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Comment by hhhAndrew | Hacker News Reader

Greg Egan. Agree with others in this thread that Permutation City is the most important. But Diaspora is not to be missed either. Egan's unique value prop is: crazy-thought-experiment sci fi (2D world with 2 time dimensions is his latest and is typical) but hard, harder than you can believe. Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?

Gene Wolfe. Book of the new Sun. Wolfe's unique value prop is, create an interesting sci fi or fantastical setting, and tell it through special narrators (unreliable, liar, child, amnesiac, etc) with wonderful skill, producing a puzzle with a lovely solution (that you will only partially solve).

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I read Permutation City with great anticipation and really disliked it. My favorite parts were when big ideas met the tedium of execution (like the avatars having to deal with the cost of spot instances, and running in lower-res slower-than-realtime environments.)

I liked Book of the New Sun in a pulpy way. I'm a huge sucker for dying earth settings, and it was great to read one of the originals.

I greatly enjoyed Zelazny's Amber series and have tried to get into some of his sci-fi, but failed. Perhaps it's time to give Lord of Light a third try.

Besides Amber, I found Jack of Shadows to be an accessible road into Zelazny.

I highly recommend the novella "home is the hangman"

Lord of Light is worth it if you can manage. I remember I bounced off a few times too.

It's rather hard to believe it's the same author as Amber sometimes, those books took me like 12 seconds to get hooked on, LoL is great it's just _quite_ different in feel.

I also recommend two of his shorter works: A Rose for Ecclesiastes and For a Breath I Tarry.

> Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?

Egan must be one of the most intelligent people alive… or if not, is at least the highest level I am personally capable of recognizing. I am genuinely curious which is the case. Anyways, I haven’t read Diaspora yet so will do so, thanks!

Something being logically consistent doesn't mean it's correct. It's possible someone could make a fully logically consistent version of string theory including future gravitational predictions.

They say "doesn't describe this universe", but that really just means it's wrong.

Edit: replying to pavel_lishin:

Yes, I'm sure Egan knows that, I'm partially replying to the statement "Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?"

Nobody here is claiming everything in Egans books is literally true… but part of the fun is thinking about the possibility that it could be

Almost but not quite literally zero? It probably is zero, because he made mistakes, but maybe you could brush that off as a narrator error or something.

Like any book you have to bring an open mind, creativity, and some benefit of the doubt to enjoy it, or to learn anything of value… you seem to be coming from a perspective that would make that impossible.

His books for the most part explore intentionally unlikely but interesting possible implications of legitimate, yet mostly unproven modern math and physics research. Some of it even comes from his own research.

A case in point, I think some of the ideas in his books can help, e.g. a physics student realize where their assumptions about the nature of time and space may be cultural assumptions, not necessarily grounded in scientific evidence. Simply exploring alternate possibilities- even if untrue, is a powerful tool to break through other unfounded perspectives you never thought to question.

I was at one point on the path to become a mathematical physicist but lost interest and pivoted to something else. I do believe if I had found Egans books sooner, I would have been inspired to continue.

> Something being logically consistent doesn't mean it's correct.

Amusingly, this is a major plot point in one of his novels.

It's a philosophic question. Some believe physics is mathematics. Roger Penrose believes the Mandelbrot set exists, because it's logically consistent and reproducible.

Huh? Like one of the Tegmark levels? Even then, a whole lot is not true anywhere near here.

Egan is quite active on Mastodon. Toots about science and maths among other things and I gotta say, some of the math stuff he works on seems quite impressive (to me at least).

Seconding the Book of the New Sun - It's great as a standalone, and the series is rewarding if you keep reading. It's an excellent 'puzzle' of a story as OP stated.

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