Not all the stories are on target but those that are score bullseyes. If you like speculative fiction where the story can come second to the idea or the world in which it takes places, then Egan is for you. Also highly recommended (give it some time, it will reward you): Permutation City - cyberspace used as never before!

Egan's short stories - almost all of them close to 20 pages long - are all very different, and all based on a unique idea that Egan spins out as the story progresses. This, together with an affinity in the choice of themes, reminds me of Jorge L. Borges. In particular, it reminds me of those aspects of Borges that fascinates and captivates me.

Like Borges, Egan has a tidy mind and a tidy writing style. Not too many characters, and no strays to "spice up" the story. Rather, he invents quirks to the main storyline itself. My favourite in this book is "Learning to be me"; though the theme is familiar, the twist isn't.

The plotline effectively shows the daydreaming of a suburban schoolboy (but it's better than that makes it sound).

The book is not exactly a conventional narrative, rather it is a series of episodes that allow Egan to make witty, thought provoking and at times poignant observations about (the Australian) school system, and life in general.

In short -- I recommend this book for anyone, but _especially_ for younger readers (say 12 - 16). I am now 26, and have never forgotten the brain-twisting joy this book brought me.

Have you ever read a sf book and thought, "That was a great concept... but the author could have gone farther"? You can NOT do that with Egan's work. He explores and pushes back the outer boundaries of the comprehensible with his stories. Diaspora, particularly, spans as far as one can go--at least, as far as its own concept of the future can be pushed.

The book develops from extremely small beginnings--the "womb" of one of Earth's virtual-reality cities called "polises"--where Yatima (the artificial-intelligence protagonist) is born. From there, Yatima grows in a quest for understanding of the world around ver (neuter for "his" or "her"). From ver polis, to the realms of the other lifeforms inhabiting Earth, to the questions of "Who is out there? Who came before us? Why are we HERE?" Yatima struggles and discovers, traveling faster and faster through space (and time). The urgency of the pitch accelerates as ve nears ver goal. Without spoiling the ending, I'll say this: have you ever hiked a "strenuous" trail to reach a peak, and then stood by yourself at the very top and listened to the wind whistle around you? It's amazing how deeply you can look into yourself when you know you're at the pinnacle of experience.

For those who hate Egan's copious (and admittedly rigorous) studies within the text: maybe adapting your style of reading would help. I'm not telling you to do anything difficult or that would detract from the story; just learn to skim over the heavy details the first time you read the story. I guarantee you'll come back again for them ... for in Diaspora, as in Quarantine and others, Egan uses high-technology magic to restate our own questions: "Who is out there? Who came before us? Why are we HERE?"

A fabulous book, Diaspora is simply so dense, filled with invention, with mind-expanding discovery. At his worst, as in his disappointing recent mainstream sci-fi novel, Terranesia, Greg Egan can be overly didactic, dull and sluggish. But here, at his best, he can do what no other contemporary 'hard' science fiction writer can do: he can turn scientific speculation into sheer wonder. When he concentrates on letting loose this amazing flow of ideas, an almost stream-of-consciousness expanding of whole universes out of the tiniest and most unexpected cracks like endless fractal flowers, his writing can be an almost mystical experience, a celebration of what the human mind can conceive.

Yet it does not rely simply on this stunning and fertile scientific speculation: Egan's characters are real; despite being virtual people, citizens of a computer polis, they are human, they grow, change and develop in comprehensible ways, even if their abilities and situation are beyond us. I have never come across another writer who can convincingly describe what it is like to see in five dimensions, and then equally comprehensibly portray the sheer emotional and physical shock of being restricted to three again. It is this combination of emotional maturity and ever unfolding wonder that makes Diaspora more like Attanasio's baroque masterpiece, Last Legends of Earth (another favourite of mine), than any other conventional hard sci-fi.

Diaspora's only disappointment is that it has to end.

Greg Egan's Permutation City is a novel centered around computer "copies" of human beings. Egan takes these characters on quite an interesting journey. The characters in this book are brought face-to-face with their own possible immortality. When a person is scanned, their very being becomes a type of computer program, which can simply run multiple copies of the same person on the computer. I was honestly frightened to read about the sad potential one has in living forever. While life extension is something our society is constantly striving for, I am bothered to read about these characters, who repeatedly "wake up" into a new round of the same old life. Each time another copy is created, the copy wakes up to the same life as that of the original and all of the copies combined. Even though each copy is a "new creation", there is no new life - it is like a recycled life. This process can be used over and over again. One of the main characters (Paul Durham) lives for over 7,000 years! It seems to me that it would be more like a never-ending nightmare than a dream come true!

In the actual storyline of the book, the main character (Paul Durham) makes a copy of himself, but removes the emergency "bail-out" option, which is required by law to provide the copy with the choice of becoming a flesh-and-blood person. The copy (Paul) works against his original in attempt to free himself from his "trapped" computer existence.

Unfortunately, for readers who are new to or not very familiar with the fast paced cyberpunk style, this book is rather confusing. The line between virtual reality and flesh-and-blood is quite thin. However, if you are able to keep up with what is real and what isn't, you may be able to enjoy and appreciate Greg Egan's Permutation City. I cannot say that I enjoyed the book as a whole, but I do believe that a shorter, simplified version would be slightly more appealing to readers like me, who are not "hard" cyberpunk fans.

Well that's the sci part. The human story behind all this doesn't have much intrinsic interest - the characters are vehicles for the ideas, and often one gets the impression that it is Egan who is speaking, not the character (they all seem to be uncannily good at making detached, intelligent comments on whatever is happening). This aspect didn't really bother me, as I think the ideas deserved some detached, intelligent commentary anyway.

The biggest flaw, I found, was the contrived ending. I won't go into details here, but needless to say, the dust theory turns out to be correct (in the story, at least). Once this is established, the author needs some kind of crisis with which to sustain the reader's interest, and it is this crisis, and the circumstances that brought it about, that I found to be rather contrived.

All in all though, I would definitely recommend Permutation City to any fan of "hard" sci-fi, or anyone interested in metaphysics or the philosophy of mind.

The best thing about this book is that I read it soon after I had read "The Minds I", a collection of essays about AI and human consciousnes. I suspect that Egan has read the same book, since many of the concepts of Permutation City are based on the thought experiements in The Minds I. This is not to say that Egan's book is not original, as the title suggests, the book is a riff or fugue on a number of concepts related to identity and consciousness.

Most of his wild extrapolations follow perfect logic if you accept the basic premise that a conscious software entity can be created. The idea that, if such an entity exists, maintaining the software state while shutting down the program, then restarting it later from the same state would be experienced by the entity as instantaneous, then following that a succession of these saved states in any chronological order should be perceived as the same experience is mind bending.

Amazon should bundle Permutation City and The Mind's I (and maybe Goedel, Escher, Bach) -- they make a great matched set.

Egan's novels are pretty good but his short stories are really excellent. It's interesting that, although "Distress" is a novel, it opens with a series of interviews (the protagonist is a journalist), each one of which is like a mini-short story about some aspect of biotechnology. This plays to Egan's strength: idea, idea, idea. However, after a while the story settles down to the central plot, about a theoretical physicist whose life is endangered by a lunatic group with some strange ideas about cosmology.

I strongly recommend this book. It deserves a 10 for ideas; I am downgrading it to a 9 because other aspects of Egan's writing could still be improved.

I came away liking this book quite a bit, I found the end satisfying. As for those who have existential/religious problems with the book, I too noted some of the "attitude" there, but I just didn't take it personally, and took it as one man's opinion. That allowed me to enjoy the book.

One problem I do have with this and another of his books (Diaspora), is his use of asexual characters (although their use in Diaspora is more understandable), and the "V" pronouns that he uses for them. It seems to me to be an uneccessary convolution to an already complicated story. I "get" the point he is trying to make about relationships, etc, but I found it dehumanizing nonetheless. I don't think people would ever choose such a path in the forseeable future. Now that I've read it in two of his books, I think the idea is getting silly.

That said, this is my favorite book by this author, and now that I have read 5 of his works, I feel my brain has grown in at least another 3 or 4 dimensions.

Be forewarned, this is not light reading material: Egan demands full intellectual participation from his reader, and a reader without a basic understanding of quantum mechanics and the many-worlds theory might not enjoy Quarantine as thoroughly as someone with that background. But if you're willing to put in the effort, this is a richly rewarding book to read.

(One more warning: I strongly suggest that you not read the description on the back of this book. Not only does it spoil the plot, but it is also very misleading and it ruins a great deal of the story's suspense.)

The last two chapters, however, destroy this book. He takes the interesting biogenetic monster virus he's developed so well, and has it attack the main character. The book ends immediately, and rather than explain the mystery and leave you thoughtful about science and the future, no conclusions are drawn at all.

Finish the book next time, Greg.

Jump ahead twenty years. Prabir believes he's saved his sister from Teranesia, but the phenomenon that began with the butterflies has now spread to higher life forms. Madhusree is now a grad student in biology attempting to carry on her parent's work. Much to Prabir's dismay, she manages to get in with an expedition heading back to Indonesia to study the mutations. Prabir knows it will eventually lead back to Teranesia so he follows her blindly. Much has changed in the twenty years since they fled, and not for the better. What is causing the mutations and are they beneficial or a deadly danger?

Most of the book takes place in a chillingly realistic near future. Egan's characters are very well drawn with tangled emotions that run deep. I especially appreciated how the fact that Prabir is gay plays such a small role in the story. It wasn't made to be a huge issue; it was just a part of who he is. It was a little disappointing that Egan didn't foresee a more positive world for his gay character. It seems 40 years won't make much difference in attitudes toward GLBT people.

I wish the rest of the book had been as well thought out as the characters. I highly enjoyed the first three-quarters of the book, but he lost me at the end. The deeper he tried to go into the technobabble of genetics and mutations the more and more he lost me. There are long, boring speeches by characters sharing their theories about the mutations, which was largely unnecessary and just served to break up the flow of the story. The ending felt rushed and really failed to resolve any of the major story lines. If Egan had maintained the same level of excellence throughout, it would have easily received five stars from me, but I felt so disappointed by the end that it ruined the whole book.

Egan says that he'll be returning to dense physics in his next book, but that he's going to continue striving to make plot and character central elements of his works. I find this a refreshing attitude and wish him luck in doing so.

Schild's Ladder has all the ingredients of an Egan classic: speculations on quantum physics, universe-spanning disaster, and characters to whom race, age, size and gender have become meaningless but who nevertheless maintain emotional lives.

Unfortunately this mixture is just too generous with the 'scientific' ingredients, and too sparing with the 'fictional' elements. In fact, except for an all too short flight beyond the border of the 'novo-vacuum', the artifically created and rapidly expanding new universe which threatens the survival of our own, and a few episodes of personal backstory and momentary action, the book appears to consist entirely of characters talking about scientific theory. And whilst the speculation is interesting it simply does not engage emotionally with the reader.

There are some superb moments within the book though: as usual Egan is adept at describing the dislocation brought about by altered dimension - at the start the scientist Cass is reduced (rather grumpily) to a few milimetres in height in order to save space at the Mimosa experimental station; there are also some sparklingly clever angles shown on the problems of movement within the Novo Vacuum whose natural laws are entirely alien to our own.

In addition one of the most engaging sequences concerns the infiltration and sabotage of the project to study the Novo-vacuum by 'anachronauts', reactionary humans who refuse the benefits of articifially-enhanced intelligence and so on. The sequence is particularly effective as it involves a fight in spacesuits outside the research station, a scene that could have been taken from the Golden Age of SF, and now itself anachronistic within contemporary science fiction - making the anachronauts appear doubly out-of-place. The explosives disguised as pot-plants only add to the effective combination of farce and menace in this section of the book.

However the moments of great writing only highlight the steady, even dull, temper of the majority of the book. Schild's Ladder is simply too much science and not enough fiction.

I did find myself caring more about these characters than Egan's past heros, and I think the author's plot development is getting better with each book. (The subplot of the cleverly-named anachronauts was brilliant.) But perhaps this was at the expense of vision: this book's picture of the future generally left me less in awe than that of Diaspora. (I mean, come on: Diaspora's vision had it's own pronouns and a glossary!) I guess Egan has spoiled me.