Line #61 Creator/GregEgan


1	[[quoteright:250:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/gregegan.png]]
2	[[caption-width-right:250:There are no images of Greg Egan on the Internet. Instead, here's a hyperbolic planet and its sun.]]
3	->''"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."''
4	-->-- [[http://www.keepingthedoor.com/greg-egan-the-big-interview/ Interview with Renai Lemay]]
5
6	Greg Egan (born 20 August 1961) is an Australian author who put the Hard Science back into 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.
7
8	A lot of Egan's early stories first appeared in ''Magazine/{{Interzone}}'' magazine, which can thus boast that he's to some extent their discovery.
9
10	!! Works with a page on this Wiki:
11	* ''Literature/{{Diaspora}}''
12	* ''Literature/{{Distress}}'' - Political intrigue surrounding the development of a Theory of Everything.
13	* ''Literature/{{Incandescence}}'' - Pre-industrial aliens discover General Relativity because their world is located in a steep gravity well.
14	* ''Literature/TheMoralVirologist''
15	* ''Literature/{{Oceanic}}''
16	* ''Literature/{{Oracle}}''
17	* ''Literature/{{Orthogonal}}'' - Aliens in a universe with very strange physics build a GenerationShip in an attempt to avert disaster. A trilogy, consisting of:
18	** ''The Clockwork Rocket''
19	** ''The Eternal Flame''
20	** ''The Arrows of Time''
21	* ''Literature/PermutationCity''
22	* ''Literature/Quarantine1992''
23	* ''Literature/SchildsLadder''
24
25	!! His other works include:
26	* ''Literature/{{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.
27	* ''Literature/TheFourThousandTheEightHundred'' - 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.
28	* ''Literature/{{Teranesia}}'' - Through quantum computing, life becomes capable of mutating into the optimum form for its environment.
29	* ''Literature/{{Zendegi}}'' - Simulations of human neural maps are used to add realism to a virtual world.
30
31	Common themes in his works include TheSingularity, [[{{Transhuman}} Transhumanism]], atheism, regional politics, religion being the source of many problems, and non-standard sexual and/or gender identities.
32	----
33	!! Tropes in his other works include:
34	* AdaptiveAbility: In ''Teranesia'', an evolving organism is apparently able to anticipate future challenges and develop appropriately.
35	* 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 posted ''eighty thousand words'' along with ''hundreds of illustrative diagrams'' to describe the alternate-universe physics he invented for ''Orthogonal''.
36	* AlternativeNumberSystem: Numbers in Egan's works are always shown in decimal thanks to a TranslationConvention, but in several of his works that take place from a nonhuman perspective, it's strongly implied that the characters use a different number base. In ''Literature/{{Orthogonal}}'', the unnamed race of aliens apparently use a duodecimal/dozenal (base-12) number system, while the six-legged "Arkdwellers" in ''Literature/{{Incandescence}}'' clearly use a base-6 system. The clearest evidence of this is that where a human might hyperbolize a large number as "a thousand" or "ten thousand" (ten times a hundred or a hundred times a hundred, respectively), the Arkdwellers tend to use phrases such as "six times thirty-six" or "thirty-six times thirty-six" when they want to exaggerate with an indeterminate large number.
37	* AwesomenessByAnalysis: In "[[http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/tap.htm TAP]]", the users with the highest level of skill with the eponymous AppliedPhlebotinum have this ability, being able to critically analyse everything perfectly. [[spoiler:This is the reason that the villains want to suppress it, as if the ability were widespread, nobody would allow corrupt politicians or religious figures to remain in power.]]
38	* BaitAndSwitch: In “Uncanny Valley”, protagonist [[MeaningfulName Adam]], who is an ArtificialHuman with incomplete memories of a dead man, comes to believe that his suppressed memories are of the dead man committing a murder. It turns out that [[spoiler:the man’s lover committed the crime, and he chose not to upload his memory of not turning his lover in]].
39	* BodySurf: In ''The Safe-Deposit Box'' short story, the protagonist's mind inhabits a different body every day. They all live in the same general area and are of similar age (and since the age the protagonist started identifying himself as a boy, they are usually male), but nothing else seems to give any clues as to how or why it happens. In fact, it wasn't until school age that the protagonist realized that this isn't a norm, and other people don't "change" into someone else every day.
40	* CallASmeerpARabbit: ''The Clockwork Rocket'' takes place in a universe with entirely different laws of physics from our own. It still uses common words like "plant", "forest", and "wheat" to describe the things that are roughly analogous (never mind that plants gain energy by ''emitting'' light rather than absorbing it).
41	* CreepyChild: Jane Remedios, of "TAP", gives off this vibe, because she appears to have the emotional maturity of an adult, in a child's body. [[CreepyGood She's one of the good guys, though.]]
42	* TheCuckoolanderWasRight: "TAP" opens with Helen Sharpe being convinced that her mother was murdered as part of a conspiracy to discredit the eponymous technology and the subculture that has fully adopted it. Nobody, not even the private investigator she hires to take the case, actually believes that Sharpe's mother was murdered. As it turns out, [[spoiler: a reactionary conspiracy ''did'' kill her to turn the public against TAP, but the methods used were different from how Helen initially suspected]].
43	* CureYourGays: His short story "Cocoon" has the eponymous treatment for pregnant women that [[MoneyDearBoy semi-inadvertently]] prevents gay-making hormones from reaching the baby.
44	* DespotismJustifiesTheMeans: In "TAP", it turns out that the murder victim's death was caused by [[spoiler:a secret cabal who wish to suppress the TAP technology so that their power is never threatened by a generation of perfect critical thinkers]]. The murder itself is just a means to that end.
45	* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: The main conflict of "Glory" is [[UsefulNotes/ColdWar between two factions of an alien species, which don't trust each other at all and spend most of their time trying to one-up the other at the expense of the planet's smaller countries]], and despite their posturing to the contrary, neither side has the moral high ground. The [[OutgrownSuchSillySuperstitions human main character]] monologues about [[AuthorFilibuster how irrational the whole thing is]].
46	* DyingDream: An unusual version of this is found in the story "Transition Dreams". A man's brain is scanned and transferred to a computer. The end result is an exact copy, as though the man's mind had been instantaneously transferred from brain to computer. But the mind is conscious of the transfer, and realizes that all its dreamlike experiences of the process must be annihilated before it can be identical to the original brain scan. The real twist, though, is that the end of the story [[spoiler:calls into question whether he even really ''is'' being transferred to a computer, or if he's just plain dying and the whole brain-scan thing is a hallucination born of denial]].
47	** 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. An imaginary orderly says: "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!"]].
48	* {{Eagleland}}: "In the Ruins" is a Type 2, presenting a future American society where science is disdained and vapid pop culture is king.
49	* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: Genre-wise. Nearly all of his output, for which he is recognized and ([[{{SmallReferencePools}} relatively, considering the niche market]]) known, is science fiction of the hardest kind with a firm scientific focus, as evident on this page, but he has written a few "old-school", most definitely non-SF horror stories at the very beginning of his writing career. They can be found and read [[http://www.gregegan.net/HORROR/Horror.html on his website.]]
50	%%* EvilReactionary: Present occasionally.
51	* 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.
52	* 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.
53	* FirstContact: Quite a few of Egan's works prominently feature the idea of a spacefaring race making contact with one that hasn't yet attained space travel, and a few, bizarrely, don't even involve space travel at all. A surprising number of them play the trope from the perspective of the spacefaring race.
54	** ''Literature/{{Diaspora}}'', "Glory", and ''Literature/{{Incandescence}}'' all feature spacefaring humans making first contact with aliens who haven't attained space travel, although in the first case the aliens in question have already met ''other'' spacefaring aliens.
55	** ''Literature/PermutationCity'' and "Crystal Nights" feature humans who create computer-simulated universes in which life "evolves" from first principles, and the humans make "first contact" with the aliens from literally ''outside'' their known universe (imagine realizing that our entire universe was being simulated--not manipulated, but simply run on a computer--and then imagine meeting the beings who ''designed the computer'').
56	** "Luminous" and its sequel "Dark Integers" feature humans making first contact with a race of intelligent beings who live in a universe that exists alongside ours--not a parallel universe, exactly, but one that exists in the same space and time. The two universes follow different mathematics, and once each race realizes that the other exists, they are able to communicate more or less by ''doing math'' at each other. [[MindScrew Yeah]].
57	* FlingALightIntoTheFuture: A species doomed to extinction by a [[spoiler:black hole crashing through their starsystem]] in ''Incandescence'' takes a radical approach to Fling A Light Into The Future: [[spoiler:they engineer a de-novo descendant species and culture able to live within chunks of rock orbiting inside the accretion disk]].
58	* AFormYouAreComfortableWith: In works featuring the galaxy-spanning superculture known as the Amalgam (short stories "Riding the Crocodile" and "Glory", and the novel ''Literature/{{Incandescence}}''), the Amalgam has mastered the trick of manipulating matter on an atomic level to turn pretty much any matter into pretty much whatever they want. The Amalgam's favored method of making FirstContact with young races is to use artificial bodies that mimic the members of the race being contacted. The trope features most prominently in "Glory".
59	* GeniusDitz: "In the Ruins" has Emma, who, despite being a textbook DumbBlonde, actually knows how to solve some pretty advanced physics word problems, at least when she actually goes through the effort to do so. That's pretty impressive for someone who isn't a physics or engineering major and has no interest in science at all.
60	* LifeOrLimbDecision: Another recurring theme, usually followed by an extended description of the SelfSurgery required.
61	* LivingForeverIsAwesome: A recurring theme, with "Border Guards" having a CharacterFilibuster against people who believe otherwise.
62	* ObliviouslyEvil: When they aren't straight up Evil Reactionaries, his villains tend to be people who honestly do not comprehend that their worldview is self-contradictory and harmful to society as a whole. Jack Hamilton of "Oracle" and Prospero of "The Planck Dive" are probably the best examples (though calling either “evil” is a stretch).
63	* PoliticallyCorrectHistory: “Uncanny Valley” has a minor case. The story takes place some time in the [=2040s=], with the protagonist being an ArtificialHuman copy of an elderly man who happened to be gay. This would mean he was born no later than the [=1960s=], and been a young adult when the AIDS epidemic decimated the gay community in the [=1980s=] and when murderous hatred of homosexuals was completely acceptable in society at large. The plot is about the protagonist trying to recover the memories that were deliberately not uploaded to him, yet the idea that these may have included {{Gayngst}} from this time in his predecessor’s life is not even contemplated.
64	* '''ReclusiveArtist''': So much so that ''there are no pictures of him in the internet''.
65	* ReligionIsWrong: Having future humans having OutgrownSuchSillySuperstitions is typical of Egan's ''oeuvre'', but only in "Oceanic" does he set up a wholly fictional religion, which the characters discover to be entirely wrong.
66	* RomanticismVersusEnlightenment: So far towards the Enlightenment end that one could make the scale into a trebuchet by tying down the Romanticism end. Unlike most writers of a similar bent, Egan is ''very'' hostile to even the slightest whiff of romantic sentiment, apparently thinking that everyone sympathetic to it wants to return to the popular conception of the Dark Ages.
67	* SlidingScaleOfDivineIntervention: 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]].
68	* SpeculativeFictionLGBT: He likes this trope, frequently either using it or at least paying lip service to it. It's notable in at least 5 of his works.
69	* StarfishAliens: More often than not, Greg Egan's aliens aren't even based on the same ''physics'', let alone the same chemistry or body plan, as Earthly life.
70	* TheWorldIsJustAwesome: "Glory" opens with a [[TechnologyPorn loving description]] of the process required to transport the human main characters to the aliens' star system, which involves [[JustForFun/AbusingTheKardashevScaleForFunAndProfit creating a kilogram each of matter and antimatter just to explode them in the core of a star, using the resultant energy to shoot two nanomachines to an icy moon several planets away from the aliens' home world, and then build both the heroes' spaceships and their new bodies (which look just like those of the aliens) individually, atom by atom, from the surrounding materials]].
71	* {{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.

Context Creator / GregEgan