Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
by MichaelGG on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @03:45PM
(#12500591)
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).
Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
by JadeNB on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @04:31PM
(#12500985)
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.
Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
by arethuza on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @05:00PM
(#12501181)
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!
Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
by JadeNB on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @05:50PM
(#12501498)
Is that your recommended entrée into the Culture universe?
Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
by arethuza on Thursday September 15, 2016 @09:39AM
(#12505995)
No - definitely not. I would recommend publication order.
Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
by jackgavigan on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @08:36PM
(#12502513)
No, my advice would be to read the in order of publication.
Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
by RachelF on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @10:48PM
(#12502966)
I think that "The Wasp Factory" is by far his best book. Sometimes unsettling but a great short read.
Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
by wlievens on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @12:20PM
(#12498513)
Did you read Schild's Ladder? It's basically about quantum cellular automata consuming the galaxy.
Re:Ask HN: What's your favorite HN post?
by JadeNB on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @12:21PM
(#12498535)
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.
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...).