> Egan’s prose, characterisation and plotting are often weak, but almost every page has a new creative concept. I agree with all of that. I was thinking recently about how Egan compares to Neal Stephenson after some discussion of his (NS) fiction here a few days ago [1]. They both (imo) are weak at characterisation etc. - but to me Egan's work is among some of the best sf I've ever read [1], wheras I find reading Stephenson an ordeal. I think that's down to the depth of the ideas that Egan explores, but I'd be interested in what others think of how he compares to other authors. [1]…
Greg Egan's Diaspora has a rather good illustration of what a fully formalized mathematical system might look like. He called it the Mines[1]: a representation of the full acyclic digraph of all the theorems proved so far by a community of mathematicians. A student can examine any proposition, see if its yet been proven (and if so, how, and from what antecedents) as well as what deeper results might depend on it. Critically, a student might select a research topic simply by travelling to the ends of the Mines and start digging, or might select some not yet proven goal as an end point and…
> "I don’t see how anyone could call Banks hard sci-fi." You know what? You're right. I'm not even going to defend it. In writing a response, I came across this section on The Culture Wikipedia page, and: Yes, not hard sci-fi. More like Star Trek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Science_and_techno... > Can I ask what you like about Egan’s work? I’m not familiar. Read this description of Diaspora: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html If that sounds intriguing, you might like his work. He starts with a what-if physics theory informed by his mathematics background.…
I have to second this. It took me years to thoroughly grasp some of its parts (and I have a math background) but Diaspora is without a doubt my favorite book of fiction. The first chapter of the novel is particularly approachable & worthwhile. It's titled Orphanogenesis and is a beautiful, detailed (~30 page) account of the digital birth of a new AI consciousness, from embryo to newborn to gaining self-awareness. Next year several Greg Egan's books will be reprinted. Diaspora comes out January 6, 2015! http://www.amazon.com/Diaspora-A-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/15978054... * * * If you want a…
> how to deal conceptually with its immensity in time and space Yes! Dimensions (not even the most objective, physical ones) are not absolutes but subject to changing, creative interpretation through the abilities of our tech. Compare the meaning of a meter when squirming vs walking vs cycling vs driving vs flying... Modern computing makes a mockery of our past capabilities for information processing / storage / transmission. Put another way, "there is no bad or good weather, only different gear requirements." Same goes for everything, not only distance & information, but also scale,…
Diaspora by Greg Egan is one of the most amazing books I've ever read, in terms of the ideas it explores. A serious treatment of the future where humans' minds are scanned into machines: what senses do you have in a virtual world? How do you spend your time when you want for nothing? What do love and reproduction mean? Space exploration when you slow your subject day to a solar year. Wonderful, beautiful, and mind-bending. http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html It used to be hard to find, but these days it seems to be available [edit: at least digitally] (ebook, audio) from the…
IMO "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" is awful. My main criticism is that it simply assumes the point it sets out to make (SPOILERS: basically that if you can't die and anything is possible, life would have no meaning). It really doesn't do anything to show why that'd be the case. It also really fetishises extreme violence and, to a certain extent, incest. (My beef is not with the fact that it involves those things, but with the way that it handles them). If you're looking for something with similar machine-intelligence, fairly limitless possibilities, and the like, I think Greg…
In Greg Egan's "Diaspora" two of the successor human groups have chosen to leave. The Polis Citizens have been uploaded to run on dedicated computers which can then just travel through space as any other computer - but the Gleisner Robots have adopted artificial bodies which unlike biological human bodies are suitable for space travel. Not with any great speed, but by their nature the Gleisner Robots live at a steady pace, they're not bothered that it will take them a very long time to reach another star. So in a sense these are both mind reconfigurations as well as physical, the Gleisner…
I love the mental picture from Greg Egan's Diaspora of the truth mines, literally hacking the math like chunks of coal: "If ve ever wanted to be a miner in vis own right -- making and testing vis own conjectures at the coal face, like Gauss and Euler, Riemann and Levi-Civita, deRham and Cartan, Radiya and Blanca -- then Yatima knew there were no shortcuts, no alternatives to exploring the Mines firsthand. Ve couldn't hope to strike out in a fresh direction, a route no one had ever chosen before, without a new take on the old results. Only once ve'd constructed vis own map of the Mines --…
If you like Permutation City, you might also enjoy another of Egan's works, Diaspora. http://www.amazon.com/Diaspora-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/1597805424... "Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive starships. And there are the holdouts: the fleshers left behind in the muck…