“The Egan Thief” is a funny little (~2100 word) story that appeared in issue #4 (Fall-Winter 2007) issue of Rudy Rucker’s online sf zine Flurb.
There’s a funny story behind it, too. While at Clarion West in 2006, one of the writing-related anecdotes I shared with my classmates was my ill-fated second attempt at a novel, a draft called “Irreducible,” which I started working on in 1998 in Montreal, and didn’t give up on until after my trip to India in early 2004. It was a tale of frustrating discoveries of unknowingly rewriting stories already published by a certain famous SF author, and my mother’s (really rather uncharacteristic) SFnal explanation of how it could be more than just coincidence. My classmates pointed out that this would make for some amusing reading, and succeeded in bugging me enough that I finally got around to writing it.
Also of note: it was originally drafted using Bruce Holland Rogers’s experimental prose form known as the “symmetrina,” thanks to discussions with, and writerly challenges by, my classmates Tina Connolly and Tristan Davenport. A little editing later, it was no longer anything close to a symmetrina, but it did become a stronger story, and if one has to discard the form to get there, that’s what one’s gotta do.