Our Lady of Chernobyl
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The Book
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. It has a purple drawing of a brain on the cover and contains 4 stories, all of which were first published in Asimov's Science Fiction or Interzone:
Colombian drug cartels have made the Amazon rainforest into biotechnological nightmare/utopia of staggering (and cool) proportions. A U.S. operative dives into the morass in search of an itinerant scientist and questions his convictions about the nature of identity.
A full understanding of certain neural pathways results in the creation of a song that gets permanently stuck in the heads of listeners.
An elderly man agrees to have his mind (or, if you prefer, in information stored in his brain) copied to computer. Because copying must act on data, and because, Egan proves (to materialists), acting on integrated brain data is equivalent to causing experiences (see: REM sleep), he is told that in the process he will undergo unremembered dreams. Further explores a subset of the territory covered in the extraordinarily cool Permutation City.
- "Our Lady of Chernobyl" (1994)
A recently deceased oligarch, a mysterious stolen icon, a private detective, a murder.
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".
The Story
"Our Lady of Chernobyl" was first published in Interzone #83, May 1994, then reprinted in Our Lady of Chernobyl, Notre-Dame de Tchernobyl, 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, through and through (albeit with a subtext that meditates on religion from an atheist perspective), a dark, twisty tale revealed to the reader as it is revealed to the P.I. protagonist, in fits and starts.
Like much of Egan's writing, this story may annoy some theists: it seems to use a futuristic Christian sect to show the sheer oddity inherent in so much religion. Some might say, though, that that's missing the point. The world constructed here is solid and rich enough to accommodate multiple reader viewpoints; whether you see allegory or just trenchcoats in the night, it's a fun, fascinating read.
(And all else aside, creating a science fiction story that's still perfectly believable almost halfway between the year of its publication and the year of its setting is no mean feat.)