| Transition Dreams | |
| Author: | Greg Egan |
| Country: | Australia |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Science fiction |
| Published In: | Interzone |
| Publication Type: | Periodical |
| Publisher: | TTA Press |
| Media Type: | |
| Pub Date: | October 1993 |
"Transition Dreams" is a science-fiction short story by Australian writer Greg Egan, first published in Interzone #76 in October 1993. The short story was included in the collections Our Lady of Chernobyl in 1995 and Luminous in 1998.[1] [2] The short story is set in the same universe as Egan's novel Diaspora.
The protagonist pays the Gleisner corporation to scan his consciousness and transfer it in a Gleisner robot. Caroline Bausch tells him about a side effect called transition dream, which will be experienced by his consciousness during the scanning process but forgotten again. The protagonist is confused about the unnecessary information, but Caroline Bausch argues that to determine how a consciousness experiences a phenomenon, it has to be created and do so in the process. The protagonist later learns that the transition dreams are actually experienced by the packages of data of a consciousness saved and deleted again on different servers while sending it to another place. When learning that the transaction to the Gleisner corporation for the process has never really been made, the protagonist realizes to be in a transition dream and therefore the necessity to soon greet death.
The short story was translated into French by Sylvie Denis and Francis Valéry (1996 & 2007), Italian (2001), Japanese by Makoto Yamagishi (2003), Spanish by Carlos Pavón (2010). Czech by Petr Kotrle (2011), Chinese (2022) and Korean by Kim Sang-hoon (2024).
The main concept of the short story is the process of scanning consciousness and create a digital version of a brain. Egan's other works also deal with this from different perspectives. This prominently includes the short story "Learning to Be Me", in which the main character is faced with an identity crisis caused by the technology, the novel Permutation City, which explores the metaphysics behind it on a very fundamental level (also including the separation of consciousness on different servers), and the novel Diaspora, in which humanity has already lived with scanning and in Gleisner robots for nine hundred years. In an interview with Carlos Pavón for The Way Things Are in 1998, Egan argued against the concern about the latter (which is set in the same universe as "Transition Dreams") not "going into all the philosophical issues of copying personalities", that "after exploring those issues in so many other things I’ve written, there comes a point where both for me, and for people who’ve read the other books and stories, there’s nothing to be gained by going over the same old ground." In an interview with Marisa O’Keeffe for noise!, Egan stated to be "fairly sure that there’ll be software in my lifetime that’s conscious, though how it will first arise I don’t know" and to be worried "that we might produce conscious software before we know it, and put the software through a lot of suffering without even realising it."[3]
Jonathan Cowie, writing on concatenation.org, states that "this story has Philip Dick elements but unlike any Dick story I have read its elements did not seem to quite fit."[4]