I really idolize Greg Egan, I feel like he has staked such a unique position for himself in the cultural-academic landscape. I like to say that he writes science-fiction while many other authors really write engineering-fiction or sociology-fiction. He seems to be a good mathematical explorer in more obscure/specific areas. One of the craziest crossover moments in my life was when I watched the Numberphile video on superpermutations which involves the results by Greg Egan and Anonymous 4chan user.
“What created the only example of consciousness we know of?” Daniel asked.
“Evolution.”
“Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of variation more targeted.”
Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious, human-level AI?”
“Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to measure her words before speaking.
“With respect,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve thought that through.”
Interesting to see this here right after finishing six of his novels. My takeaway is that Egan clearly is a talented scientist, a man of unique ideas, and not a very good writer. The books are an excuse to go into scientific minutiae, with plodding storylines and two-dimensional characters. Kept going mostly because the ideas/set-up were fascinating.
Some of Egan's shorts are the most haunting explorations of what it means to be human that I've read -- maybe try those.
But yes, Egan's philosophy is that sci-fi can be about the human story OR about the science. Both are valid.
From this long interview:
> I’m interested in science as a subject in its own right, just as much as I’m interested in the effects of technology on the human condition. In many things I write the two will be combined, but even then it’s important to try to describe the science accurately. In a novel such as Incandescence, though, the entire point is understanding the science, and it really doesn’t bother me in the least that it’s not an exploration of the human condition.
> There are times when it’s worth putting aside the endless myopic navel-gazing that occupies so much literature, in order to look out at the universe itself and value it for what it is.
Of his recent fiction, I enjoyed "Zeitgeber" [1] and "The Nearest" [2]. I found the latter to be an interesting exploration of what happens when you suddenly discover that you don't recognize your loved ones as human.
Good writing is highly subjective. The way his books focus more on the interesting concepts and not the characters is precisely why I enjoy them so much. There are enough books in the world about people and why they do what they do for books like Greg Egan's to do their own thing.
I think he achieved exactly what he set out to do with his writing.
Agreed. Been a fan of Egan for years and I've never met anyone who reads his books for the prose. Egan's stories are a delivery package for the ideas he wants to present, and nothing more. Interestingly, that is why I enjoy his work. Sometimes I want to have my mind a little blown by stuff that is just at the far edge of my intellectual understanding. Other times I want to be simply entertained, so I turn to other sci-fi authors for that.
He's gotten better at it. You can compare Clockwork Rocket to (say) Schild's Ladder, both of which show off interesting concepts; there's no question that Clockwork Rocket has the more interesting characters.
But the characters still aren't why anyone reads them. Nowadays they're serviceable; years back they were cardboard cutouts. Nobody who enjoys Egan is bothered by either.
While I agree with that and still enjoy some of Egan's writing, his text would definitively be better and more interesting if the characters were not so artificial, without losing anything about the science.
It is amusing to think that a lot of people who are defending Egan on this point would probably be uncompromising on their very low opinion on a book containing badly put together science. They will probably not say "it's not for me, but why not, the author was interested in the characters, the science is just an excuse", but rather "no, they use science, so they need to do the science correctly". But they will ignore this argument ("they use characters, so they need to do characters correctly") is the case of Egan.
Are his characters really artificial? Boring and single-minded, sure, but there are plenty of boring and single-minded people in the world - too many literary critics lose track of how unusual (indeed unrealistic) most of the characters in literature are.
Indeed. The point of the story is the concepts presented. This is what hard sci-fi is all about. When I think sci fi, I think Egan rather than Star Wars
If I'm really being honest, I don't think any of the great SF writers are great writers if you take away the SF. The Only Exception I can think of where the prose and character development are roughly equivalent to well-known novelists is Walter J Williams. He could have been a non-sf writer but he chose SF probably because it allowed him to get published.
I think it was Larry Niven who pointed out that if you think of conventional writing as consisting of something like some combination of plot, prose, and characters, that the science fiction author labors under the additional constraint of also having to establish setting. (IIRC he broke it into five categories, but the total number and exactly what they are isn't important.) And given how few authors ever reach the level of firing on all cylinders in a non-science-fiction setting on those metrics, a science fiction fan must extend the science fiction authors some grace on the other fronts of good writing if they're going to enjoy it at all. I don't think I've ever seen a science fiction story that establishes a truly different setting that also gets a 5 out of 5 across the board on all the other metrics, and it's debatable whether such a thing is even possible. If such a story hypothetically existed it would probably be too verbose to count as good writing.
You can get all sorts of combinations of various attributes, but you just can't get them all. Certainly Egan is in the Silver Age Asimov/Clarke tradition of sacrificing characters to fit the rest in, but what he does is so good I can't complain. For all the crazy science fiction I've read, Egan has, just to name one example, the only story set in a serious attempt at an alternative space-time geometry in which there are two space and two time dimensions, and not in some vague what-if "parallel dimension" sense, but by actually working out the consequences of what two spatial and two temporal dimensions looks like when you feed that into the equations of general relativity: https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/00/DPDM.html
(I find this one particularly interesting because many of us have imagined "what if there were two time dimensions"; Egan shows that what came to most of our imaginations was so laughably wrong as to not even be in the ballpark, and that in fact you can perfectly sensible discuss the topic grounded in real physics.)
Even in the field of science fiction writers there's only a certain percentage of writers who could even properly follow that page, let alone generate it themselves.
Depends on what you mean by "the great SF writers." If you mean Clarke and Heinlein and such, then I would agree; their prose tends to be utilitarian.
But as counter-examples I submit J. G. Ballard, Samuel Delaney, Ursula LeGuin, John Crowley, Gene Wolfe, William Gibson, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon — and there are surely others I'm forgetting. All great prose stylists, all masters of characterization, and arguably among the greats of the genre.
> If I'm really being honest, I don't think any of the great SF writers are great writers if you take away the SF.
Joe Haldeman's non-SF novels were all very good in their way. I wonder if he would have been happy to make the switch to full time non-genre writing if 1968 (his Vietnam novel - although he'd joke that all his novels are Vietnam novels) hadn't fizzled. I'm not the right person to criticize his poetry, but I enjoyed some of it.
As some others mentioned, Iain Banks, Ursula LeGuin, and William Gibson wrote some great non-genre stuff. In a different world William Gibson could have been a great essayist in the vein of John McPhee.
If I'm really being honest, I don't think any of the great SF writers are great writers if you take away the SF. The Only Exception I can think of where the pros and character development are roughly equivalent to well-known novelists is Walter J Williams. He could have been a non-sf writer but he chose SF probably because it allowed him to get published.
The literary form is just the Deliveroo package for the actual contents: the ideas. And that's what hard sci-fi is in its purest form: the literature of ideas
(I had thought Wells' relationship between Morlocks and Eloi might've been a reply to Kipling's Sons of Marthahttps://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_martha.htm ,
but the former is from 1895 and the latter was not until 1907)
* although hard sci-fi has its own interwoven network of influences and references, so like capital-L literature and hip-hop, it really does count as a literature.
I don't know if plodding storylines and two-dimensional characters is fair, some of his novels spend a lot of time watching characters do science (like the orthogonal triology) so it can get slow but he's still banged out plenty of great plots and action setpieces and characters that develop. The second book of Orthoganol has some amazing action set pieces (solidly based on the weird rules of an imaginary universe) and plot developments. General consensus is that his short stories are the best.
You should try reading Zendegi. Maybe is not one of his best books, at least regarding science extrapolation, but of the few I've read from him it had its human side.
I wish he would show his face and do interviews. He's rather obsessed with Google linking him to wrong faces. I am curious to know what he looks like, his interests, background, etc
I think Lock-Pick Lawyer's views on this are germane (paraphrasing):
>>> I would show my face or give my name as there are many thousands of normal people to whom that would make an interesting or grounding moment, but it only takes one crazy nut-job to ruin your whole year, and if there is one thing common in the internet, it's crazy nut-jobs
Why do you/he think that some nutjob would try to track him down? It's not like that's the case with many writers is it? I don't think Arthur Clark, Asimov or even more contemporaries like Liu or Cixin had nutjobs after them
Anyone who would be on this site is the kind of person who should do themselves a favor and read his short story collection Axiomatic. His other collections are excellent as well, I have read them all. For novels, Diaspora is my favorite so far, but I am still working through them.
I strongly second the recommendation for Diaspora. The story begins about 1000 years in the future, with characters that are trans-human, or post-human. Starting from that baseline of normalcy, then it gets weird.
But it's not weird for the sake of weirdness. The story is grounded in logic and built around rational exploration of deeply philosophical ideas. The book can be challenging at times, but only because the concepts it explores are so deep. The writing, IMHO, is very lucid. Egan wants to bring you into these ideas, not drive you away through inscrutable prose.
You might also like these similar short stories with a similar theme:
- "What's expected of us" by Ted Chiang, about a reverse time delay device that reveals the deterministic nature of physics and causes a societal crisis. It's eventually used to send a message to the past from the heat death of the universe: https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
- "The Hundred Light-Year Diary" by Greg Egan, about a society that adapts to being able to receive messages from themselves one hundred years into the future. Every person gets a ration of 100 characters per day that they can send to their past self. This one also deals with questions of free will, and what we choose to omit from our "perfect" records when given the chance. Synposis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Light-Year_Diary
I think the novel you're referring to is 'Timescape', and it was written by Gregory Benford. From what I remember (and it's been 20 years at least since I read it), it's quite a bleak story.
Timescape and Red Mars are very different in very different in nature and size. Timescape is a self-contained end-of-the-world story, but set in a multiverse, so some of the characters do get out alive. Red Mars is the first part of a lengthy trilogy, which is ultimately optimistic about humanity itself, even though the story contains environment collapse, devastation, and war.
[Edit] To be clear, the overall story of which Red Mars is just the first part is much longer than Timescape.
They're about the same thickness and number of pages and I've read them at about the same age. Timescape got the Nebula award, Red Mars got the BSFA and Nebula awards. They have about the same number of stars on Goodreads, so roughly the same reception? I haven't finished reading Red Mars, I think I grew tired with the endless descriptions. Maybe the other two Mars books are better? Dunno, never got around reading them, moved on. Both might be okay books to turn into movies, with Red Mars just use the lenghty descriptions as documentation for filming the scenes.
