After their release, Egan was active in campaigning for refugee rights, including the end of mandatory detention for asylum seekers in Australia, for a few years.
[4] In an interview with David Conyers for Virtual Worlds and Imagined Futures in 2009, Egan called it an "eye-opening experience to see people mistreated in that way", revealing that "Lost Continent" about a time traveler seeking asylum but facing burocratic incompetence is "an allegory of the whole thing, just to get some of the anger out of my system and move on.
"[5] Greg Johnson, writing on the SF Site, states that the collection "represent Egan both at his best, and his most accessible" and that he "finds a way to balance the complexity of his ideas with enough story and character for the reader to care about them as stories and not just speculative essays on the latest in cosmology, physics or artificial intelligence research."
"[6] Publishers Weekly referred to the collection as "steadfastly reductionist", noting that Egan "makes room for the moral implications of the treatment of refugees in 'Lost Continent,' while 'Crystal Nights' offers a pointed critique of technologists enthused by the idea of enslaved creations."
They concluded, "More conventional SF puzzle stories like 'Hot Rock' and 'Tap' and a forcefully worded introduction on the ethics of artificial intelligence round out the volume".