/lit/ opinion on Greg Egan?

He's a writer

>>9431557
that's not an opinion, can't you understand a simple question?

>>9431569
Yes, it is

>>9431557
T. Samuel beckett

I read Permutation City and found the ideas interesting but the prose severely lacking. Still worth reading if only for the ideas. His short stories (Axiomatic) work a little better and remind me a bit of Borges. Also i'm convinced that Ted Chiang reads Egan and basically takes Egan's ideas and lathers on nicer prose to make them more appealing.

I think he is the greatest science-fiction writer alive.

His earlier (pre-2000) books contain a fireworks display's worth of ideas that range from actual scientific facts through plausible extrapolations to outrageous speculations, with a continuous spectrum. He usually begins with a situation that is already far from ordinary, then proceeds to run wild with it, to the extreme edge of possibilities. Like in Diaspora, where the novel already begins 1000 years after the present, with most of the characters being AIs running in an orbital supercomputer, but then the Earth gets destroyed and the characters chase a mystery through a series of 5-dimensional universes (and encounter intelligent life that exists in the Fourier-transformed space of the expanding edge of a chemical cellular automaton).

After the hiatus he took from writing in the 2000s, he seem to have adopted the stance that science can and should be interesting on its own right, interesting enough to base entire novels on it, and if you are not willing to make the (admittedly considerable) investment of learning what it takes to understand his work, then, well, it's your loss. For example, some of his critics panned Incandescence because they didn't understand the timeline and how the two narrative threads of the book are connected. Actually, it's all there, but you need to have a quantitative understanding of general relativity to pick up the hints.

He is quite consistent and uncompromising in following this program of his. Many think that his novels are "dry" for this reason. I for one think that he (almost) produced the quintessential sci-fi with Ortogonal (at least with the first book of the trilogy): after all, the essence of science-fiction is usually a single what-if question (what if we could travel to the past? what if there were aliens?), which the author tries to answer, expanding on the consequences of that single question. In Orthogonal Egan asks a very simple question: what if there was a plus instead of a minus in one of the fundamental quantities that describe our world? He proceeds to derive most of physics starting from this assumption (science), then creates a very engrossing world with fleshed out characters and an engaging plot (fiction). The beauty of it is that both the calamity that the characters face and the solution they come up with is made possible (and inevitable) by the fundamental change he makes to the underlying physics. Even the usual complaint of the weakness of the plot and characters are thwarted here: there is a beautiful arc with the main character.

>>9431548
Can't you dumb bastards keep inside your containment thread?

>>9431124

>>9431600
>Also i'm convinced that Ted Chiang reads Egan and basically takes Egan's ideas and lathers on nicer prose to make them more appealing.
Dubs confirm. Also, several chapters of Black Mirror.

>>9432171
very interesting. I've been meaning to read Diaspora---thanks for the recommendations.

Is there any other sci-fi writers you've read that have reached this level of purity? (focusing on a single "what-if" and deriving the conclusions that the assumption entails?

>>9432473
*Are there any other sci-fi writers.

Jesus fuck, this is what happens when you've been working for more than half-a-day straight and decide to procrastinate a bit by melancholically reading the chans.

Also an r-paren. fuark