[HN Gopher] Foundations (1997-2000)
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Foundations (1997-2000)
Author : ColinWright
Score : 141 points
Date : 2023-12-28 13:28 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gregegan.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gregegan.net)
| pushcx wrote:
| I found this very hard to read with the staticy background and
| removed it with the following ublock origin filter:
|
| www.gregegan.net##body:style(background-image: none !important;)
| Karellen wrote:
| On the individual topic pages, the [B] buttons allow you to
| choose a background, one of which is plain white.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Wow, I hate to make an off topic complaint, but that has to be
| the most unreadable page style I've ever seen.
| golol wrote:
| I really idolize Greg Egan, I feel like he has staked such a
| unique position for himself in the cultural-academic landscape. I
| like to say that he writes science-fiction while many other
| authors really write engineering-fiction or sociology-fiction. He
| seems to be a good mathematical explorer in more obscure/specific
| areas. One of the craziest crossover moments in my life was when
| I watched the Numberphile video on superpermutations which
| involves the results by Greg Egan and Anonymous 4chan user.
| romanhn wrote:
| Interesting to see this here right after finishing six of his
| novels. My takeaway is that Egan clearly is a talented scientist,
| a man of unique ideas, and not a very good writer. The books are
| an excuse to go into scientific minutiae, with plodding
| storylines and two-dimensional characters. Kept going mostly
| because the ideas/set-up were fascinating.
| izzydata wrote:
| Good writing is highly subjective. The way his books focus more
| on the interesting concepts and not the characters is precisely
| why I enjoy them so much. There are enough books in the world
| about people and why they do what they do for books like Greg
| Egan's to do their own thing.
|
| I think he achieved exactly what he set out to do with his
| writing.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Agreed. Been a fan of Egan for years and I've never met
| anyone who reads his books for the prose. Egan's stories are
| a delivery package for the ideas he wants to present, and
| nothing more. Interestingly, that is why I enjoy his work.
| Sometimes I want to have my mind a little blown by stuff that
| is just at the far edge of my intellectual understanding.
| Other times I want to be simply entertained, so I turn to
| other sci-fi authors for that.
| Filligree wrote:
| 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.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| Indeed. The point of the story is the concepts presented.
| This is what hard sci-fi is all about. When I think sci fi, I
| think Egan rather than Star Wars
| danbmil99 wrote:
| 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. The Only
| Exception I can think of where the pros and character
| development are roughly equivalent to well-known novelists is
| Walter J Williams. He could have been a non-sf writer but he
| chose SF probably because it allowed him to get published.
| danbmil99 wrote:
| 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. The Only
| Exception I can think of where the prose and character
| development are roughly equivalent to well-known novelists is
| Walter J Williams. He could have been a non-sf writer but he
| chose SF probably because it allowed him to get published.
| cauch wrote:
| While I agree with that and still enjoy some of Egan's
| writing, his text would definitively be better and more
| interesting if the characters were not so artificial, without
| losing anything about the science.
|
| It is amusing to think that a lot of people who are defending
| Egan on this point would probably be uncompromising on their
| very low opinion on a book containing badly put together
| science. They will probably not say "it's not for me, but why
| not, the author was interested in the characters, the science
| is just an excuse", but rather "no, they use science, so they
| need to do the science correctly". But they will ignore this
| argument ("they use characters, so they need to do characters
| correctly") is the case of Egan.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| The literary form is just the Deliveroo package for the actual
| contents: the ideas. And that's what hard sci-fi is in its
| purest form: the literature of ideas
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Stories* for Morlocks, not literature for Eloi...
|
| (I had thought Wells' relationship between Morlocks and Eloi
| might've been a reply to Kipling's _Sons of Martha_
| https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_martha.htm , but
| the former is from 1895 and the latter was not until 1907)
|
| * although hard sci-fi has its own interwoven network of
| influences and references, so like capital-L literature and
| hip-hop, it really does count as a literature.
| gmuslera wrote:
| You should try reading Zendegi. Maybe is not one of his best
| books, at least regarding science extrapolation, but of the few
| I've read from him it had its human side.
| genmon wrote:
| Some of Egan's shorts are the most haunting explorations of
| what it means to be human that I've read -- maybe try those.
|
| But yes, Egan's philosophy is that sci-fi can be about the
| human story OR about the science. Both are valid.
|
| From this long interview:
|
| > _I'm interested in science as a subject in its own right,
| just as much as I'm interested in the effects of technology on
| the human condition. In many things I write the two will be
| combined, but even then it's important to try to describe the
| science accurately. In a novel such as Incandescence, though,
| the entire point is understanding the science, and it really
| doesn't bother me in the least that it's not an exploration of
| the human condition._
|
| > _There are times when it's worth putting aside the endless
| myopic navel-gazing that occupies so much literature, in order
| to look out at the universe itself and value it for what it
| is._
|
| From http://rlemay.com.au/greg-egan-the-big-interview/
| ycombinete wrote:
| I found myself lightly horrified throughout _Permutation City_
| , and found myself thinking about it spontaneously for months
| afterwards.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| His short stories are far better than the novels.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| You're the second to suggest this in this thread. Could you
| list some of your favorites?
| codeulike wrote:
| I don't know if _plodding storylines and two-dimensional
| characters_ is fair, some of his novels spend a lot of time
| watching characters do science (like the orthogonal triology)
| so it can get slow but he 's still banged out plenty of great
| plots and action setpieces and characters that develop. The
| second book of Orthoganol has some amazing action set pieces
| (solidly based on the weird rules of an imaginary universe) and
| plot developments. General consensus is that his short stories
| are the best.
| anthk wrote:
| I love his cyberpunk/transhumanist novel.
| petre wrote:
| Is this the novelist that wrote the novel with the tachyon
| messages to our past generations warning them about the impending
| climate change disaster?
|
| Edit: no, it's Timescape by Gragory Benford.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/778990.Timescape
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| I think the novel you're referring to is 'Timescape', and it
| was written by Gregory Benford. From what I remember (and it's
| been 20 years at least since I read it), it's quite a bleak
| story.
| petre wrote:
| Yup, it was about the same size but maybe still better than
| Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Red from what I remember? At
| least I've finished reading it.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| (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.
| petre wrote:
| They're about the same thickness and number of pages and
| I've read them at about the same age. Timescape got the
| Nebula award, Red Mars got the BSFA and Nebula awards.
| They have about the same number of stars on Goodreads, so
| roughly the same reception? I haven't finished reading
| Red Mars, I think I grew tired with the endless
| descriptions. Maybe the other two Mars books are better?
| Dunno, never got around reading them, moved on. Both
| might be okay books to turn into movies, with Red Mars
| just use the lenghty descriptions as documentation for
| filming the scenes.
| teraflop wrote:
| Egan has a somewhat smaller-scale and more personal exploration
| of a similar concept, in a short story called "The Hundred
| Light-Year Diary".
| Acumen321 wrote:
| This is my favorite story of his. It is part of the
| collection Axiomatic for those new to him.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I always get Greg Egan, Greg Bear and Gregory Benford confused.
| geden wrote:
| It's all very confusing :)
| gcr wrote:
| You might also like these similar short stories with a similar
| theme:
|
| - "What's expected of us" by Ted Chiang, about a reverse time
| delay device that reveals the deterministic nature of physics
| and causes a societal crisis. It's eventually used to send a
| message to the past from the heat death of the universe:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
|
| - "The Hundred Light-Year Diary" by Greg Egan, about a society
| that adapts to being able to receive messages from themselves
| one hundred years into the future. Every person gets a ration
| of 100 characters per day that they can send to their past
| self. This one also deals with questions of free will, and what
| we choose to omit from our "perfect" records when given the
| chance. Synposis:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Light-Year_Diary
| Acumen321 wrote:
| Anyone who would be on this site is the kind of person who should
| do themselves a favor and read his short story collection
| Axiomatic. His other collections are excellent as well, I have
| read them all. For novels, Diaspora is my favorite so far, but I
| am still working through them.
| komon wrote:
| I enjoyed Schild's Ladder and Permutation City immensely
| loudmax wrote:
| I strongly second the recommendation for Diaspora. The story
| begins about 1000 years in the future, with characters that are
| trans-human, or post-human. Starting from that baseline of
| normalcy, then it gets weird.
|
| But it's not weird for the sake of weirdness. The story is
| grounded in logic and built around rational exploration of
| deeply philosophical ideas. The book can be challenging at
| times, but only because the concepts it explores are so deep.
| The writing, IMHO, is very lucid. Egan wants to bring you into
| these ideas, not drive you away through inscrutable prose.
| loudmax wrote:
| Greg Egan is fairly active on Mastodon. You can follow along at
| https://mathstodon.xyz/@gregeganSF
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| I wish he would show his face and do interviews. He's rather
| obsessed with Google linking him to wrong faces. I am curious
| to know what he looks like, his interests, background, etc
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think Lock-Pick Lawyer's views on this are germane
| (paraphrasing):
|
| >>> I would show my face or give my name as there are many
| thousands of normal people to whom that would make an
| interesting or grounding moment, but it only takes one crazy
| nut-job to ruin your whole year, and if there is one thing
| common in the internet, it's crazy nut-jobs
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Foundations by Greg Egan (1998)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8547249 - Nov 2014 (17
| comments)
| codeulike wrote:
| Time to post my favourite short story of his: you can read it
| online:
|
| Crystal Nights https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html
|
| _"What created the only example of consciousness we know of?"
| Daniel asked.
|
| "Evolution."
|
| "Exactly. But I don't want to wait three billion years, so I need
| to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the
| sources of variation more targeted."
|
| Julie digested this. "You want to try to evolve true AI?
| Conscious, human-level AI?"
|
| "Yes." Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to
| measure her words before speaking.
|
| "With respect," she said, "I don't think you've thought that
| through."_
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