History Creator / GregEgan

* His works fall in Class 0 whenever the subject of religion comes up (except for "Crystal Nights", which has a Sandbox God instead). Religions are invariably portrayed as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_reservoir disease reservoir]] from which every human flaw and wickedness springs, and the people who run them are never anything more than abusive authoritarians who treat their followers the way a totalitarian government treats its citizens, and they always, ''always'' [[PersecutedIntellectuals forbid scientific inquiry]].

* {{Zeerust}}: Though still hard science fiction, some of the stories Egan wrote in TheNineties, such as "TAP", haven't aged well because of VirtualReality being an important plot point. ([[TechnologyMarchesOn Though given recent advances]], [[SubvertedTrope this may swing back to respectability in a few years]].)

* ''Literature/{{Incandescence}}'' - Pre-industrial aliens discover General Relativity because their world is located in a steep gravity well.

* ''Dichronauts'' - Similar in concept to ''Orthogonal'': A sentient society in a world with alien physics need to learn about their world's strange geography and physics in order to avoid the extinction of their race.
* ''The Four Thousand, The Eight Hundred'' - A philosophical thought experiment about the ethics of sacrificing a few to save many more plays out against a backdrop of an interplanetary refugee crisis.
* ''Incandescence'' - Pre-industrial aliens discover General Relativity because their world is located in a steep gravity well.
* ''Teranesia'' - Through quantum computing, life becomes capable of mutating into the optimum form for its environment.
* ''Zendegi'' - Simulations of human neural maps are used to add realism to a virtual world.

-->--[[http://www.keepingthedoor.com/greg-egan-the-big-interview/ Interview with Renai Lemay]]

* ''Literature/{{Quarantine}}''

* AllThereInTheManual: He stuffs his stories with heady physics that is almost impossible to fully convey without diagrams and calculus. He has interactive animated simulations on his website for the confused yet still interested. He's recently taken this UpToEleven, posting ''eighty thousand words'' along with ''hundreds of illustrative diagrams'' to describe the alternate-universe physics he invented for ''Orthogonal''.

* '''ReclusiveArtist''': So much so that ''[[UpToEleven there are no pictures of him in the internet]]''.

** It gets worse: [[spoiler: As the dream progresses, the man imagines or remembers speaking to an old uploaded human who tells him uploaded Copies used to be moved from server to server automatically as cloud-computing costs changed, unaware that this would have produced transition dreams every time. Initially, the man is glad this is no longer done; he then realizes with horror that biological brains are *more* noisy than computers, not less, and so [[MindScrew brains must generate transition dreams constantly as they shift from state to state, as a byproduct of creating the "main mind"]]. This means most conscious observers aren't "real", but are ephemeral ghosts, including him.
"Do you think there could ever be one coherent, conscious self, enduring through time -- without a billion fragmentary minds forming and dying all around it? Transition dreams blossoming, and vanishing into oblivion? The air's thick with them. Look!"]].

** It gets worse: [[spoiler: As the dream progresses, the man imagines or remembers speaking to an old uploaded human who tells him uploaded Copies used to be moved from server to server automatically as cloud-computing costs changed, unaware that this would have produced transition dreams every time. Initially, the man is glad this is no longer done; he then realizes with horror that biological brains are *more* noisy than computers, not less, and so [[MindScrew brains must generate transition dreams constantly as they shift from state to state, as a byproduct of creating the "main mind"]]. This means most conscious observers aren't "real", but are ephemeral ghosts, including him. "Do you think there could ever be one coherent, conscious self, enduring through time -- without a billion fragmentary minds forming and dying all around it? Transition dreams blossoming, and vanishing into oblivion? The air's thick with them. Look!]].

* {{Anvilicious}}: He does a lot to counter the belief that [[MeasuringTheMarigolds science is cold and sterile]] and that one should believe in comforting lies that are known to be such. Yet though he is very capable[[note]]such as in “Oracle” and in the opening scene of “Glory”[[/note]] of showing the pursuit of scientific knowledge as good on its own merits and the best means of human improvement we have, most of the time he neglects this and falls back on just making a strawman of his opponents so cartoonishly evil or superstitious that the reader has no choice but to side with the protagonists instead. Even [[DontShootTheMessage people who agree with him]] think this is his greatest weakness.

Greg Egan (born 20 August 1961) is an Australian author who put the Hard Science back into [[MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness Hard Science Fiction]]. Likes to [[ShownTheirWork show his work.]] Quite unapologetic for being deeply technical - he's got his niche of the "1% that treats science as something of interest in its own right", the rest have enough authors writing for them already.

* FailedFutureForecast: "Yeyuka" was written in 1997, and as a result has the Democratic Republic of the Congo still called Zaire by characters who live in the 2020s.* FallenStatesOfAmerica: "In the Ruins" is set here, with American scientists being forced to debase themselves by being called "[[BigStupidDooDooHead poopy-heads]]" and American university students jumping at the chance to study abroad, because the American scientific and technological infrastructure has collapsed. One character outright states that the United States used to actually understand the scientific process, and wasn't always in the sorry state it currently finds itself in.

* ''Literature/{{Distress}}'' - Political intrigue surrounding the development of a Theory of Everything.

* ''Distress'' - Political intrigue surrounding the development of a Theory of Everything.

* FallenStatesOfAmerica: "In the Ruins" is set here, with American scientists being forced to debase themselves by being called "[[BigStupidDooDooHead poopy-heads]]" and American university students jumping at the chance to study abroad, because the American scientific and technological infrastructure has collapsed. One character outright states that the United States used to actually understand the scientific process, and wasn't always in the sorry state it currently finds itself in.

* TheGreatPoliticsMessUp: "Yeyuka" was written in 1997, and as a result has the Democratic Republic of the Congo still called Zaire by characters who live in the 2020s.