Greg Egan (ology)

"Yesterday, I escaped from the summer heat into an airconditioned warren in a nearby suburb, its carpeted passages lined with chambers in which people clutched totemically decorated buckets of Coke and tried to link their senses to those of exotic alter egos with the aid of pairs of black-rimmed glasses. My aim was to find out what counts as a quintessential science-fiction blockbuster at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The answer turned out to be an eye-popping exercise in photorealist animation that brings to life a whimsical fantasy world, in the service of a very uninspiring fairy tale."

3.5 out of 5

http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/AVATAR/Avatar.html

Ibn Qirtaiba Interview - Greg Egan

"IQ: To begin with, a question about each of your published novels. First comes An Unusual Angle. You are no longer especially fond of this novel, although hints of your future direction can be found in it (for instance you revisit the idea of a movie camera implanted in a character's body in your latest novel Distress). The novel's protagonist shows a notable propensity for scientific metaphor (there are references to wave functions, energy states, parsecs and mass spectrometers) and he seems to be a science fiction fan to boot (with references to Daleks, 2001, Star Wars, Altered States and Mad Max II). He also shares the interest in film-making you held at his age. To what extent is the novel autobiographical?

GE: I wrote An Unusual Angle when I was in high school, and basically I just applied a slight SF/surrealist distortion to my own situation at the time. The whole book is really the extended daydream of a bored schoolkid staring out the window and constructing a layer of fantasy to superimpose over everything, but the daydream's always anchored by the fact that the reality's still there. Shades of Billy Liar and Walter Mitty, I suppose. It's autobiographical to the extent that the basic circumstances and attitude of the narrator were pretty much my own, and I think it does capture a certain way of responding to tedium and petty authority, which is what most novels of school life are ultimately about. But for a book-length daydream to work, it would either have to be a lot more structured, or a lot more inventive, than this."

http://web.archive.org/web/20050101091605/http://sf.sig.au.mensa.org/iq-18.html

Letters from the forgotten - Greg Egan

From 2005:

"Greg Egan tells the story of his friend Peter Qasim, who has languished in immigration detention for more than six years."

5 out of 5

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/02/16/1108500150540.html

Anatomy Of A Hatchet Job - Greg Egan

"As with the wider population, the people who read, write, edit and review science fiction include a significant proportion with no knowledge of, or interest in, the universe they inhabit — and within that group, a smaller but still substantial number who treat any such interest with contempt. Given that much of what I write is coming from the position that mathematics and the natural sciences are intrinsically interesting, and are as suitable as the central concerns of fiction as anything else, when the result is reviewed by someone who has about as much passion for these things as I have for opera or baseball, a clash of expectations is inevitable."

Or, reviewers with an English literature background failing to acknowledge their own lack of scientific education - the double standard, in other words.

4.5 out of 5

http://gregegan.net/INCANDESCENCE/Z/Hatchet.html

Virtual Worlds and Imagined Futures - Greg Egan

“Virtual Worlds and Imagined Futures”
Albedo One, Number 37, 2009. Interview by David Conyers.

Unseen.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Reification Highway - Greg Egan

Interzone, October 1992, (Oct 1992, David Pringle, Lee Montgomerie, £2.25, 72pp, magazine)

Unseen. Also length unknown, so will put short story.

Before - Greg Egan

Interzone, March 1992, (Mar 1992, David Pringle, Lee Montgomerie, £2.25, 72pp, magazine)

Unseen. Length unknown. Will call it a short story.

Fidelity - Greg Egan

"Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, September 1991, (Sep 1991, Gardner Dozois, Davis Publications, Inc., $2.50, 180pp, Digest, magazine) "

Unseen. There is a reference to a 'neural implant' in the story in an Eidolon interview.

Beyond the Whistle Test - Greg Egan

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 1989, (Nov 1989, Stanley Schmidt, Davis Publications, Inc., #ISSN: 0161-2328, $2.00, 196pp, Digest, magazine) Cover: Janet Aulisio - [VERIFIED]
Our Lady of Chernobyl, (1995, Greg Egan, MirrorDanse Books, 0-646-23230-4, A$9.95, 111pp, tp, coll) Cover: Shaun Tan

Unseen.

References to content:

""Beyond the Whistle Test" is a hard sf horror story about the commercial uses of music."

http://www.sflit.com/novaexpress/15/reviews-15.html

"I have read "Beyond The Whistle Test" in a french translation ("Mortelles Ritournelles"). As far as I can remember, it's about advertisement music generated by computer model that people can't forget and keep hearing in their heads."

http://www.asimovs.com/aspnet_forum/messages.aspx?TopicID=1957&Page=8

An Unusual Angle - Greg Egan

An excerpt in: The Australian Teacher, Nov 1983.

Unseen.

An Unusual Angle - Greg Egan

"An Unusual Angle (1983) was the first novel published by Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan by Norstrilia Press. It concerns a high school boy who makes "a movie in his head."

A mainstream novel. Unseen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Unusual_Angle

Read This - Greg Egan

The New York Review of Science Fiction, November 1994, (1994, Kathryn Cramer, L. W. Currey, Samuel R. Delany, Gordon Van Gelder, David G. Hartwell, Donald G. Keller, Robert K. J. Killheffer, $3.00, 24pp, magazine)

Unseen.

A Report On Miracle Ingredient A - Greg Egan

Eidolon, Winter 1995, (Jun 1995, Editors of Eidolon, Jeremy G. Byrne, Eidolon Publications, octavo s/b, magazine)

"Miracle Ingredient A puts all Australian SF in precisely the same arena as beer advertisements and Neighbours, as Paul Hogan tourism commercials and Crocodile Dundee. And it's all about the selling, the whoring, of a nation of eighteen million people as if it were one thing: indivisible, homogeneous.

I've said almost nothing here about the actual content of Australian SF - because frankly, I don't care whether other Australian SF writers set their works in Australia or elsewhere, and I don't care whether they're inspired more by M. Barnard Eldershaw, Cordwainer Smith, Stanislaw Lem, or Larry Niven. That is the business of each individual writer, and I wouldn't dream of making proclamations on the subject.

And it may sound paradoxical, but Australians can cease writing "Australian SF" - and start writing real SF, SF with no adjective, like everyone else - without changing a single word of their fiction. Let me make this explicit: the last thing this essay is about is calling for less (or more, or different) writing about Australia in Australian science fiction. That's not the issue."

4 out of 5

http://eidolon.net/eidolon_magazine/issue_17/17_egan.htm

Another Exchange - Greg Egan and David Pringle

Interzone, August 1997, (Aug 1997, David Pringle, £3.00, 68pp, magazine)

Unseen.

25 IZ - Greg Egan

Interzone, April 2007, (Apr 2007, Sandy Auden, Andrew Hedgecock, Liz Williams, David Mathew, Jetse de Vries, Andy Cox, TTA Press, £3.75, 68+4pp, Bedsheet, magazine)

Unseen. Presumably part of a tribute to the magazine.

Introduction to Crystal Nights and Other Stories - Greg Egan

Crystal Nights and Other Stories, (Sep 2009, Greg Egan, Subterranean Press, 1-59606-240-1, $35.00, 310pp, hc, coll)

Unseen.

Afterword to Incandescence - Greg Egan

Gives some detail on sources of interest:

"Afterword

The "weight and motion" of objects in the Splinter follow from Einstein's theory of general relativity; many of the effects described also occur in Newtonian gravity, but observations within the Splinter are sufficient to discriminate between the two theories. The best general reference on this subject is:

Gravitation by C. W. Misner, K. S. Thorne and J. A. Wheeler,
W. H. Freeman, New York, 1970.

The most comprehensive treatment of the particular space-time geometries discovered by the protagonists is:

The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes by S. Chandrasekhar,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992.

"Zak's principle" is essentially Einstein's equation in a vacuum, that is, the version that applies when the matter in your immediate vicinity has no significant gravitational effect. The general equation, which allows for the presence of matter, is described in terms that are almost as simple in this excellent account:

"The Meaning of Einstein's Equation" by John C. Baez and
Emory F. Bunn, math.ucr.edu/home/baez/einstein/

Some events in this novel depend on the detailed behavior of the plasma accretion disks that are present around black holes, and several aspects of this subject remain uncertain. For example, precisely if and when an accretion disk with given physical characteristics would be forced to lie in the equatorial plane of a rotating black hole (a phenomenon known as the Bardeen-Petterson effect) is a matter of controversy, because determining this theoretically depends on complex computer simulations, and direct observational data is inconclusive. See, for example:

"Spin-Induced Disk Precession in Sagittarius A*" by Gabriel
Rockefeller, Christopher L. Fryer, and Fulvio Melia,
www.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0507302

A comprehensive discussion of the possible fates that can be suffered by stars that encounter black holes is given in:

"Tidal Disruption of Stars by Black Holes," by Martin J. Rees,
Nature, Vol. 333, 9 June 1988, pp 523-528.

In charting Rakesh and Parantham's journey, I drew on:

"The Nuclear Bulge of the Galaxy. III. Large-Scale Physical
Characteristics of Stars and Interstellar Matter" by R. Launhardt,
R. Zylka, and P. G. Mezger, www.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0201294

Panspermia—the spreading of viable biological material from one planet to another—is almost certainly possible between planets in the same system, but the prospects of such material achieving, and surviving, interstellar journeys is far slimmer. Interstellar panspermia is an interesting idea, and I don't believe it has been shown to be impossible, but I wouldn't argue with anyone who considers it to be highly unlikely.

Supplementary material for this novel can be found at www.gregegan.net"

4.5 out of 5

(you would of course have to buy the below book to access it, but it is a great deal)
http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/1597801283/1597801283.htm

An Interview With - Greg Egan

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Issue #36, (Sep 2008, Lucy Zinkiewicz, A$8.95, magazine)

"ASIM: Several of your books, Incandescence included, deal with far-future civilisations, and if anything there seems to be a progression towards further-future settings as the books get more recent. Do you see your books as presenting a more-or-less consistent sequence, or are they more along the lines of explorations of alternative possibilities?
GE: None of my novels to date share a future history, though I’ve set some short stories in the same universe as Incandescence. If you look at Diaspora, Schild’s Ladder, and Incandescence, there are galaxy-shaking events, and some very different discoveries about fundamental physics, that make it impossible for any two of those books to be describing the same universe. At the same time, they do all share a set of assumptions that shape some aspects of the culture: that there will never be fasterthan-light travel, but we will eventually be able to exist as software, and transmit that software at lightspeed. The three novels present different stages in the development of the kind of culture that might flow from that situation."

4.5 out of 5

Beyond the Veil Of Reality - Greg Egan

Interzone, June 2008, (Jun 2008, David Mathew, Andy Cox, Jetse de Vries, Andrew Hedgecock, Liz Williams, TTA Press, 0264-3596, £3.75, 68+4pp, Bedsheet, magazine)

" *Your previous 'huge-scale' novel* _Diaspora_ *took on the exploration of the universe (or even multiverse) to an extreme end. Then the next 'universe-wide' novel* _Schild's Ladder_ *literally changed the fabric of reality and extrapolated its implications. Compared to these predecessors*, _Incandescence_ *seems somewhat restrained. Did you plan this as such, or did it just happen?*
The main thing I wanted to do was write about a low-tech culture facing a challenge that was very tough for them, and very different from anything in our own history, but completely grounded in known physics. That left room to write about a galactic culture that wasn't facing a catastrophe or cosmic revelations of its own. In the long term, periods of radical discovery or great danger are going to comprise a very small part of our future; it was fun to write about that kind of thing in _Diaspora_ and _Schild's Ladder_, but with the Amalgam I wanted to have a backdrop of stability, where the local dramas are very important if you happen to be caught up in them, but for most of the galaxy life goes on as normal."

4.5 out of 5

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Saturday, December 26, 2009

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