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New Greg Egan novel, Morphotrophic, coming in March 2024
@Greg Egan:
MORPHOTROPHIC, a new novel in 2024.In a world where the cells that make up our bodies are not committed to any one organism, Marla is confronted by the fickleness of her cytes, and resolves to understand them with help from a centuries-old Flourisher.
I can't wait to barely understand this book!
Just kidding, I love Egan :)
My thoughts exactly. I can keep up with Egan for a while but he always manages to lose me in the most wonderfully brain-melting ways.
Looking forward to this, thanks for the heads up.
My current understanding of ultra-hard sci-fi is that, sometimes, there is something an author really needs to say in no uncertain terms. That is not necessarily a plus for the narrative, it's just something that is very important for them to put out there, even if less than 1% of their fans are capable of understanding.
So that is what they do. When I take out the 30% of Egan I can't understand, there is still a good chunk of very interesting stuff. I think he does a good job of having enough solid narrative that his deep dives into physics/math/compsci serve as a source of amusement. Even if you don't understand much, it communicates to the reader just how insane everything is. At some point, it sounds like Lacan, or Aleister Crowley -- it's not longer strictly about semantics, the goal is to feel magical, which is an interesting thing to say about science fiction.
I am trying to read Blindsight, and my first impression is that there are lots of gratuitous scientific jargon in that book. That is not the impression I get from Egan.
Nice to see a fellow Greg Egan fan. I agree that Egan somehow manages to make even the somewhat incomprehensible science stuff be interesting and engaging. What shines through most of stories, is how passionate the characters are about what is going on. They understand what is going and it feels important to them, so I am engaged as a reader as well, even though I might not get all the scientific details. Egan always creates some excitement for the scientific process and while he is clearly very hard sf, it is - at least to me - more exciting to read that kind of hard sf than the more engineering type hard where the author finds it very important the orbital mechanics and Lagrange points are correct (some Analog authors). Egan doesn't do that. Some of his stuff can to an extent be labelled as outright fantasy, where he invents a whole new universe with completely different laws of physics where the speed of light is not a constant making time relativistic effects work in the opposite way than we know, but it is always told with a scientific approach to storytelling.
Only book of his I've read was Diaspora, which I read when I was younger and really enjoyed. Any recommendations of his work?
Permutation City is a masterpiece, and his short stories are way more approachable, with varying quality. Axiomatic is a good collection.
Go grab The Best of Greg Egan short story collection. I really think he shines as a short story writer. As for novels, I really liked The Clockwork Rocket which is the first in a trilogy, but good enough on its own. It explores a universe with different laws of physics where the speed of light is not a constant which gives way for a very different kind of science and scientific discovery.