Greg Egan | |
---|---|
Born | Gregory Mark Egan [1] 20 August 1961 [1] Perth, Western Australia, Australia |
Occupation | Writer, former programmer [2] |
Period | 1983–present (as a science fiction writer) |
Genre | Science fiction |
Website | |
www |
Greg Egan (born 20 August 1961) [1] is an Australian science fiction writer and mathematician, best known for his works of hard science fiction. Egan has won multiple awards including the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Award.
Egan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Western Australia. [2] [3] [4]
He published his first work in 1983. [5] He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind uploading, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism to religion. He often deals with complex technical material, like new physics and epistemology. He is a Hugo Award winner (with eight other works shortlisted for the Hugos) and has also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. [6] His early stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror.
Egan's short stories have been published in a variety of genre magazines, including regular appearances in Interzone and Asimov's Science Fiction .
In 2002, Egan co-authored two papers about Riemannian 10j symbols, spin networks appearing in Riemannian quantum gravity, together with John Baez and Dan Christensen. Spin networks also play a central role in his novel Schild's Ladder released the same year.
In 2014, Egan conjectured a generalization of the Grace–Danielsson inequality about the relation of the radii of two spheres and the distance of their respective centres to fit a simplex between them to also hold in higher dimensions, which later became known as the Egan conjecture. A proof of the inequality being sufficient was published by him in 2014 under a blog post of John Baez. They were lost due to a rearrangement of the website, but the central parts were copied into the original blog post. Further comments by Greg Egan on 16 April 2018 concern the search for a generalized conjecture involving ellipsoids. [7] A proof of the inequality also being necessary was published by Sergei Drozdov on 16 October 2023 on ArXiv. [8]
In 2018, Egan described a construction of superpermutations, thus giving an upper bound to their length. On 27 February 2019, using ideas developed by Robin Houston and others, Egan produced a superpermutation of n = 7 symbols of length 5906, breaking previous records. [9] [10]
As of 2015, Egan lives in Perth. He is a vegetarian [2] [11] and an atheist. [12]
Egan does not attend science fiction conventions, [13] does not sign books, and has stated that he appears in no photographs on the web, [14] though both SF fan sites and Google Search have at times mistakenly represented photos of other people with the same name as those of the writer. [15]
Egan's work has won the Japanese Seiun Award for best translated fiction seven times. [6]
Teranesia was named the winner of the 2000 Ditmar Award for best novel, but Egan declined the award. [6]
Axiomatic (1995), ISBN 1-85798-281-9
Our Lady of Chernobyl (1995), ISBN 0-646-23230-4
Luminous (1998), ISBN 1-85798-551-6
Dark Integers and Other Stories (2008), ISBN 978-1-59606-155-2
Crystal Nights and Other Stories (2009), ISBN 978-1-59606-240-5
Oceanic (2009), ISBN 978-0-575-08652-4
The Best of Greg Egan (2019), ISBN 978-1-59606-942-8
Instantiation (2020)
Sleep and The Soul (2023)
Phoresis and Other Journeys (2023)
The production of a short film inspired by the story "Axiomatic" commenced in 2015, [47] and the film was released online in October 2017. [48]
New Scientist is a popular science magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organisation publishes a monthly Dutch-language edition. First published on 22 November 1956, New Scientist has been available in online form since 1996.
Howard Waldrop was an American science fiction author who worked primarily in short fiction. He received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2021.
Walter Jon Williams is an American writer, primarily of science fiction. Previously he wrote nautical adventure fiction under the name Jon Williams, in particular, Privateers and Gentlemen (1981–1984), a series of historical novels set during the Age of Sail.
Elizabeth Moon is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her other writing includes newspaper columns and opinion pieces. Her novel The Speed of Dark won the 2003 Nebula Award. Prior to her writing career, she served in the United States Marine Corps.
Sean Christopher McMullen is an Australian science fiction and fantasy author.
Axiomatic (ISBN 0-7528-1650-0) is a 1995 collection of short science fiction stories by Greg Egan. The stories all delve into different aspects of self and identity.
John Michael Scalzi II is an American science fiction author and former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is best known for his Old Man's War series, three novels of which have been nominated for the Hugo Award, and for his blog Whatever, where he has written on a number of topics since 1998. He won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2008 based predominantly on that blog, which he has also used for several charity drives. His novel Redshirts won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel. He has written non-fiction books and columns on diverse topics such as finance, video games, films, astronomy, writing and politics, and served as a creative consultant for the TV series Stargate Universe.
Lewis Shiner is an American writer.
Jonathan Strahan is an editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His family moved to Perth, Western Australia in 1968, and he graduated from the University of Western Australia with a Bachelor of Arts in 1986.
Martha Wells is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has published a number of fantasy novels, young adult novels, media tie-ins, short stories, and nonfiction essays on fantasy and science fiction subjects. Her novels have been translated into twelve languages. Wells has won four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards and three Locus Awards for her science fiction series The Murderbot Diaries. She is also known for her fantasy series Ile-Rien and The Books of the Raksura. Wells is praised for the complex, realistically detailed societies she creates; this is often credited to her academic background in anthropology.
The Ditmar Award is Australia's oldest and best-known science fiction, fantasy and horror award, presented annually since 1969, usually at the Australian "Natcon". The historical nominations and results of the Award follow.
Joseph Edward "Jay" Lake, Jr. was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. In 2003 he was a quarterly first-place winner in the Writers of the Future contest. In 2004 he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction. He lived in Portland, Oregon, and worked as a product manager for a voice services company.
Naomi Novik is an American author of speculative fiction. She is known for the Temeraire series (2006–2016), an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars involving dragons, and her Scholomance fantasy series (2020–2022). Her standalone fantasy novels Uprooted (2015) and Spinning Silver (2018) were inspired by Polish folklore and the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale respectively. Novik has won many awards for her work, including the Alex, Audie, British Fantasy, Locus, Mythopoeic and Nebula Awards.
The bibliography of American science fiction author Bruce Sterling comprises novels, short stories and non-fiction.
Eidolon Publications was a small press publisher based in North Perth, Western Australia. The company previously published the speculative fiction magazine Eidolon which ran from 1990 to 2000 and published books under the name of Eidolon Books.
Zendegi is a science fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan, first published in the United Kingdom by Gollancz in June 2010. It is set in Iran in the near future and deals with mapping the human brain, virtual reality and the democratization of Iran. The title of the book means "life" in Persian; the name of the virtual reality system featured in the story is Zendegi-ye Behtar, Persian for "better life".
Steven Paulsen is an Australian writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror fiction whose work has been published in books, magazines, journals and newspapers around the world. He is the author of the best selling children's book, The Stray Cat, which has seen publication in several foreign language editions. His short story collection, Shadows on the Wall: Weird Tales of Science Fiction, Fantasy and the Supernatural), won the 2018 Australian Shadows Award for Best Collected Work, and his short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Dreaming Down-Under, Terror Australis: Best Australian Horror, Strange Fruit, Fantastic Worlds, The Cthulhu Cycle: Thirteen Tentacles of Terror, and Cthulhu Deep Down Under: Volume 3.
Simulated consciousness,synthetic consciousness, etc. is a theme of a number of works in science fiction. The theme is one step beyond the concept of the "brain in a vat"/"simulated reality" in that not only the perceived reality but the brain and its consciousness are simulations themselves.
"The Moral Virologist" is a science fiction short story by Greg Egan. It was first published in September 1990 in Pulphouse Magazine, and subsequently republished in 1991's The Best of Pulphouse, in the Summer 1993 issue of Eidolon magazine, and in Egan's 1995 collection Axiomatic. An Italian-language version, "Il Virologo Morale", was published in 2003.
The Arrows of Time is a hard science-fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan and the third part of the Orthogonal trilogy. The novel was published by Gollancz on 21 November 2013 with a cover art by Greg Egan and by Night Shade Books on 5 August 2014 with a cover art by Cody Tilson. The novel describes the return journey of the generation ship Peerless, which has been launched in The Clockwork Rocket and traveled into the void in The Eternal Flame, and the reverse enabling the construction of a device to receive messages from the own future as well as the journey to a world where time runs in reverse. The universe of the novel is therefore based on a Riemannian instead of a Lorentzian manifold, changing the rules of physics. The details are described by Greg Egan on his website.