Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

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> I can't find it right now, but it lead me to purchase the book "Permutation City" which is now one of my favourite novels because of the way it comings CS, philosophy, and writing that isn't stilted like a lot of the stuff you find in this realm.

If you haven't already, then don't wait to buy the rest of Greg Egan's œuvre. It was "Quarantine", a lovely plot but arguably one of his weakest stories, that got me into his work, and since then I've found no-one except possibly Ted Chiang (whose work is very different) who comes anywhere near him in the world of hard sci-fi. Almost everything of his is rewarding, and I believe a lot of it was relatively recently (within the last 5 years or so) released as e-books after a long period of unavailability. He also has generous excerpts from selected books and stories at his web-site, and—my favourite—proves his non-fiction science bona fides as a regular contributor on the n-category Café (https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/MT-3.0/mt-search.cgi?Inc...).

Greg Egan and Iain M Banks don't seem to have equals. Greg's stuff is incredibly hard (in both ways: he says to use a pencil and paper while reading). Iain's stuff is ... uplifting, but still coherent. It's not hard, but it still feels coherent somehow (unlike some books that just start making up weird shit just to put the "fi" in scifi).

My first exposure to Banks was The Wasp Factory, which remains one of the only books that has ever literally nauseated me. It was excellent, but it's been hard for me to pick up another book of his since.

Oh, actually I did read The Business, which introduced me to the delightful question "how do you count to 1000 on your fingers?" (without using 'intermediate storage' like keeping track of 10's in your head). I still use that when teaching elementary number theory.

That means you are in the lucky situation of not having read Use of Weapons yet - I'm jealous. It really is very very good!

Is that your recommended entrée into the Culture universe?

No, my advice would be to read the in order of publication.

No - definitely not. I would recommend publication order.

I think that "The Wasp Factory" is by far his best book. Sometimes unsettling but a great short read.

Did you read Schild's Ladder? It's basically about quantum cellular automata consuming the galaxy.

I think that I have read everything pre-Orthogonal trilogy. (Nothing against the Orthogonal trilogy; I just haven't got to it yet.) If I recall correctly, Schild's Ladder was the first long one I read (after the short-story collection Axiomatic). I liked it a lot, although I think I preferred Distress.

I got into Greg Egan from a StackOverflow post somewhere, where one of the comments referenced Dark Integers.

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