google Search have at times mistakenly represented photos of other people with the same name as being of the writer.