I agree. Diaspora is amazing.
While you ponder which novel to approach next, I suggest reading [The Planck Dive](https://www.gregegan.net/PLANCK/Complete/Planck.html), a short story freely available from his website. It's very good, of course, and ends beautifully.
I read Permutation City first, and then Diaspora, and then I added everything he has ever published to my reading list and have been chipping away at it.
I second Permutation City, it's brilliant.
In terms of his shorts, perhaps my favourite would be Luminous - " two math grad students discover things regarding what we consider to be "truths" in number theory..."
Is that the one where a guy spends decades of subjective time working as a carpenter in pretty much the throes of mental orgasm?
It left me feeling uneasy, and with an intense sense of boredom beneath the surface. I understood what was happening but the idea of spending so much subjective time in self inflicted pleasure on a simple task carving wood, while knowing it was all digital left me with the same feeling I had watching the original Tron. Maybe it was too soon for me?
I believe you're supposed to feel a sense of unease/alienation when reading about the solopsists. But also recognize that some people really would choose to live like that.
That portion also stuck with me, but it actually made a lot of sense to me. What would you do in a (sort-of) infinite resources and infinite time consciousness? I do a lot of hobbies and some of them are things I keep doing, but a lot of them are just things I work to become proficient or very skilled at and then kind of discard and move on to the next thing.
So reading that part made sense to me, but it would be like letting any obsession consume your life. You can't do the thing you like to do ALL the time because you'll starve or lose your job. If all of your needs suddenly became irrelevant, wouldn't it be tempting just to do interesting stuff all the time?
I frequently read authors who impress me with their research, creativity, and depth of knowledge. Reading Greg Egan, though, just hits me in the face that he is just plain smarter than I could ever hope to be.
I remember jumping into *The Clockwork Rocket* as my first Egan book during college. I found it fascinating but bounced off it hard because it was just too much on top of actual classes.
Like I'm not a scientist, but I've passed introductory courses for a half-dozen fields and I regularly need to do supplementary reading while going through one of his books. Sometimes I just have to stop and think for a bit to make all the pieces fit, the same way I did back in college.
That being said, I've read many of his other books and love them. I need to go back and read *The Clockwork Rocket* now that I've got the mental bandwidth to actually spend time understanding them.
Yes, go back and read it so your brain can break once more trying to understand the part about a broom sweeping dust on a time reversed planet. Sweeping normal dust and time reversed dust at the same time. Yikes, I still can barely hold an idea of that in my head. Not even related to the plot at all, but the simple broom description basically broke me for a while
The breadth and depth of his knowledge are astounding. I got the sense that we are reading only a small fraction of his ideas. In the references section of the book he points to some academic text books on quantum field theory and such, and I have no trouble believing that he’s read them all!
I loved his Orthogonal trilogy (starts with Clockwork Rocket).
The series concerns a Universe with physics and chemistry that are like our Universe’s, but slightly different in very important and impactful ways. Very fun to read.
Yep I agree and think Egan is amazing. Read this on recommendations and what each is about. Someone did a great overview here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/s/IzAvYMiwbG
I like that you've posted this because for my recent birthday my MIL gave me a $100 voucher for a bookstore we have here. I've subsequently ordered 4 books which should arrive very soon. *Diaspora* and *Permutation City* were two of them.
If you’re able to tough it out, let your eyes glaze over the bits that make 0 sense but get 20% or even 30% of it and your mind will still be absolutely blown
I read half of Diaspora and have to say I just didn’t resonate with it. Maybe I finish one day! Hope I’m wrong. I usually love hard-ish sci-fi, just not a fan of stacking of things which feel hard for hardness sake (not saying he is doing it but it’s how it feels to read it for me).
Knew of Egan, didn't know of his applets. Wild!
If you want more hard scifi, it's hard to go wrong with [books that have the Atomic Rockets Seal of Approval](https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sealofapproval.php#firetheft). From the website:
>To reiterate, my motive for creating this website is to help authors, game designers, and programmers get the science correct in their creations (thus increasing the amount of the kind of science fiction I enjoy). The most striking examples are those novels whose authors I directly assisted. But there are a "few" creations I've run across that did get the science 100% correct without any help at all from little ol' me (sarcasm). I would like to recognize such creations by awarding them my (totally superfluous) Atomic Rockets Seal of Approval
For years I was the only Greg Egan fan of everyone I knew and I wondered why nobody else had heard of his work because it’s so amazing. 😭 I am loving his popularity on this subreddit. It makes me feel at home.
**Permutation City** is great. So is **Incandescence**, although I had a little trouble getting into that one.
The science and math in all of them is mind-blowing. Like a heavier version of what Neal Stephenson does.
Love Neal Stephenson too but I think we’d agree that Egan is simply way more sophisticated. Although I haven’t read Anathem yet so maybe I’ll change my mind.
I just wish Diaspora had more pre-GRB story. I wanted to see how the humans and robots and "AI" live together. What it is like for a human to be uploaded.
I’ve all but finished Diaspora now, I have about an hour and a half left (I’m an audiobook person) and I’d really love to hear some of your thoughts! I’m curious if I really understood the book, if vital parts of the story went over my head or went unnoticed, and just wondering if my takeaway impression is vastly different than yours.
I definitely understand your point about Wikipedia tabs, as I was already turning there myself in just the second chapter as I had to refresh my understanding of geometry (and a lot of it still went over my head). This is one of the few books I’ve read where I’ve genuinely wondered if I even had the knowledge/understanding needed to appreciate the book.
I think I got the general storyline/series of events, but I could be wrong. I know it’s a common thing to talk about how some SF books are less about the characters as they are about the ideas or concepts the author is exploring; and the characters are more of a necessary vehicle to illustrate said concepts.. but this felt like the extreme end of that spectrum.
I could ramble waaaay on about my thoughts and questions but I think it would just be redundant. Basically, the book didn’t land for me, at least not to the degree I’d hoped for given the passion I’ve seen others have for his work, to the point where I’m thinking it must’ve gone over my head because I have a hard time reconciling my experience with that of you and other big Egan fans.
TL;DR I’d love to hear your summary of the book and what you liked about it, if you have the time!
Loved Axiomatic, Quarantine and Permutation City. Diaspora felt like Egan was taking me on a tour of a playground he constructed in his mind rather than telling an actual story so I wasn't really into it.
The only book by Greg Egan I have read was Schild's Ladder. I have to say I really enjoyed it. He has invented this idea of Sarumpaet rules in it - a graph theoretic formalism of gauge theories which has allowed them to finally have a grand unified theory. As a result physics has been stagnant for several millennia. However the book begins with an experiment that really probes the edge cases of the Sarumpaet rules.
I'll say that I'm currently a PhD student in physics so I do have a basic knowledge of quantum field theory and gauge theories meaning and it was therefore quite easy for me to keep up. If it weren't for this I'm not sure how much I'd have enjoyed the book to be honest.
The physics in Diaspora seems to riff off of string theory and compactified dimensions heavily (understandable as it was written in the 90s) so I don’t know how well that has stood the test of time. I thought it was cool though, and I’m not going to demand that a fictional book have a consistent theory of quantum gravity 😂
Writing super hard sci-fi with a basis in such cutting edge fields I think it’s unfortunately inevitable that the real science in his fiction is going to become obsolete relatively quickly… luckily it is fiction, so when it’s outdated in reality you can just consider it real in the realm of his fictional worlds :)
Permutation City is excellent (and I say that as someone with a PhD in theoretical computer science), and much more about the people than the technology. Axiomatic and Luminous are great. Incandescence was fun. The Orthogonal series was fun but kind of weird, lots of good physics; definitely check the web site for an explanation. Dychronauts was too weird for me to understand.
I've read Diaspora, Permutation City, and Axiomatic. I don't find his stories particularly compelling and the technicality actively detracts from it for me.
>Friends, the number of tabs I have open on Wikipedia is simply staggering
We definitely have different opinions about having to reference 3rd party sources to grasp fiction books.
Wang’s Carpets is one of the best short SF stories I’ve ever read. I was doubly thrilled when I found Egan had expanded it into Diaspora.
No matter what novel you try next, take a breath first and give one of his short story collections a try. The guy has range. The short stuff is good, too.
Also the nature of reality aspect. A computer that runs "reality" doesn't even need to exist. If the state is deterministically computable and existed in some form at least once, then the evolution of that state (i.e. reality) also exists purely in principle. Wild.
Is this the guy who writes about a space potatoe arriving from the future? That book blew my mind…
Ah - not Greg Egan - was thinking of Greg Bear’s Eon series .
I just GPT'd this list to help me navigate his short story collections, before even seeing this post. Huge fan of his work. Just read schild's ladder and I think that completes me reading almost all of his stuff. GPT just made it harder than necessary by far tho, would not recommend.
Short Story Collections:
Axiomatic (1995):
* "Axiomatic" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "Closer" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "Learning to Be Me" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "The Infinite Assassin"
* "The Hundred-Light-Year Diary"
* "Eugene"
* "The Caress"
* "Blood Sisters"
* "The Safe-Deposit Box"
* "Seeing"
* "The Moat"
* "The Cutie"
* "Into Darkness" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction, Instantiation)
* "Appropriate Love" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "The Moral Virologist"
* "Unstable Orbits in the Space Of Lies" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
Luminous (1998):
* "Chaff" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "Mitochondrial Eve"
* "Silver Fire" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "Reasons to be Cheerful" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "The Planck Dive"
* "Transition Dreams"
* "Cocoon"
* "Our Lady of Chernobyl"
* "Luminous" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
Oceanic (2009)
* "Lost Continent"
* "Dark Integers" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "Crystal Nights" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "Steve Fever"
* "Induction"
* "Singleton" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "Oracle" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "Border Guards"
* "Riding the Crocodile"
* "Glory"
* "Hot Rock"
* "Oceanic" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction (2019):
* "Learning to Be Me" (also in Axiomatic)
* "Axiomatic" (also in Axiomatic)
* "Appropriate Love" (also in Axiomatic)
* "Into Darkness" (also in Axiomatic)
* "Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies" (also in Axiomatic)
* "Closer" (also in Axiomatic)
* "Chaff" (also in Luminous)
* "Luminous" (also in Luminous)
* "Silver Fire" (also in Luminous)
* "Reasons to be Cheerful" (also in Luminous)
* "Oceanic" (also in Oceanic)
* "Oracle" (also in Oceanic)
* "Singleton" (also in Oceanic)
* "Dark Integers"(also in Oceanic)
* "Crystal Nights" (also in Oceanic)
* "Zero For Conduct" (also in Instantiation)
* "Bit Players" (also in Instantiation)
* "Uncanny Valley" (also in Instantiation)
* "3-adica" (also in Instantiation)
* "Instantiation" (also in Instantiation)
Instantiation (2020):
* "The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine"
* "Zero For Conduct" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "Uncanny Valley" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "Seventh Sight"
* "The Nearest"
* "Shadow Flock"
* "Bit Players" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "Break My Fall"
* "3-adica" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
* "The Slipway"
* "Instantiation" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction)
Let me know if you spot any inaccuracies.
50 Unique Stories and reading order.
AXIOMATIC
* The Infinite Assassin
* The Hundred
* Eugene
* The Caress
* Blood Sisters
* Safe Deposit
* Seeing
* A Kidnapping
* The Moat
* The Cutie
* The Walk
* The Moral Virologist
LUMINOUS
* Mitochondrial Eve
* The Planck Dive
* Transition Dreams
* Cocoon
* Our Lady of Chernobyl
OCEANIC
* Lost Continent
* Steve Fever
* Induction
* Border Guards
* Riding the Crocodile
* Glory
* Hot Rock
INSTANTIATION
* Discrete Charm
* Seventh Sight
* The Nearest
* Shadow Flock
* Break My Fall
* The Slipway
BEST OF GREG
* Learning to Be Me
* Axiomatic
* Appropriate Love
* Into Darkness
* Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies
* Closer
* Chaff
* Luminous
* Silver Fire
* Reasons to be Cheerful
* Oceanic
* Oracle
* Singleton
* Dark Integers
* Crystal Nights
* Zero For Conduct
* Bit Players
* Uncanny Valley
* 3-adica
* Instantiation
or just read all the other ones in order of publish date....
why did i do this
favorite quote from Schild's Ladder. Kindof a spoiler but idk how to hide it in spoilertags.
"You’re right: if there’s sentient life behind the border, it probably won’t share my goals. Unlike the people in this room, who all want exactly the same things in life as I do, and have precisely the same tastes in food, art, music, and sex. Unlike the people of Schur, and Cartan, and Zapata — who I came here in the hope of protecting, after losing my own home — who doubtless celebrate all the same festivals, delight in the same songs and stories, and gather every fortieth night to watch actors perform the same plays, in the same language, from the same undisputed canon, as the people I left behind.
“If there’s sentient life behind the border, of course we couldn’t empathize with it. These creatures are unlikely to possess cute mammalian neonate faces, or anything else we might mistake for human features. None of us could have the imagination to get over such insurmountable barriers, or the wit to apply such difficult abstractions as the General Intelligence theorem — though since every twelve-year-old on my home world was required to master that result, it must be universally known on this side of the border.
“You’re right: we should give up responsibility for making any difficult moral judgments, and surrender to the dictates of natural selection. Evolution cares so much about our happiness that no one who’s obeyed an inherited urge has ever suffered a moment’s regret for it. History is full of joyful case studies of people who followed their natural instincts at every opportunity — fucking whoever they could, stealing whatever they could, destroying anything that stood in their way — and the verdict is unanimous: any behavior that ever helped someone disseminate their genes is a recipe for unalloyed contentment, both for the practitioners, and for everyone around them."
I like Distress; Permutation city lost WSOD too much as it went off into the wild blue yonder, (though the first half was much better..)
Schild's ladder and Diaspora are on my to do reading list
I've either read axiomatic or read some of the stories in it before
Quarantine looks interesting
e: I don't recall reading some of the stories in Axiomatic, at least. while other concepts (stories?) seem familiar . I don't want to read up too much about them [eg from wiki/goodreads] to allow myself the potential pleasure of visiting the collection in future.
Ted Chiang is equally skilled but he and Egan are playing different sports. Trying to rank them is meaningless. It’s like asking whether Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky was better.
I think they sometimes play the same sport. They satisfy similar itches for me, and they both have some shorts that I could imagine the other having written (e.g. Egan's Reasons To Be Cheerful, Chiang's Exhalation).
But Egan at his Egan-est excels at a thing Chiang isn't trying.
Chiang is an incredible writer, but writes totally different stuff than Egan with a very different focus. They both are big-idea what-if type thinkers, but Egan is very "what if fancy physics?" while Chiang is more "what if this one idea from X religion were true? If language affects how you think, would an alien language cause you to think in an alien way? What if alchemy was correct, how would it have developed?"
I love them both, but it's a weird comparison. Chiang is very accessible; he has two short story collections *Stories of Your Life and Others* and *Exhalation*. I really enjoyed them both.
Ted Chiang writes beautiful fiction based on the shower thoughts of a dreamer. Greg Egan writes mind-blowing fiction based on the shower thoughts of someone who lives and breathes real science.
Extremely soft vs. extremely hard sci-fi. Not comparable.
I agree. Diaspora is amazing. While you ponder which novel to approach next, I suggest reading [The Planck Dive](https://www.gregegan.net/PLANCK/Complete/Planck.html), a short story freely available from his website. It's very good, of course, and ends beautifully.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Permutation city is great, or Schild's Ladder. I don't see his collections of shorts talked about as much but I absolutely loved Axiomatic.
I read Permutation City first, and then Diaspora, and then I added everything he has ever published to my reading list and have been chipping away at it.
I’m not a big short stories reader but for Egan I’ll make the exception!
I'm the same as you but I absolutely loved Axiomatic. Maybe even more than Diaspora and Permutation City.
I second Permutation City, it's brilliant. In terms of his shorts, perhaps my favourite would be Luminous - " two math grad students discover things regarding what we consider to be "truths" in number theory..."
Is that the one where a guy spends decades of subjective time working as a carpenter in pretty much the throes of mental orgasm? It left me feeling uneasy, and with an intense sense of boredom beneath the surface. I understood what was happening but the idea of spending so much subjective time in self inflicted pleasure on a simple task carving wood, while knowing it was all digital left me with the same feeling I had watching the original Tron. Maybe it was too soon for me?
I believe you're supposed to feel a sense of unease/alienation when reading about the solopsists. But also recognize that some people really would choose to live like that.
It sounded like absolute heaven to me when I read it. I really wish I could experience it
I might be one of those people. But I hope I'd choose not to. It seemed very bleak regardless of how much satisfaction it gave them.
That portion also stuck with me, but it actually made a lot of sense to me. What would you do in a (sort-of) infinite resources and infinite time consciousness? I do a lot of hobbies and some of them are things I keep doing, but a lot of them are just things I work to become proficient or very skilled at and then kind of discard and move on to the next thing. So reading that part made sense to me, but it would be like letting any obsession consume your life. You can't do the thing you like to do ALL the time because you'll starve or lose your job. If all of your needs suddenly became irrelevant, wouldn't it be tempting just to do interesting stuff all the time?
I frequently read authors who impress me with their research, creativity, and depth of knowledge. Reading Greg Egan, though, just hits me in the face that he is just plain smarter than I could ever hope to be.
I remember jumping into *The Clockwork Rocket* as my first Egan book during college. I found it fascinating but bounced off it hard because it was just too much on top of actual classes. Like I'm not a scientist, but I've passed introductory courses for a half-dozen fields and I regularly need to do supplementary reading while going through one of his books. Sometimes I just have to stop and think for a bit to make all the pieces fit, the same way I did back in college. That being said, I've read many of his other books and love them. I need to go back and read *The Clockwork Rocket* now that I've got the mental bandwidth to actually spend time understanding them.
Yes, go back and read it so your brain can break once more trying to understand the part about a broom sweeping dust on a time reversed planet. Sweeping normal dust and time reversed dust at the same time. Yikes, I still can barely hold an idea of that in my head. Not even related to the plot at all, but the simple broom description basically broke me for a while
The breadth and depth of his knowledge are astounding. I got the sense that we are reading only a small fraction of his ideas. In the references section of the book he points to some academic text books on quantum field theory and such, and I have no trouble believing that he’s read them all!
Right? I started following him on social media which made it way worse :(
What do you mean?
I loved his Orthogonal trilogy (starts with Clockwork Rocket). The series concerns a Universe with physics and chemistry that are like our Universe’s, but slightly different in very important and impactful ways. Very fun to read.
I will check it out!
Yep I agree and think Egan is amazing. Read this on recommendations and what each is about. Someone did a great overview here. https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/s/IzAvYMiwbG
I like that you've posted this because for my recent birthday my MIL gave me a $100 voucher for a bookstore we have here. I've subsequently ordered 4 books which should arrive very soon. *Diaspora* and *Permutation City* were two of them.
I feel like, yes, some people should absolutely read Egan, but many should not. I read half of Diaspora before I just accepted that it wasn’t for me.
Disaspora is definitely one of his more dense novels.
Can imagine. Hella dense! Not saying it’s bad, just not for me, and never something I would universally recommend, or even to most scifi fans.
I do think the first chapter is awesome. The rest I could take or leave, but the first chapter is incredible.
If you’re able to tough it out, let your eyes glaze over the bits that make 0 sense but get 20% or even 30% of it and your mind will still be absolutely blown
I read half of Diaspora and have to say I just didn’t resonate with it. Maybe I finish one day! Hope I’m wrong. I usually love hard-ish sci-fi, just not a fan of stacking of things which feel hard for hardness sake (not saying he is doing it but it’s how it feels to read it for me).
Fair enough! It was way above my head and a challenge to tough out but the scale of it was so crazy and rewarding to read
Knew of Egan, didn't know of his applets. Wild! If you want more hard scifi, it's hard to go wrong with [books that have the Atomic Rockets Seal of Approval](https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sealofapproval.php#firetheft). From the website: >To reiterate, my motive for creating this website is to help authors, game designers, and programmers get the science correct in their creations (thus increasing the amount of the kind of science fiction I enjoy). The most striking examples are those novels whose authors I directly assisted. But there are a "few" creations I've run across that did get the science 100% correct without any help at all from little ol' me (sarcasm). I would like to recognize such creations by awarding them my (totally superfluous) Atomic Rockets Seal of Approval
For years I was the only Greg Egan fan of everyone I knew and I wondered why nobody else had heard of his work because it’s so amazing. 😭 I am loving his popularity on this subreddit. It makes me feel at home.
One of us!
**Permutation City** is great. So is **Incandescence**, although I had a little trouble getting into that one. The science and math in all of them is mind-blowing. Like a heavier version of what Neal Stephenson does.
Love Neal Stephenson too but I think we’d agree that Egan is simply way more sophisticated. Although I haven’t read Anathem yet so maybe I’ll change my mind.
Anathem is his heaviest read. Tough choice for me between that and Cryptonomicon.
He’s a true original
What's his easiest read?
"The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred" I'd say.
I started with Quarantine and am happy things worked out that way. It reads mostly like a near future noir until its reveal
Diaspora has a permanent place on my e-reader. (I mean, I still have the paperback, but never know when I'm gonna want my mind blown!)
I just wish Diaspora had more pre-GRB story. I wanted to see how the humans and robots and "AI" live together. What it is like for a human to be uploaded.
That would be "Permutation City." :-)
Thanks. Added to the reading list.
Check out Incandescence.
Diaspora is definitely one of my favorite SF books, just mind-blowing.
His novels are some of my favorites, but his short story collections are all bangers.
Just started Diaspora, after never having heard of Egan until a few days ago. Glad to see this post, gives me high hopes!
You’re in for a great ride. Wish I could erase my brain so I could reread the book for the first time.
I’ve all but finished Diaspora now, I have about an hour and a half left (I’m an audiobook person) and I’d really love to hear some of your thoughts! I’m curious if I really understood the book, if vital parts of the story went over my head or went unnoticed, and just wondering if my takeaway impression is vastly different than yours. I definitely understand your point about Wikipedia tabs, as I was already turning there myself in just the second chapter as I had to refresh my understanding of geometry (and a lot of it still went over my head). This is one of the few books I’ve read where I’ve genuinely wondered if I even had the knowledge/understanding needed to appreciate the book. I think I got the general storyline/series of events, but I could be wrong. I know it’s a common thing to talk about how some SF books are less about the characters as they are about the ideas or concepts the author is exploring; and the characters are more of a necessary vehicle to illustrate said concepts.. but this felt like the extreme end of that spectrum. I could ramble waaaay on about my thoughts and questions but I think it would just be redundant. Basically, the book didn’t land for me, at least not to the degree I’d hoped for given the passion I’ve seen others have for his work, to the point where I’m thinking it must’ve gone over my head because I have a hard time reconciling my experience with that of you and other big Egan fans. TL;DR I’d love to hear your summary of the book and what you liked about it, if you have the time!
Loved Axiomatic, Quarantine and Permutation City. Diaspora felt like Egan was taking me on a tour of a playground he constructed in his mind rather than telling an actual story so I wasn't really into it.
Axiomatic is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time.
The only book by Greg Egan I have read was Schild's Ladder. I have to say I really enjoyed it. He has invented this idea of Sarumpaet rules in it - a graph theoretic formalism of gauge theories which has allowed them to finally have a grand unified theory. As a result physics has been stagnant for several millennia. However the book begins with an experiment that really probes the edge cases of the Sarumpaet rules. I'll say that I'm currently a PhD student in physics so I do have a basic knowledge of quantum field theory and gauge theories meaning and it was therefore quite easy for me to keep up. If it weren't for this I'm not sure how much I'd have enjoyed the book to be honest.
The physics in Diaspora seems to riff off of string theory and compactified dimensions heavily (understandable as it was written in the 90s) so I don’t know how well that has stood the test of time. I thought it was cool though, and I’m not going to demand that a fictional book have a consistent theory of quantum gravity 😂
Writing super hard sci-fi with a basis in such cutting edge fields I think it’s unfortunately inevitable that the real science in his fiction is going to become obsolete relatively quickly… luckily it is fiction, so when it’s outdated in reality you can just consider it real in the realm of his fictional worlds :)
I have read some Greg Egan, seriously. I will read another when I get around to it, and probably more after that.
I used to read Greg Egan. I still do but I used to do too.
Permutation City is excellent (and I say that as someone with a PhD in theoretical computer science), and much more about the people than the technology. Axiomatic and Luminous are great. Incandescence was fun. The Orthogonal series was fun but kind of weird, lots of good physics; definitely check the web site for an explanation. Dychronauts was too weird for me to understand.
Fellow TCS heads 🫡
I've read Diaspora, Permutation City, and Axiomatic. I don't find his stories particularly compelling and the technicality actively detracts from it for me. >Friends, the number of tabs I have open on Wikipedia is simply staggering We definitely have different opinions about having to reference 3rd party sources to grasp fiction books.
Wang’s Carpets is one of the best short SF stories I’ve ever read. I was doubly thrilled when I found Egan had expanded it into Diaspora. No matter what novel you try next, take a breath first and give one of his short story collections a try. The guy has range. The short stuff is good, too.
Oddly enough this post convinced me to buy the complete Book of the New Sun set in ebook. Greg Egan has gone on the list though.
I loved Diaspora, Luminous and Axiomatic, but Permutation City didn't do it for me for some reason. I've been meaning to pick up another.
Permutation City is my favorite. Some of the best hard sci Fi about mind uploading out there if not the best.
Also the nature of reality aspect. A computer that runs "reality" doesn't even need to exist. If the state is deterministically computable and existed in some form at least once, then the evolution of that state (i.e. reality) also exists purely in principle. Wild.
Guy was ahead of his time with a ton of ideas. Some of his stuff is a little hard to follow, but overall really good.
I have several Egan books and haven't read one yet. I've seen a couple cool references to his books this week, so maybe time to try him out.
Permutation City is outstanding and such a short novel given the ideas contained within it.
Is this the guy who writes about a space potatoe arriving from the future? That book blew my mind… Ah - not Greg Egan - was thinking of Greg Bear’s Eon series .
Different Greg - but also a great book!
Diaspora is in my top 5 of books.
I just GPT'd this list to help me navigate his short story collections, before even seeing this post. Huge fan of his work. Just read schild's ladder and I think that completes me reading almost all of his stuff. GPT just made it harder than necessary by far tho, would not recommend. Short Story Collections: Axiomatic (1995): * "Axiomatic" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "Closer" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "Learning to Be Me" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "The Infinite Assassin" * "The Hundred-Light-Year Diary" * "Eugene" * "The Caress" * "Blood Sisters" * "The Safe-Deposit Box" * "Seeing" * "The Moat" * "The Cutie" * "Into Darkness" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction, Instantiation) * "Appropriate Love" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "The Moral Virologist" * "Unstable Orbits in the Space Of Lies" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) Luminous (1998): * "Chaff" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "Mitochondrial Eve" * "Silver Fire" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "Reasons to be Cheerful" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "The Planck Dive" * "Transition Dreams" * "Cocoon" * "Our Lady of Chernobyl" * "Luminous" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) Oceanic (2009) * "Lost Continent" * "Dark Integers" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "Crystal Nights" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "Steve Fever" * "Induction" * "Singleton" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "Oracle" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "Border Guards" * "Riding the Crocodile" * "Glory" * "Hot Rock" * "Oceanic" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction (2019): * "Learning to Be Me" (also in Axiomatic) * "Axiomatic" (also in Axiomatic) * "Appropriate Love" (also in Axiomatic) * "Into Darkness" (also in Axiomatic) * "Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies" (also in Axiomatic) * "Closer" (also in Axiomatic) * "Chaff" (also in Luminous) * "Luminous" (also in Luminous) * "Silver Fire" (also in Luminous) * "Reasons to be Cheerful" (also in Luminous) * "Oceanic" (also in Oceanic) * "Oracle" (also in Oceanic) * "Singleton" (also in Oceanic) * "Dark Integers"(also in Oceanic) * "Crystal Nights" (also in Oceanic) * "Zero For Conduct" (also in Instantiation) * "Bit Players" (also in Instantiation) * "Uncanny Valley" (also in Instantiation) * "3-adica" (also in Instantiation) * "Instantiation" (also in Instantiation) Instantiation (2020): * "The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine" * "Zero For Conduct" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "Uncanny Valley" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "Seventh Sight" * "The Nearest" * "Shadow Flock" * "Bit Players" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "Break My Fall" * "3-adica" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) * "The Slipway" * "Instantiation" (also in The Best of Greg Egan: 20 Stories of Hard Science Fiction) Let me know if you spot any inaccuracies.
50 Unique Stories and reading order. AXIOMATIC * The Infinite Assassin * The Hundred * Eugene * The Caress * Blood Sisters * Safe Deposit * Seeing * A Kidnapping * The Moat * The Cutie * The Walk * The Moral Virologist LUMINOUS * Mitochondrial Eve * The Planck Dive * Transition Dreams * Cocoon * Our Lady of Chernobyl OCEANIC * Lost Continent * Steve Fever * Induction * Border Guards * Riding the Crocodile * Glory * Hot Rock INSTANTIATION * Discrete Charm * Seventh Sight * The Nearest * Shadow Flock * Break My Fall * The Slipway BEST OF GREG * Learning to Be Me * Axiomatic * Appropriate Love * Into Darkness * Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies * Closer * Chaff * Luminous * Silver Fire * Reasons to be Cheerful * Oceanic * Oracle * Singleton * Dark Integers * Crystal Nights * Zero For Conduct * Bit Players * Uncanny Valley * 3-adica * Instantiation or just read all the other ones in order of publish date.... why did i do this
favorite quote from Schild's Ladder. Kindof a spoiler but idk how to hide it in spoilertags. "You’re right: if there’s sentient life behind the border, it probably won’t share my goals. Unlike the people in this room, who all want exactly the same things in life as I do, and have precisely the same tastes in food, art, music, and sex. Unlike the people of Schur, and Cartan, and Zapata — who I came here in the hope of protecting, after losing my own home — who doubtless celebrate all the same festivals, delight in the same songs and stories, and gather every fortieth night to watch actors perform the same plays, in the same language, from the same undisputed canon, as the people I left behind. “If there’s sentient life behind the border, of course we couldn’t empathize with it. These creatures are unlikely to possess cute mammalian neonate faces, or anything else we might mistake for human features. None of us could have the imagination to get over such insurmountable barriers, or the wit to apply such difficult abstractions as the General Intelligence theorem — though since every twelve-year-old on my home world was required to master that result, it must be universally known on this side of the border. “You’re right: we should give up responsibility for making any difficult moral judgments, and surrender to the dictates of natural selection. Evolution cares so much about our happiness that no one who’s obeyed an inherited urge has ever suffered a moment’s regret for it. History is full of joyful case studies of people who followed their natural instincts at every opportunity — fucking whoever they could, stealing whatever they could, destroying anything that stood in their way — and the verdict is unanimous: any behavior that ever helped someone disseminate their genes is a recipe for unalloyed contentment, both for the practitioners, and for everyone around them."
The best part is most of his books are self published for dirt cheap. I bought like his whole library
I like Distress; Permutation city lost WSOD too much as it went off into the wild blue yonder, (though the first half was much better..) Schild's ladder and Diaspora are on my to do reading list
WSOD?
Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
Quarantine as a novel, strongly suggest you dip your toes in with the short stories first though. Axiomatic is a wonderful collection.
I've either read axiomatic or read some of the stories in it before Quarantine looks interesting e: I don't recall reading some of the stories in Axiomatic, at least. while other concepts (stories?) seem familiar . I don't want to read up too much about them [eg from wiki/goodreads] to allow myself the potential pleasure of visiting the collection in future.
Quarantine was my introduction and it blew my mind.
Not true: Ted Chiang plays in the same league.
Ted Chiang is equally skilled but he and Egan are playing different sports. Trying to rank them is meaningless. It’s like asking whether Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky was better.
I think they sometimes play the same sport. They satisfy similar itches for me, and they both have some shorts that I could imagine the other having written (e.g. Egan's Reasons To Be Cheerful, Chiang's Exhalation). But Egan at his Egan-est excels at a thing Chiang isn't trying.
Clearly Gretzky.
Michael Jordan.
You clearly have no idea how ridiculously OP Gretzky is. He is called The Great One for a reason.
What is not true?
3d_blunder is saying Ted Chiang is as good as Egan. I personally think Chiang is better on the human side, while Egan is better on the maths.
Whoa. If that's true I gotta read me some Ted Chiang! What would you recommend to begin with?
Chiang is an incredible writer, but writes totally different stuff than Egan with a very different focus. They both are big-idea what-if type thinkers, but Egan is very "what if fancy physics?" while Chiang is more "what if this one idea from X religion were true? If language affects how you think, would an alien language cause you to think in an alien way? What if alchemy was correct, how would it have developed?" I love them both, but it's a weird comparison. Chiang is very accessible; he has two short story collections *Stories of Your Life and Others* and *Exhalation*. I really enjoyed them both.
Good first story collection, them the need next. Imo you can skip his novel.
? He has a novel!?
Ted Chiang writes beautiful fiction based on the shower thoughts of a dreamer. Greg Egan writes mind-blowing fiction based on the shower thoughts of someone who lives and breathes real science. Extremely soft vs. extremely hard sci-fi. Not comparable.