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