Greg Egan

One of the best sci-fi writers to emerge in recent years, if not the best. You can read some of his stuff for free on his Web site http://www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan/ and elsewhere. His themes include body and neural modification, artificial evolution, gender and personal autonomy, quantum physics, cellular automata, and experimental philosophy. Even better, he gets the science right, and raises the right questions.

Also a computer programmer, which makes him more OnTopic than IainBanks. So there. ;)

I was introduced to GregEgan through one of his books of short stories, Axiomatic (ISBN 0061052655 ). I still consider it the best science fiction I have ever read, and I urge everyone to read it: every story has a twenty-megatonne idea in it. UnstableOrbitsInTheSpaceOfLies? is one of the finest titles I've come across (it's sort of about ChaosTheory applied to religion - it helps if you know what a StrangeAttractor is). See http://public.logica.com/~stepneys/sf/books/e/egan.htm#axiom for a one-line description of each story. -- TomAnderson

Some of Egan's shorts are the most unsettling I have read. As a parent I found "The Cutie" almost unbearable. -- TomAyerst

If you enjoy GregEgan's works, you might also enjoy the works of:

GregEgan is an author with incredibly limited range and his novels have no characterization to speak of. "the best in scifi" my ass! http://bookshelved.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GregEgan

CategoryAuthor, CategoryScienceFiction