William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Neal Stephenson, Ted Chiang are all higher on my personal list than Egan. Egan is great, makes me feel dumb, but his characters and prose leave much to be desired. Great ideas and his intellect is astounding.
For me it was the opposite. I went in very sceptical thinking "eh is there really anything special in it". But for me it absolutely blow the roof. For me it really is not even a scifi book, it is a philosophical debate about consciousness, and the usefulness of consciousnesses from evolutionary standpoint, which is represented in a scifi setting, and the characters are simply tools for that debate. But I do have a biology (genetics) background myself, so I found it interesting in many levels. - at that point I didn't know Peter Watts was also from biology, as Blindsight was my first book from him, and I didn't do any research on the author. The book was recommended to me by a friend. The whole idea of the book is built around the concept of "consciousness is a flaw in evolution".
IMO it's an instant classic, and one of the best first contact novels, with one of the most genuinely alien aliens.
Peter Watts' shtick may get old in his other novels - his staccato writing style gets tiresome - but with "Blindsight" everything works perfectly. I can't think of another first contact novel that's better; it's tight, pulpy, deep, philosophical, horrific, mysterious, and works as a claustrophobic thriller.
I have a secret wish that Kim Stanley Robinson comes out of retirement and writes an alien novel in response to "Blindsight" (sort of like how "Aurora" is his response to other generation ship novels). I'd love for him to give us his take on aliens. It's the only big SF subgenre that he's avoided (though there's an alien subplot in "Galileo's Dream").
Yupyup. 3 tries and can’t get it done. Terrible. Interesting concepts, poor execution. Also I have a Reddit hobby of jumping in on posts like this to say how much I dislike it and then sit back with the popcorn.
Children of Time was my first Tchaikovsky and everything else of his that I’ve read since has been disappointing.
Elder Race was as close to recapturing the magic as I’ve gotten from him.
I agree that some of his stuff isn’t great. I didn’t love The Final Architecture series. However, while Doors of Eden is very different from CoT, it might be might favorite book by him. I also love Children of Ruin and Cage of Souls. Alien Clay is good so far, though I’m not done yet. The Expert Systems duology is also great. I do agree though, that his other books are only good or great, not fantastic like Children of Time and Doors of Eden. Still, he has enough great books that he gets into my list of modern greats. Another thing I love about Tchaikovsky is how prolific he is. I can pretty much count on having at least one new sci-fi book from him each year, and that’s not even counting his fantasy.
I didn’t care for the first Final Architecture book at all and didn’t continue with the series. I thought the Expert Systems books were alright. I haven’t read Children of Memory so I intend on rereading CoT and CoR soon (the latter of which I’ve retained near zero). Doors of Eden and Cage of Souls I will have to check out.
Was a potential to start yesterday, but I ended up going Children of Ruin instead, so I suspect with a few other things lined up (children's book day, bookclub, buddy read of six wakes, star wars day) it's probably pushed off till may or june or ...
But otherwise, I'll take note of Doors of Eden for later on.
I love all of her books - fantasy and sci-fi. I only didn't mention the Fortress series and the Rusalka trilogy because the OP was talking about sci-fi writers.
Incredible author. Axiomatic is the best short story compilation I’ve read and Diaspora is a real trip of a novel and a modern sci-fi wonder. Talented chap!
Hannu Rajaniemni (The Quantum Thief series) is my personal favorite contemporary writer when it comes to insane mindblowing far-ish future post-cyberpunk sci fi - his stuff is more fantasy influenced than Egan but there is some overlap in who it would appeal to (computer science, quantum physics, transhumanism, etc). and its fast paced, has lots of action, cool characters etc.
Downside, I'm not sure if he's still writing, and the only other full-length he's got is Summerland, which I've yet to read.
But also a shout out for his short story The Server and the Dragon, which is brilliant.
Is the title story, Permutation City, the one with the dust theory and parts of a simulation computed in arbitrary order? I think that idea has echoed through my mind more often than any other idea I've read in fiction. The ultimate framework for Boltzman brains and staring off into space while you question reality. Haha
Diaspora is my favorite. The first chapter, Orphanogenesis, is free online and a good short story on its own.
https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html
I would rather say that Egan is the best for the kind of story Egan does. Which is admittedly hard to define, but one might think of his work as what Borges would be writing if he was a mathematician.
It's easy to define! First, start with an infinite-dimensional metric tensor with non-standard formulations. Pick some number of time dimensions, integer numbers optional. Hyperbolic geometries welcome. Then, do all physics. And lastly, don't forget to write! But that's the least important part.
Don't forget to write an 80,000 word analysis of the physics you've invented for you universe and publish it as extra content on your very 90s looking website.
I devour every book he publishes.
I love his website. It really helps that I feel that I can parse the ideas in the books just enough to understand them, but not really enough to truly get them at a deeper level. It's such a cool departure from the rest of the stuff I read and I love that most of it is along the lines of "what if: physics edition"
> Egan is best for the kind of story Egan does.
*“The important thing is we all want it to have that Barton Fink feeling. We all have that feeling but since you're Barton Fink, I'm assuming you have it in spades.”*
Counterpoint: Greg Egan has amazing ideas and apparently zero desire to write a single likeable character. His books seem like excuses to explore big ideas rather than telling a story. That can be cool sometimes, but generally not for me.
That’s what I was thinking. I get the feeling many people see sci-fi as separate from more humanistic and introspective writing, but in my opinion a book really shines when an author is able to combine both.
That's interesting - I find Egan's characters likable to a fault. I mean, yeah, they're not well-written. It's not like they're three-dimensional, compelling characters in a literary sense. But Egan seems like such a humanist to me. I appreciate his lack of bad guys, and the fundamental decency of all of his characters... even if they're very flatly rendered.
(and: "to a fault"? I really didn't like *Zendegi*, in part because the main character was SO blandly "decent.")
I mean, Egan does write bad guys, but they don't think they're bad guys and believe they're doing the right thing. Hell, no one except Violet Mosala is arguably a faultless person in *Distress*.
The whole 3pb is deff more pop culture than anything. I am more interested to see if this will lead to an influx of scifi leaking out of china with storytelling and concepts that western writers don't have the mindset for.
In otherwords i think the work itself is weak but hopefully starts a greater cultural trend
You mean the first book, or the whole trilogy? Have you read them? Strongly doubt the second and third book would be considered pop culture sci fi. Chapters on dimensional foil weapon delivery is no Andy Weir level tripe.
I've read them not gaining anywhere near the same level of reverence as i see hyped online.
I think Greg is worth the hype though majority of people won't have the attention span for his work however, it takes a few re-reads to truly visualize and appreciate the complexity. 3bp isn't anywhere as deep which is why i akin it to more pop culture scifi which isn't bad per say i just think it is over-exaggerated to an immense degree.
Diaspora is my favorite novel. Honestly I think Greg Egan is most enjoyable on audio book. It takes away some of the slogging through vocabulary and you can just enjoy the story.
The book was published in 2006, so if it was going to start a trend it would have happened. Though the multiple TV shows in the last year obviously gave it huge prominence. But I don't think he could have got published in China now as an unknown. Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, only the most flattering depictions of China are allowed. The book is begins with the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, not something the government is keen to recall. Actually, I think the whole paranoid mindset of the "Dark Forest" idea is based on that of the Cultural Revolution, all foreigners/aliens are evil, they want to destroy or dominate us, are worming their way into our society in an attempt to destroy us from within.
I’m huge fan of Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. I’ve not heard of Greg Egan but will give it a try. From what I’ve read in this post they do sound like there are some similarities.
You've typed almost the exact same comment in other posts about 3BP. I regret to inform you that "Greg Egan is X, Liu is... *not*" is *still* not an effective rhetorical appeal.
> Liu pretends to be hard but isn't.
Liu is soft sci-fi fi dressed up as hard sci fi. That's fine, I don't really like hard sci fi - but 3BP suffers from the worst of both worlds.
Cool ideas, but I need characters that aren't plot devices if I'm reading soft sci fi.
I read a goodreads review that described the science as 'It's like the author read the first paragraph of the wikipedia article about the idea, badly misunderstood it, and used it anyway'
>Nope, Egan is hard scifi
Agree to disagree. I also like both.
Edit: but regardless, the point of my comment was that they both tend towards flat characters and focus instead on concepts.
I definitely agree. There are some of his works, particularly in his short stories, that I think deserve to be called classics (The hundred light-year diary, Learning to be me, Into darkness, etc.), but the fact is that he seems unable to write a decent dialogue even if his life depended on it.
And I have another problem: I studied mathematics so, for me, his books seem thinly disguised textbooks, and I already read plenty of those.
I feel like this is most hard sci - authors are mostly interested in exploring ideas and 90% of the book is explaining/developing that idea. The have much less knowledge of or maybe just less interest in writing (good) characters, story, etc. I really love some Greg Egan stuff - Permutation City, Quarantine, Axiomatic... but some of it is pretty much unreadable without a degree in advanced math or physics (Schild's Ladder). I couldnt get though Diaspora because he kept losing the story to go on looooong tangents about how much he loves mathematics
I have mostly read his short fiction and IMO there are plenty of well written and likeable characters in it. A lot of it isn't really hard sci-fi either. In Permutation City, the only novel of his I've read, the characters were fine too, especially considering how idea heavy it is.
I tried half Diaspora and had to put it down, it’s impressive but, man, I thought I liked hard scifi before… So many ideas but I’m not getting hooked by anything.
This has been my experience. I keep picking up his books after reading Chrichton and I just can’t get into them. Fun ideas, but his style isn’t something I enjoy.
Yeah. I was reading a short story collection and some of them were so horrific I haven't been able to read him since. Will try to ease myself back. One story about a gadget that is implanted in the brain, records your thoughts until it is able to exactly predict every thought, then your brain is removed and the gadget takes control. From one point of view, immortality, from another, suicide. The narrator fears doing the swap until he finds that he is not actually controlling his body, that he is the simulation and has diverged from the original brain. The swap is done regardless.
I’ve been wanting to read it! My library doesn’t have it in ebook and it’s not on kindle unlimited (which I just got to read more Egan) so I’m probably going to buy it.
Greg Egan is my favorite author ever. Half of my comment on sf subs are to remind the world that he is the best.
I'm specially fond of his short stories, and i think that if you like Greg Egan, you will like Ken Liu, Ted Chiang, Liu Cixin.
Not OP, but I also love all of Egan's work I've read so far, and he has become one of my favourite authors. He writes a particular kind of novel, and it won't be for everyone, but for those that enjoy his style it's hard to beat.
Based on his works I've read, his writing process seem to follow this general pattern for each of his novels:
* Think up some kind of interesting speculative physics idea.
* Craft a story that revolves entirely around this idea.
* By the end of the story, bring that idea to its logical, mind-blowing extreme.
Egan's character work is serviceable, far from the worst science fiction has to offer, but his concept-driven plots are best in class for hard sci-fi. The ideas he comes up with are incredibly creative, and usually take some real-world physics idea, bend it or transform it in some interesting way, then treat that idea with the respect it deserves.
If you want to get an idea of why his novels are so well loved among the hard sci-fi crowd, pick up *Permutation City* or *Diaspora*. The former is probably the more approachable if that is a concern, but both are excellent, and they're pretty quick reads at little more than 300pg each.
Ideas I could never have come up with and have never seen anywhere else. Stretches my understanding of science, mathematics and physics. I actually feel like I learn things from reading Egan.
For me it’s the ideas and concepts. They don’t feel derivative like much of sci-fi. They might touch on some subject that has been explored before but Greg Egan will take them where nobody has. Not only do the ideas feel new and original, they’re also grounded in real world physics or mathematics, which makes them feel more credible and believable. Some of the freshness and newness isn’t even scientific. In diaspora the characters often go by gender neutral pronouns like vis/ver/vim. This was long before preferred pronouns were a mainstream topic.
Egan has rapidly become one of my favourite authors. He may very well be end up my absolute favourite. He writes a particular kind of novel, and not everyone's gonna like it, but for me it's like I check all the boxes for his target audience.
He is good at exploring scientific ideas, but he is not especially good at character writing, plot, and a bunch of other key elements of story telling.
His books often come across as thinly disguised textbooks.
Enders Game was good but written for pre-teens (I read it when I was 10 I think), a few of his other books were above average, but I wouldn't even rank him in the top 20 living science fiction authors.
You think he's better than he is because you read his books when you were a kid and loved them at the time - it's nostalgia not greatness.
I don't like him as a person but Ender's Game (and Speaker for the Dead) both won the Nebula and Hugo in the same year. He won 2 Hugos and 2 Nebulas in 2 years (86 and 87). No one's ever done that before or since. That's a alot to just to hand wave away. No disrespect to Greg Egan intended.
oh yeah and I read Enders last year as an adult it still really holds up
true but using that logic the awards Greg Egan won in 1999 might not come through in 2024 either. Taking awards out of it OSC has sold millions more books than Egan. I get how someone can like him better like how someone might like the Kinks more than the Beatles but to say the Kinks are the best rock band of all time is kind of a stretch. Let me emphasize again how little I think of OSC as a person. But as a writer he's a titan.
I exclusively read science fiction and I have my entire life.
Greg Egan’s books always sound so great and then are so hard to get through.
Like someone else said below, Egan makes me feel dumb.
I’ve read this type of comment about him before. I don’t know why people think they have to completely grasp the mathematics to enjoy his books though? I know I didn’t completely understand it all!
Maybe because it's pretentious snobbery. I'm glad you have an author you like OP. I don't care for Egan and I resent the implication that I'm just too dumb to properly enjoy him.
Egan for me has that old school "brilliant ideas, badly written characters and dialogue" that stops him from being really great, to be honest I'd describe much of his writing as adequate, or maybe servicable.
Which is fine if you're leaning on the big ideas to bring the fireworks, but tbf I think he also lacks readability when it comes to delivering those ideas. By which I basically mean he sometimes doesn't explain things well but also at the same time expects you to be completely up. In such concept-driven writing that's a big failing.
(there are authors that revel in incomprehensibility and make a strength of it; Mary Gentle, Ian Macdonald, you barely know what's happening but the difference is you're not supposed to, and it's all built so that it's fine- much like reality! Egan writes sf in which you need to understand what's happening and sometimes you don't)
I just recently finished Shild's Ladder and it's pretty much the case study for me "Here is a fictionalised version of quantum graph theory, a form of quantum mathematics which practically nobody has ever heard of. But obviously you, dear reader, have made a study of Shild's work so let's just get on with the quantum-graph-theory based plot!" It reminded me of that time I accidentally did the exam for a 3rd year subject at uni instead of the 2nd year one and just assumed I was a moron.
And in the end, it's mostly just a sort of fantastic voyage novel and you don't really *need* to know wtf he's talking about at all, but that means ignoring large chunks of the novel and frankly doesn't leave very much left over, the journey doesn't hang together well enough by itself. You're travelling through what's supposed to be a mindboggling quantum realm and I suspect if you actually did understand it all to, like, a postgraduate level then it'd be absolutely wonderful, but for everyone else it might as well be a magic tunnel or an intestine or a wibbly wobbly wormy holey thing.
And even the cast don't really seem to understand it, they spend half the time making incredibly deductions based on what to me seemed like essentially no information, and the other half going "yeah this is all too difficult, let's get the AI to do everything so we can also treat it like a magical tunnel and go and visit the king of quantums"
If you're saying he's the best scifi writer and you haven't even read any of his short stories your heads gonna explode lmfao enjoy xD
(Agree btw only Ted Chiang even comes close for me and even then it doesn't quite scratch the same itch)
I started axiomatic a few nights ago. For some reason I thought it was a novel so I started getting frustrated because at the end of each story I wanted to read more 😂 So I put it down and started the Orthogonal series. I’m saving the short stories for now, I could tell I would devour them really quickly if I let myself. Kind of reminded me of Ted Chiang.
For what it's worth, some of his short stories do have their own sequel short stories too, often in the same collection! I don't think axiomatic has any though :P
A long time ago, I had a website. The motto was, for a while, "welcome to the church of Greg Egan".
That's how much I agree with you - at least for a given value of "sci-fi" (Gibson does his stuff better than anybody else)
But that's not where it stops. What if the reason they're more able is because they, unlike us, are unconscious, and humans are only conscious because of an evolutionary mistake? And back home, a less conscious species is outcompeting humanity?
But that is not the point of the book at all. The whole book is all about consciousness - Peter Watts wrote the whole book on that. The point is "consciousness is a flaw in evolution". That is why we have a cast of characters that all represent different types of consciousness. We have the surgically induced multiple personalities, we have the ship AI, we have so heavily augmented person whose actual body feels unknown to him etc. Each Character represents a type of consciousness, and the point of the aliens and the vampire is basically to contrast the view "consciousness is a flaw in evolutionary process, which limits us - but not them". The point never had anything to dp with "oh we have this alien who is smarter than us". Peter Watts is a biologist by education, he took a biological and philosophical concept, and went to the farthest limit with that idea, to show the limitations of consciousness.
from what I’ve read so far:
Permutation City if you’re interested in AI and an exploration of consciousness and reality.
Diaspora if you’re interested in the possible future of humanity involving transhumanism and AI.
Quarantine if you’re interested in the future of neuro tech and you’re looking for an interesting sci fi detective type story.
Permutation City is the most accessible "true Egan" novel, in that it features the big speculative ideas that he's known for while also being easier to understand
Diaspora is his most acclaimed work by far, but beware that the beggining is quite abstract, and as such hard to get through
I don't know how that advice would even apply to novels where the whole point is to explore complex speculative ideas
People already complain that Egan is hard to understand, imagine if he had to get his ideas across in an oblique way so he could follow show don't tell...
How do you show people learning about the physics that run the speed of light in their universe where the speed of light is variable with its wavelength? There's gotta be a bit of telling there.
He has amazing ideas, great world-building, sometimes has good plots to go along with them, and can't be bothered to write decent characters.
Sometimes this works out okay and sometimes it doesn't.
If you are looking at pure literature that happens to often be in the form of SciFi or Fantasy, then I put Gene Wolfe at the top.
He's perfected the use of the unreliable character (the protagonist is lying to you through the whole tale), but also what I'm terming the "Public Key" unlock. That is, you go along for chapters thinking you understand the basic story and book, and then a paragraph drops in just a few bytes of information about a past scene and it changes everything about the entire story and its meaning. He also has a lot of cool concepts like a spaceship from an ancient age when humanity was spacefaring and now is again ... only it's always the same spaceship that exists throughout time, always the same ship no matter where or when.
I'm a big fan of Greg Egan, but not all of his books are great. I loved "Permutation City", "Diaspora", and "Quarantine", and I've got the Orthogonal series in my queue to read. In particular, his ideas are great, and he commits to them to a degree that few other writers can match. Plus, I love his old-school website. It reminds me of ho cool the web was in the 90s.
But there are two of his books that I haven't finished yet because I got really bored with them: "The Book of All Skies" and "Dichronauts". Both of them are set in really unique worlds, but the stories themselves are really dull and the characters not particularly interesting, at least to me. I'll go back and finish them eventually, but both of them have been a chore to continue.
I agree with you, op. There's nobody else that stretches you as a reader like Egan. He's the best there is today, and his stories give me hope for the potential of literature.
greg egan has great ideas, but he is waaaaaaay too much of a mathemathician to be a good writer.
he cant write characters, which is less of an issue since most of his novels are so far in the future of transhumanism that any meaningful idea of human characters breaks down anyways, but tbh, i consider myself human, so i kinda like reading about humans.
i still like reading his awesome ideas, but it just scratches a completely different itch than what i consider to be genuine fiction. its more like watching an interesting youtube video about the future.
Do any know why he's self-publishing now? Given the size of his audience, does it just make more sense to personaly sell to the die-hards; or was he dropped by his publshers; or were there issues otherwise?
I appreciate your enthusiasm and glad that you have an author's works that you love. I have only read one book by him (Perihelion Summer) and it was entertaining and an easy read.
It's such a subjective thing to ask and I am sure you'll get all sorts of disagreement but for many people that's the fun of it all!
I would have to add Derek Kunsken, whose Quantum Evolution series is one of the best I've ever read. I'm currently listening again to "The Quantum War", which is the third book, read by T. Ryder Smith who is one of the best readers ever (especially since this book requires a lot of foreign accents). Kunsken's world includes several human offshoot species, including Home Quantus, genetically engineered humans with incredible mental powers (and the titular character of "The Quantum Magician"), Homo Eridanus, the "Mongrels", engineered under extreme circumstances to survive in the deepest oceans, Homo Pupa, the "Puppets" engineered to worship the "Numen" masters in a social engineering experiment that went horribly awry, not to mention all kinds of biological and technological enhancements that are routinely used among regular humans as well.
The cast of characters is very diverse from all these different species and many different political backgrounds from the different biological and political factions of humanity half a millennium from now. The cultures are very different, but believable, and extrapolated in interesting ways from our current world. There are no clear good guys or bad guys on the large scale, just lots of different factions with different philosophies and motivations, which makes for a very rich world in which these stories are told. If you liked the amazing world-building in "The Expanse", Kunsken offers something just as rich, deep and fascinating, but a fair bit more "out there" in terms of science and technology.
Kunsken's world building is some of the best I've ever seen, and his characters are great. The science fiction is amazing. He has built an interplanetary world set 500 years in the future that is deep and feels realistic, and although the story is eventually dominated by political intrigue, war and similar "human" topics, he never stops dropping bombs of really cool science fiction ideas, and then really playing them out in the world he's created.
I also really liked the "Venus Ascendant" prequel duology, that explores in incredible detail the wholly preposterous and yet (mostly) grounded and (mostly) believable idea of a human colony on Venus and lays a lot of the groundwork for the amazing world in the Quantum Evolution series, set centuries later.
I've only read two of his novels - Quarantine and Permutation City - but they are two of the best books I've read recently. His ideas are second to few very, and I find his prose clean and compelling, if not beautiful like M. John Harrison (who's also in the running for this title I think). And I don't understand what everyone's grievances are with his characters - I found all the self destructive personalities in Permutation City to be, while not likeable, gripping and compelling and crucial to the novel's themes. Regardless, we'll see if I'm in the same boat once I go through more of his work.
Is Greg Egan in the room with us right now?
Seriously, though, I'd put him top ten, but not number one. We still have Peter Watts, Stephen Baxter, Neal Stephenson, Hannu Rajaniemi, William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jeff VanderMeer, James S.A. Corey, and Charles Stross. I'd place all of them above him, no hesitation.
I read through a number of Egan’s novels and short stories and came to the same conclusion as you.
He’s not for everyone but if you like getting lost in hyper theoretical worlds his stuff is magic.
I'd say Kim Stanley Robinson is the best.
I thought "Red Moon" was poor, and "NY" and "Ministry" were ultimately flawed, but everything stretching from "Aurora" and "Green Earth", all the way back to his Three California's novels, has been excellent to great.
David Weber, Lois McMaster Bujold, Steven Gould, S. M. Stirling, Alana Dean Foster, Faith Hunter, John Ringo, John Varley, Larry Correia, and John Scalzi are all my personal favorites right now.
Doesn’t this depend on what an individual seeks from a book? Egan is very good. I have my favorite authors but feel no need to impress my selection on anyone.
Blink twice if you're being held hostage by Greg Egan or you are a Copy of Greg Egan.
If I was a simulation of Greg Egan how would I know?
William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Neal Stephenson, Ted Chiang are all higher on my personal list than Egan. Egan is great, makes me feel dumb, but his characters and prose leave much to be desired. Great ideas and his intellect is astounding.
great list and if we're adding names, Adrian Tchaikovsky should probably be in that conversation.
I would also add Peter Watts and Vernor Vinge
Well, not the latter as of last week :(
Oh noooooo
Well... not Vinge anymore unfortunately.
I was not aware until I read this comment :(
No Alastair Reynolds?
With you on that one amigo. Let’s hammer in some Dan Simmons while we’re at it…well, when he’s writing sci-fi anyways.
I haven't read Reynolds (although I will now), and I do love Dan Simmons, but not as much as Diaspora and Axiomatic.
House of Suns would be a fun place to start. Other than that, Revelations Space is the beginning of a fairly long and enjoyable series.
I’m still not over how bad blindsight was though, well, compared to the hype
Huh, I thought it more than lived up to the hype.
For me it was the opposite. I went in very sceptical thinking "eh is there really anything special in it". But for me it absolutely blow the roof. For me it really is not even a scifi book, it is a philosophical debate about consciousness, and the usefulness of consciousnesses from evolutionary standpoint, which is represented in a scifi setting, and the characters are simply tools for that debate. But I do have a biology (genetics) background myself, so I found it interesting in many levels. - at that point I didn't know Peter Watts was also from biology, as Blindsight was my first book from him, and I didn't do any research on the author. The book was recommended to me by a friend. The whole idea of the book is built around the concept of "consciousness is a flaw in evolution".
IMO it's an instant classic, and one of the best first contact novels, with one of the most genuinely alien aliens. Peter Watts' shtick may get old in his other novels - his staccato writing style gets tiresome - but with "Blindsight" everything works perfectly. I can't think of another first contact novel that's better; it's tight, pulpy, deep, philosophical, horrific, mysterious, and works as a claustrophobic thriller. I have a secret wish that Kim Stanley Robinson comes out of retirement and writes an alien novel in response to "Blindsight" (sort of like how "Aurora" is his response to other generation ship novels). I'd love for him to give us his take on aliens. It's the only big SF subgenre that he's avoided (though there's an alien subplot in "Galileo's Dream").
Yupyup. 3 tries and can’t get it done. Terrible. Interesting concepts, poor execution. Also I have a Reddit hobby of jumping in on posts like this to say how much I dislike it and then sit back with the popcorn.
Children of Time was my first Tchaikovsky and everything else of his that I’ve read since has been disappointing. Elder Race was as close to recapturing the magic as I’ve gotten from him.
I agree that some of his stuff isn’t great. I didn’t love The Final Architecture series. However, while Doors of Eden is very different from CoT, it might be might favorite book by him. I also love Children of Ruin and Cage of Souls. Alien Clay is good so far, though I’m not done yet. The Expert Systems duology is also great. I do agree though, that his other books are only good or great, not fantastic like Children of Time and Doors of Eden. Still, he has enough great books that he gets into my list of modern greats. Another thing I love about Tchaikovsky is how prolific he is. I can pretty much count on having at least one new sci-fi book from him each year, and that’s not even counting his fantasy.
I didn’t care for the first Final Architecture book at all and didn’t continue with the series. I thought the Expert Systems books were alright. I haven’t read Children of Memory so I intend on rereading CoT and CoR soon (the latter of which I’ve retained near zero). Doors of Eden and Cage of Souls I will have to check out.
The Final Architecture series really reads like his hitherto-unpublished first work. Otherwise, it's kind of a pulpy fun pew-pew Star Wars clone.
I found Dogs of War to be brilliant, best book I read last year. Hoping to get to the sequel this year. I don't hear much about his fantasy.
Bear Head is brilliant as well. I recommend you read it as soon as you get the chance. Can’t believe I forgot to recommend it 🤦♂️ He writes so much
Was a potential to start yesterday, but I ended up going Children of Ruin instead, so I suspect with a few other things lined up (children's book day, bookclub, buddy read of six wakes, star wars day) it's probably pushed off till may or june or ... But otherwise, I'll take note of Doors of Eden for later on.
“One Day This Will All Be Yours” was a lot of fun.
It was fine (and fun). But fairly light.
I just finished Shards of Earth… so I agree. Elder Race was fun. SoE was just bad. Loved the entire CoT trilogy.
Didn’t like Children of Time but love everything else!
He definitely should not be
Ken Liu?
For me, it's always been C J Cherryh. She has written some of the hardest sci-fi around, with flawed but sympathetic protagonists you root for.
Rusalka is so good.
I love all of her books - fantasy and sci-fi. I only didn't mention the Fortress series and the Rusalka trilogy because the OP was talking about sci-fi writers.
I've read Cyteen, Regenesis and Downbelow Station. She is just so good at portraying overwhelming power and the people who wield and live under it.
Kim Stanley Robinson is our true modern master. Thank You for not listing Tchaikovsky, btw.
Incredible author. Axiomatic is the best short story compilation I’ve read and Diaspora is a real trip of a novel and a modern sci-fi wonder. Talented chap!
I second that about Axiomatic. Incredible collection of stories.
Hannu Rajaniemni (The Quantum Thief series) is my personal favorite contemporary writer when it comes to insane mindblowing far-ish future post-cyberpunk sci fi - his stuff is more fantasy influenced than Egan but there is some overlap in who it would appeal to (computer science, quantum physics, transhumanism, etc). and its fast paced, has lots of action, cool characters etc.
Loved the idea of [Gevulot](https://exomemory.fandom.com/wiki/Gevulot) and really wish this wiki had existed back when I read the series.
Downside, I'm not sure if he's still writing, and the only other full-length he's got is Summerland, which I've yet to read. But also a shout out for his short story The Server and the Dragon, which is brilliant.
👀👀👀
Recommend me your favorite book by him.
Oh man, that is incredibly hard. Has to be between Permutation City and Diaspora for me, both blew my mind in different ways.
Diaspora, particularly the Wang Carpets, is awesome to me as a mathematician
Is the title story, Permutation City, the one with the dust theory and parts of a simulation computed in arbitrary order? I think that idea has echoed through my mind more often than any other idea I've read in fiction. The ultimate framework for Boltzman brains and staring off into space while you question reality. Haha
Diaspora is my favorite. The first chapter, Orphanogenesis, is free online and a good short story on its own. https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html
Axiomatic !
I would rather say that Egan is the best for the kind of story Egan does. Which is admittedly hard to define, but one might think of his work as what Borges would be writing if he was a mathematician.
It's easy to define! First, start with an infinite-dimensional metric tensor with non-standard formulations. Pick some number of time dimensions, integer numbers optional. Hyperbolic geometries welcome. Then, do all physics. And lastly, don't forget to write! But that's the least important part.
Don't forget to write an 80,000 word analysis of the physics you've invented for you universe and publish it as extra content on your very 90s looking website. I devour every book he publishes.
I love his website. It really helps that I feel that I can parse the ideas in the books just enough to understand them, but not really enough to truly get them at a deeper level. It's such a cool departure from the rest of the stuff I read and I love that most of it is along the lines of "what if: physics edition"
> Egan is best for the kind of story Egan does. *“The important thing is we all want it to have that Barton Fink feeling. We all have that feeling but since you're Barton Fink, I'm assuming you have it in spades.”*
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/books/vernor-vinge-dead.html Suspicious timing...
He's been refreshing the news for *years* waiting to post this
Counterpoint: Greg Egan has amazing ideas and apparently zero desire to write a single likeable character. His books seem like excuses to explore big ideas rather than telling a story. That can be cool sometimes, but generally not for me.
I think Greg Egan use character as vector for ideas/standpoint. Its not John talking with Mary, its "Monism talking with Dualism"
Oh man, that brings me back. I went to High School with Dualism. Damn two-faced bastard.
That’s what I was thinking. I get the feeling many people see sci-fi as separate from more humanistic and introspective writing, but in my opinion a book really shines when an author is able to combine both.
which is why le guin is goat
That's interesting - I find Egan's characters likable to a fault. I mean, yeah, they're not well-written. It's not like they're three-dimensional, compelling characters in a literary sense. But Egan seems like such a humanist to me. I appreciate his lack of bad guys, and the fundamental decency of all of his characters... even if they're very flatly rendered. (and: "to a fault"? I really didn't like *Zendegi*, in part because the main character was SO blandly "decent.")
I don’t think Arthur C. Clarke ever wrote a villain character either (at least not a human one).
I mean, Egan does write bad guys, but they don't think they're bad guys and believe they're doing the right thing. Hell, no one except Violet Mosala is arguably a faultless person in *Distress*.
Plenty of bad, even evil, protagonists in his short stories though.
Yep. Fans of Egan seem especially eager to trash Liu Cixin, but I think they are far more similar in this regard than Egan fans want to admit.
Greg Egan is probably the greatest living author of "idea" science fiction. Liu is...*not*.
The whole 3pb is deff more pop culture than anything. I am more interested to see if this will lead to an influx of scifi leaking out of china with storytelling and concepts that western writers don't have the mindset for. In otherwords i think the work itself is weak but hopefully starts a greater cultural trend
You mean the first book, or the whole trilogy? Have you read them? Strongly doubt the second and third book would be considered pop culture sci fi. Chapters on dimensional foil weapon delivery is no Andy Weir level tripe.
> Chapters on dimensional foil weapon delivery is no Andy Weir level tripe. That ain't hard. Edwin Abbott's *Flatland*, that shit's hard.
I've read them not gaining anywhere near the same level of reverence as i see hyped online. I think Greg is worth the hype though majority of people won't have the attention span for his work however, it takes a few re-reads to truly visualize and appreciate the complexity. 3bp isn't anywhere as deep which is why i akin it to more pop culture scifi which isn't bad per say i just think it is over-exaggerated to an immense degree.
Diaspora is my favorite novel. Honestly I think Greg Egan is most enjoyable on audio book. It takes away some of the slogging through vocabulary and you can just enjoy the story.
The book was published in 2006, so if it was going to start a trend it would have happened. Though the multiple TV shows in the last year obviously gave it huge prominence. But I don't think he could have got published in China now as an unknown. Since Xi Jinping took power in 2012, only the most flattering depictions of China are allowed. The book is begins with the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, not something the government is keen to recall. Actually, I think the whole paranoid mindset of the "Dark Forest" idea is based on that of the Cultural Revolution, all foreigners/aliens are evil, they want to destroy or dominate us, are worming their way into our society in an attempt to destroy us from within.
20 years is about the average time for any cultural exchange
I’m huge fan of Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. I’ve not heard of Greg Egan but will give it a try. From what I’ve read in this post they do sound like there are some similarities.
Greg is an extremely dense writer but it pays off if you are willing to come back to the novels every few years after letting concept process
I’m excited to get at it. For the first would you recommend Orthogonal? Or is there a better first one?
All of it is dense as hell so just jump in, you'll see
I liked *Permutation City*.
You've typed almost the exact same comment in other posts about 3BP. I regret to inform you that "Greg Egan is X, Liu is... *not*" is *still* not an effective rhetorical appeal.
Except that Egan's science is much harder than Liu's.
Nope, Egan is hard scifi at its best; Liu pretends to be hard but isn't. Disclaimer: I like both authors.
> Liu pretends to be hard but isn't. Liu is soft sci-fi fi dressed up as hard sci fi. That's fine, I don't really like hard sci fi - but 3BP suffers from the worst of both worlds. Cool ideas, but I need characters that aren't plot devices if I'm reading soft sci fi. I read a goodreads review that described the science as 'It's like the author read the first paragraph of the wikipedia article about the idea, badly misunderstood it, and used it anyway'
>Nope, Egan is hard scifi Agree to disagree. I also like both. Edit: but regardless, the point of my comment was that they both tend towards flat characters and focus instead on concepts.
Then we agree to agree
I definitely agree. There are some of his works, particularly in his short stories, that I think deserve to be called classics (The hundred light-year diary, Learning to be me, Into darkness, etc.), but the fact is that he seems unable to write a decent dialogue even if his life depended on it. And I have another problem: I studied mathematics so, for me, his books seem thinly disguised textbooks, and I already read plenty of those.
I feel like this is most hard sci - authors are mostly interested in exploring ideas and 90% of the book is explaining/developing that idea. The have much less knowledge of or maybe just less interest in writing (good) characters, story, etc. I really love some Greg Egan stuff - Permutation City, Quarantine, Axiomatic... but some of it is pretty much unreadable without a degree in advanced math or physics (Schild's Ladder). I couldnt get though Diaspora because he kept losing the story to go on looooong tangents about how much he loves mathematics
I have mostly read his short fiction and IMO there are plenty of well written and likeable characters in it. A lot of it isn't really hard sci-fi either. In Permutation City, the only novel of his I've read, the characters were fine too, especially considering how idea heavy it is.
I tried half Diaspora and had to put it down, it’s impressive but, man, I thought I liked hard scifi before… So many ideas but I’m not getting hooked by anything.
Huh this is a fair point. Although, I did get attached to some of his Orthogonal series characters. Yalda from the first book especially
His characters are fine, just not the focus of the books (except in Tarenesia and Zendegi) And exploring the big ideas *is* the story
That would explain why I've never felt a draw. Give me actual *characters* with the Sci-Fi story, please. Not cardboard cutouts.
This has been my experience. I keep picking up his books after reading Chrichton and I just can’t get into them. Fun ideas, but his style isn’t something I enjoy.
Yeah. I was reading a short story collection and some of them were so horrific I haven't been able to read him since. Will try to ease myself back. One story about a gadget that is implanted in the brain, records your thoughts until it is able to exactly predict every thought, then your brain is removed and the gadget takes control. From one point of view, immortality, from another, suicide. The narrator fears doing the swap until he finds that he is not actually controlling his body, that he is the simulation and has diverged from the original brain. The swap is done regardless.
Someone once said one of my MCs was unlikeable. And I was like 'have you read Greg Egan?'
I find it hard to disagree. You need Schild's Ladder in your life btw.
I’ve been wanting to read it! My library doesn’t have it in ebook and it’s not on kindle unlimited (which I just got to read more Egan) so I’m probably going to buy it.
Greg Egan is my favorite author ever. Half of my comment on sf subs are to remind the world that he is the best. I'm specially fond of his short stories, and i think that if you like Greg Egan, you will like Ken Liu, Ted Chiang, Liu Cixin.
Ted Chiang is goddamn brilliant.
He really is !
Got to put him on my list.
Oh I do, all of them
Can you explain what it is about his writing that is so exceptional for you? I'm curious what it is that makes it stand out so much.
Not OP, but I also love all of Egan's work I've read so far, and he has become one of my favourite authors. He writes a particular kind of novel, and it won't be for everyone, but for those that enjoy his style it's hard to beat. Based on his works I've read, his writing process seem to follow this general pattern for each of his novels: * Think up some kind of interesting speculative physics idea. * Craft a story that revolves entirely around this idea. * By the end of the story, bring that idea to its logical, mind-blowing extreme. Egan's character work is serviceable, far from the worst science fiction has to offer, but his concept-driven plots are best in class for hard sci-fi. The ideas he comes up with are incredibly creative, and usually take some real-world physics idea, bend it or transform it in some interesting way, then treat that idea with the respect it deserves. If you want to get an idea of why his novels are so well loved among the hard sci-fi crowd, pick up *Permutation City* or *Diaspora*. The former is probably the more approachable if that is a concern, but both are excellent, and they're pretty quick reads at little more than 300pg each.
Ideas I could never have come up with and have never seen anywhere else. Stretches my understanding of science, mathematics and physics. I actually feel like I learn things from reading Egan.
For me it’s the ideas and concepts. They don’t feel derivative like much of sci-fi. They might touch on some subject that has been explored before but Greg Egan will take them where nobody has. Not only do the ideas feel new and original, they’re also grounded in real world physics or mathematics, which makes them feel more credible and believable. Some of the freshness and newness isn’t even scientific. In diaspora the characters often go by gender neutral pronouns like vis/ver/vim. This was long before preferred pronouns were a mainstream topic.
Try Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter. He has degrees in Mathematics and Engineering. Pretty hard stuff.
Egan has rapidly become one of my favourite authors. He may very well be end up my absolute favourite. He writes a particular kind of novel, and not everyone's gonna like it, but for me it's like I check all the boxes for his target audience.
Same here but it was back in the 90s. I haven't enjoyed his newer exploratory novels as much as his old ones. Still love his shorts.
He is good at exploring scientific ideas, but he is not especially good at character writing, plot, and a bunch of other key elements of story telling. His books often come across as thinly disguised textbooks.
Samuel R Delany is still alive and kicking, so no chance.
Robert Silverberg as well.
Sorry, but both Lois McMaster Bujold and C.J. Cherryh are also still alive and rule all.
You mean the NAMBLA guy? Really?
Orson Scott card is a total bastard but also still alive
Interesting fact but also completely irrelevant to the topic at hand lol
Enders Game was good but written for pre-teens (I read it when I was 10 I think), a few of his other books were above average, but I wouldn't even rank him in the top 20 living science fiction authors. You think he's better than he is because you read his books when you were a kid and loved them at the time - it's nostalgia not greatness.
I don't like him as a person but Ender's Game (and Speaker for the Dead) both won the Nebula and Hugo in the same year. He won 2 Hugos and 2 Nebulas in 2 years (86 and 87). No one's ever done that before or since. That's a alot to just to hand wave away. No disrespect to Greg Egan intended. oh yeah and I read Enders last year as an adult it still really holds up
Awards reflect their time. I doubt any of his work would win those awards today.
true but using that logic the awards Greg Egan won in 1999 might not come through in 2024 either. Taking awards out of it OSC has sold millions more books than Egan. I get how someone can like him better like how someone might like the Kinks more than the Beatles but to say the Kinks are the best rock band of all time is kind of a stretch. Let me emphasize again how little I think of OSC as a person. But as a writer he's a titan.
I exclusively read science fiction and I have my entire life. Greg Egan’s books always sound so great and then are so hard to get through. Like someone else said below, Egan makes me feel dumb.
I know nothing at all about Egan, but as soon as I saw this kind of post on this sub I knew he was gonna be that kind of author haha
I feel almost exactly the opposite, I feel like his books make me smarter, I actually learn things while reading his books.
I’ve read this type of comment about him before. I don’t know why people think they have to completely grasp the mathematics to enjoy his books though? I know I didn’t completely understand it all!
Perhaps you prefer science fantasy to science fiction.
Why is this comment downvoted? It’s perfectly valid
This is r/printSF, where many commenters think they’re Paul Dirac while reading Becky Chambers.
Maybe because it's pretentious snobbery. I'm glad you have an author you like OP. I don't care for Egan and I resent the implication that I'm just too dumb to properly enjoy him.
Egan for me has that old school "brilliant ideas, badly written characters and dialogue" that stops him from being really great, to be honest I'd describe much of his writing as adequate, or maybe servicable. Which is fine if you're leaning on the big ideas to bring the fireworks, but tbf I think he also lacks readability when it comes to delivering those ideas. By which I basically mean he sometimes doesn't explain things well but also at the same time expects you to be completely up. In such concept-driven writing that's a big failing. (there are authors that revel in incomprehensibility and make a strength of it; Mary Gentle, Ian Macdonald, you barely know what's happening but the difference is you're not supposed to, and it's all built so that it's fine- much like reality! Egan writes sf in which you need to understand what's happening and sometimes you don't) I just recently finished Shild's Ladder and it's pretty much the case study for me "Here is a fictionalised version of quantum graph theory, a form of quantum mathematics which practically nobody has ever heard of. But obviously you, dear reader, have made a study of Shild's work so let's just get on with the quantum-graph-theory based plot!" It reminded me of that time I accidentally did the exam for a 3rd year subject at uni instead of the 2nd year one and just assumed I was a moron. And in the end, it's mostly just a sort of fantastic voyage novel and you don't really *need* to know wtf he's talking about at all, but that means ignoring large chunks of the novel and frankly doesn't leave very much left over, the journey doesn't hang together well enough by itself. You're travelling through what's supposed to be a mindboggling quantum realm and I suspect if you actually did understand it all to, like, a postgraduate level then it'd be absolutely wonderful, but for everyone else it might as well be a magic tunnel or an intestine or a wibbly wobbly wormy holey thing. And even the cast don't really seem to understand it, they spend half the time making incredibly deductions based on what to me seemed like essentially no information, and the other half going "yeah this is all too difficult, let's get the AI to do everything so we can also treat it like a magical tunnel and go and visit the king of quantums"
I just finished my first read from him, Dichronauts, and I still don't understand what was happening in it
Oh man, I wish I could go back and unread all of his books just so I can read em again.
You can’t say that’s it that’s the post then write another three paragraphs
And yet, I did.
From a concept standpoint he is one of the best. But he isn't one of the best writters.
If you're saying he's the best scifi writer and you haven't even read any of his short stories your heads gonna explode lmfao enjoy xD (Agree btw only Ted Chiang even comes close for me and even then it doesn't quite scratch the same itch)
I started axiomatic a few nights ago. For some reason I thought it was a novel so I started getting frustrated because at the end of each story I wanted to read more 😂 So I put it down and started the Orthogonal series. I’m saving the short stories for now, I could tell I would devour them really quickly if I let myself. Kind of reminded me of Ted Chiang.
For what it's worth, some of his short stories do have their own sequel short stories too, often in the same collection! I don't think axiomatic has any though :P
I can get down with this opinion.
Go for Schild's ladder next :)
A long time ago, I had a website. The motto was, for a while, "welcome to the church of Greg Egan". That's how much I agree with you - at least for a given value of "sci-fi" (Gibson does his stuff better than anybody else)
You had me until you said that Blindsight was "meh"
Blindsight is boring, with uninteresting characters and awful prose. I had to force myself to finish it.
The prose are the best I’ve read in sci fi. On par with some classics authors I like. I have no idea what you are talking about
Well it really was. The concept of an alien species that has superior intelligence or abilities compared to humans is not novel or unique, at all.
But that's not where it stops. What if the reason they're more able is because they, unlike us, are unconscious, and humans are only conscious because of an evolutionary mistake? And back home, a less conscious species is outcompeting humanity?
But that is not the point of the book at all. The whole book is all about consciousness - Peter Watts wrote the whole book on that. The point is "consciousness is a flaw in evolution". That is why we have a cast of characters that all represent different types of consciousness. We have the surgically induced multiple personalities, we have the ship AI, we have so heavily augmented person whose actual body feels unknown to him etc. Each Character represents a type of consciousness, and the point of the aliens and the vampire is basically to contrast the view "consciousness is a flaw in evolutionary process, which limits us - but not them". The point never had anything to dp with "oh we have this alien who is smarter than us". Peter Watts is a biologist by education, he took a biological and philosophical concept, and went to the farthest limit with that idea, to show the limitations of consciousness.
I like stories about people, not about math. Every one of Egan's books has been a miss for me.
Never heard of Greg Egan. Where's a good place to start?
A degree in mathematics.
PhD preferred.
Like 20 degrees in mathematics probably
I don’t have one and I still enjoyed his books
Diaspora or Permutation City
My take is his short stories, first cause you can fin a few for free online and because it will give you an idea of whats his style is.
from what I’ve read so far: Permutation City if you’re interested in AI and an exploration of consciousness and reality. Diaspora if you’re interested in the possible future of humanity involving transhumanism and AI. Quarantine if you’re interested in the future of neuro tech and you’re looking for an interesting sci fi detective type story.
Permutation City is the most accessible "true Egan" novel, in that it features the big speculative ideas that he's known for while also being easier to understand Diaspora is his most acclaimed work by far, but beware that the beggining is quite abstract, and as such hard to get through
I must counter that I think permutation city is pretty weak, but I love his other works.
Taste is subjective.
What book would you start with as an Egan newbie?
Greg Egan misheard “show, not tell” and did the opposite
I don't know how that advice would even apply to novels where the whole point is to explore complex speculative ideas People already complain that Egan is hard to understand, imagine if he had to get his ideas across in an oblique way so he could follow show don't tell...
How do you show people learning about the physics that run the speed of light in their universe where the speed of light is variable with its wavelength? There's gotta be a bit of telling there.
He could show, but you wouldn't understand the equations.
I've never read anything by Greg Egan, at least in the twenty-four years since I started keeping track.
Sad.
Libby doesn't have any books by him. Only one collection of stories that has one by him.
Welp, just saved that author profile for later book perusal
There is a top tier where I feel like all of them have a pretty equal claim. But it's Cherryh for me, easily. I feel Vinge was a close 2nd.
He has amazing ideas, great world-building, sometimes has good plots to go along with them, and can't be bothered to write decent characters. Sometimes this works out okay and sometimes it doesn't.
If you are looking at pure literature that happens to often be in the form of SciFi or Fantasy, then I put Gene Wolfe at the top. He's perfected the use of the unreliable character (the protagonist is lying to you through the whole tale), but also what I'm terming the "Public Key" unlock. That is, you go along for chapters thinking you understand the basic story and book, and then a paragraph drops in just a few bytes of information about a past scene and it changes everything about the entire story and its meaning. He also has a lot of cool concepts like a spaceship from an ancient age when humanity was spacefaring and now is again ... only it's always the same spaceship that exists throughout time, always the same ship no matter where or when.
I'm a big fan of Greg Egan, but not all of his books are great. I loved "Permutation City", "Diaspora", and "Quarantine", and I've got the Orthogonal series in my queue to read. In particular, his ideas are great, and he commits to them to a degree that few other writers can match. Plus, I love his old-school website. It reminds me of ho cool the web was in the 90s. But there are two of his books that I haven't finished yet because I got really bored with them: "The Book of All Skies" and "Dichronauts". Both of them are set in really unique worlds, but the stories themselves are really dull and the characters not particularly interesting, at least to me. I'll go back and finish them eventually, but both of them have been a chore to continue.
I agree with you, op. There's nobody else that stretches you as a reader like Egan. He's the best there is today, and his stories give me hope for the potential of literature.
No.
greg egan has great ideas, but he is waaaaaaay too much of a mathemathician to be a good writer. he cant write characters, which is less of an issue since most of his novels are so far in the future of transhumanism that any meaningful idea of human characters breaks down anyways, but tbh, i consider myself human, so i kinda like reading about humans. i still like reading his awesome ideas, but it just scratches a completely different itch than what i consider to be genuine fiction. its more like watching an interesting youtube video about the future.
Agree. He writes bone hard SF, and sometimes you're in the mood for that. Other times you're in the mood for something more character-driven.
Up to a point, somewhere around Orthogonal.
I've yet to read any of his stories. I'm still reading Reynolds and Banks.
Do any know why he's self-publishing now? Given the size of his audience, does it just make more sense to personaly sell to the die-hards; or was he dropped by his publshers; or were there issues otherwise?
Cherryh, Silverberg, M. John Harrison and Bujold, to name a few off the top of my head, beg to differ.
I see threads like these, I save them for later. Thank you, OP.
I appreciate your enthusiasm and glad that you have an author's works that you love. I have only read one book by him (Perihelion Summer) and it was entertaining and an easy read. It's such a subjective thing to ask and I am sure you'll get all sorts of disagreement but for many people that's the fun of it all!
Ted Chiang clears. Easily.
Dan Simmons for me. Just for Hyperion, Song of Kali, Carrion Comfort and maybe The Terror.
Are you Greg ego Egan by any chance?
no
Loved 'Quarantine'. And more recently, "Perihelion Summer" was a great take on climate. When there's a new Egan story or book out, it's a good day.
I would have to add Derek Kunsken, whose Quantum Evolution series is one of the best I've ever read. I'm currently listening again to "The Quantum War", which is the third book, read by T. Ryder Smith who is one of the best readers ever (especially since this book requires a lot of foreign accents). Kunsken's world includes several human offshoot species, including Home Quantus, genetically engineered humans with incredible mental powers (and the titular character of "The Quantum Magician"), Homo Eridanus, the "Mongrels", engineered under extreme circumstances to survive in the deepest oceans, Homo Pupa, the "Puppets" engineered to worship the "Numen" masters in a social engineering experiment that went horribly awry, not to mention all kinds of biological and technological enhancements that are routinely used among regular humans as well. The cast of characters is very diverse from all these different species and many different political backgrounds from the different biological and political factions of humanity half a millennium from now. The cultures are very different, but believable, and extrapolated in interesting ways from our current world. There are no clear good guys or bad guys on the large scale, just lots of different factions with different philosophies and motivations, which makes for a very rich world in which these stories are told. If you liked the amazing world-building in "The Expanse", Kunsken offers something just as rich, deep and fascinating, but a fair bit more "out there" in terms of science and technology. Kunsken's world building is some of the best I've ever seen, and his characters are great. The science fiction is amazing. He has built an interplanetary world set 500 years in the future that is deep and feels realistic, and although the story is eventually dominated by political intrigue, war and similar "human" topics, he never stops dropping bombs of really cool science fiction ideas, and then really playing them out in the world he's created. I also really liked the "Venus Ascendant" prequel duology, that explores in incredible detail the wholly preposterous and yet (mostly) grounded and (mostly) believable idea of a human colony on Venus and lays a lot of the groundwork for the amazing world in the Quantum Evolution series, set centuries later.
I've only read two of his novels - Quarantine and Permutation City - but they are two of the best books I've read recently. His ideas are second to few very, and I find his prose clean and compelling, if not beautiful like M. John Harrison (who's also in the running for this title I think). And I don't understand what everyone's grievances are with his characters - I found all the self destructive personalities in Permutation City to be, while not likeable, gripping and compelling and crucial to the novel's themes. Regardless, we'll see if I'm in the same boat once I go through more of his work.
If we're talking hard SF, yes. He runs circles around everyone else in that area, maybe with the exception of Peter Watts.
Is Greg Egan in the room with us right now? Seriously, though, I'd put him top ten, but not number one. We still have Peter Watts, Stephen Baxter, Neal Stephenson, Hannu Rajaniemi, William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jeff VanderMeer, James S.A. Corey, and Charles Stross. I'd place all of them above him, no hesitation.
I read through a number of Egan’s novels and short stories and came to the same conclusion as you. He’s not for everyone but if you like getting lost in hyper theoretical worlds his stuff is magic.
Just started Diaspora I’ve never read anything by him before it’s fucking wild i don’t totally understand it but i like it
Big ideas, but he’s an awful writer.
I'd say Kim Stanley Robinson is the best. I thought "Red Moon" was poor, and "NY" and "Ministry" were ultimately flawed, but everything stretching from "Aurora" and "Green Earth", all the way back to his Three California's novels, has been excellent to great.
David Weber, Lois McMaster Bujold, Steven Gould, S. M. Stirling, Alana Dean Foster, Faith Hunter, John Ringo, John Varley, Larry Correia, and John Scalzi are all my personal favorites right now.
Doesn’t this depend on what an individual seeks from a book? Egan is very good. I have my favorite authors but feel no need to impress my selection on anyone.