Foundations (1997-2000)

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.

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.

Iain M Banks.

'Nuff said.

> 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.

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.

"Luminous" was what got me hooked on Greg Egan.

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.

[1] https://www.tor.com/2019/09/25/zeitgeber-greg-egan/

[2] https://www.tor.com/2018/07/19/the-nearest-greg-egan/

Luminous, Chaff, Axiomatic, Learning to be Me, The Cutie, The Moat.

The Best of Greg Egan is a perfectly respectable place to start.

I understand that viewpoint but I would think that someone as niche as him would go unnoticed in most places

We would never be able to tell anyway

(spoilers)

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.