> I can't find it right now, but it lead me to purchase the book "Permutation City" which is now one of my favourite novels because of the way it comings CS, philosophy, and writing that isn't stilted like a lot of the stuff you find in this realm.

If you haven't already, then don't wait to buy the rest of Greg Egan's œuvre. It was "Quarantine", a lovely plot but arguably one of his weakest stories, that got me into his work, and since then I've found no-one except possibly Ted Chiang (whose work is very different) who comes anywhere near him in the world of hard sci-fi. Almost everything of his is rewarding, and I believe a lot of it was relatively recently (within the last 5 years or so) released as e-books after a long period of unavailability. He also has generous excerpts from selected books and stories at his web-site, and—my favourite—proves his non-fiction science bona fides as a regular contributor on the n-category Café (https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/MT-3.0/mt-search.cgi?Inc...).

Greg Egan and Iain M Banks don't seem to have equals. Greg's stuff is incredibly hard (in both ways: he says to use a pencil and paper while reading). Iain's stuff is ... uplifting, but still coherent. It's not hard, but it still feels coherent somehow (unlike some books that just start making up weird shit just to put the "fi" in scifi).

My first exposure to Banks was The Wasp Factory, which remains one of the only books that has ever literally nauseated me. It was excellent, but it's been hard for me to pick up another book of his since.

Oh, actually I did read The Business, which introduced me to the delightful question "how do you count to 1000 on your fingers?" (without using 'intermediate storage' like keeping track of 10's in your head). I still use that when teaching elementary number theory.

That means you are in the lucky situation of not having read Use of Weapons yet - I'm jealous. It really is very very good!

Is that your recommended entrée into the Culture universe?

No - definitely not. I would recommend publication order.

No, my advice would be to read the in order of publication.

I think that "The Wasp Factory" is by far his best book. Sometimes unsettling but a great short read.

Did you read Schild's Ladder? It's basically about quantum cellular automata consuming the galaxy.

I think that I have read everything pre-Orthogonal trilogy. (Nothing against the Orthogonal trilogy; I just haven't got to it yet.) If I recall correctly, Schild's Ladder was the first long one I read (after the short-story collection Axiomatic). I liked it a lot, although I think I preferred Distress.

I got into Greg Egan from a StackOverflow post somewhere, where one of the comments referenced Dark Integers.

I piled on along wfn's recommendation of the book here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7267811

The story (https://qntm.org/responsibility) was really fun, and there were good comments too. It's certainly one of my favorite HN posts.

Re: OQ, I don't have a single favorite, but I like whenever the hivemind hashes out what's going on with a big tech issue, like Facebook's post denying complicity in NSA spying.

Yeah, I stumbled upon Greg Egan too in one of the HN posts - I think it was about 'Best Science Fiction Books' or something.

I've never read anything like Greg Egan. While reading 'Diaspora' I could feel my skull expanding - he pushes you to think at a magnitude we're not used to. The last few chapters of Diaspora are something I often read myself to bed.

Could it be the top comment of this somewhat recent post?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12152658

It was this HN comment that prompted me to read it, fascinating book. The topic of the post, Boltzmann brain, is also well worth reading into.