after all i know a lot of very abstract ideas from mathematics and physics and it would be nice to finally get some use out of them 😛
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4a. several of his near-future stories feature teenagers getting radical body modifications in this very cyberpunk way; as a prediction i don't think this panned out at all. not a single new form of body modification has become popular in my lifetime that i can think of
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(not counting gender transition stuff which i think doesn't really fall under this umbrella; greg egan is imagining like tattoos-and-piercings++ for young punks to stick it to old squares and i just haven't seen anything like that personally. afaict ppl just want to look sexy)
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4b. related to 4a, many of the body modifications come from significant tech advances especially in biotech, and i also don't think anything like that has panned out. greg egan imagined tech able to do stuff like control the levels of neurotransmitters in your brain in real time
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in a few stories (e.g. the titular Axiomatic) greg egan imagines tech able to infiltrate your brain and force you to believe some particular thing, e.g. that some religion is true. i actually suspect there will be deep reasons why something like this couldn't possibly work
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(to go into greg-egan-mc mode, i think the structure of beliefs is holographic; your beliefs reflect and are reflected by the sum totality of the experiences that make you you, everything depends on everything else, they can't just be arbitrarily modified in isolation
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so i think we'll find that we won't be able to do much better than the equivalent of installing a voice in your mind constantly trying to hypnotize you into believing something or other, which will have effects but not as powerful as what greg imagines, i think)
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(also i think this holography idea itself could be the basis of a nice short story hmm. if i really wanted to go hardcore greg-egan-style on it i could try to tie it to the holographic principle in physics somehow, greg loves doing shit like that, ted chiang too)
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5a. i'm not quite sure how to say this more precisely but something about the pandemic has made a lot of greg-egan-in-the-'90s' worldview seem naive. it's like he vastly overestimated how competent organizations are? maybe they were more competent in the '90s?
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like - there are epidemics in these stories! in one story called Blood Sisters
(SPOILER WARNING)
there's a meta-epidemic caused by a biological weapon that is basically constantly trying to evolve new epidemics. it causes a lockdown that lasts *one month*!!!!!
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the worst thing that happens in this story
(SPOILER WARNING AGAIN)
is that medical organizations are revealed to be *covertly giving some people placebos for A/B testing purposes without their knowledge*!!!!!
can you imagine a world in which *that's* as bad as it gets?