Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ‘competition’…as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the Galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

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.