Egan's becoming a better author over time, though. Permutation City is a relatively early novel... but I hope you'll look at the others as well, if you haven't already.
I think my favorite has to be Schild's Ladder, just for sheer conceptual interestingness. I ended up writing fanfiction for it.
The best one from a literary standpoint is probably the Clockwork Rocket trilogy, though.
Re:Post Virtual Reality Sadness
by squeaky-clean on Tuesday November 15, 2016 @06:15PM
(#12963194)
I'm definitely excited to read more by Egan, and already own a few of his other works. I just tend to binge on sci-fi and haven't been in that mood since, well, not-finishing Permutation City.
I originally bought Permutation City because of a recommendation on HN. Schild's Ladder might have to be my next sci-fi read for the same reason. "Sheer conceptual interestingness" is pretty much exactly what I want, haha.
Quick google says it talks about parallel transport. If that's true in any meaningful sense, I'm happy differential geometry science fiction is a thing. :)
Re:Post Virtual Reality Sadness
by Patrick_Devine on Tuesday November 15, 2016 @06:46PM
(#12963376)
This is going to sound silly (and tangential to the original topic), but Permutation City gave me the idea for my last startup. I liked the idea of being able to rent out compute power from anywhere in the world, AWS style, but where the supply of compute could be democratized.
Anyway, I would recommend finishing it. It's a great book.
For what its worth, Egan has written a few works that follow up on, and expand, the ideas presented in Permutation City. Most notably Diaspora and Schild's Ladder. So there's more to enjoy after you finish it :-)
Re:Post Virtual Reality Sadness
by squeaky-clean on Tuesday November 15, 2016 @05:31PM
(#12962927)
I actually bought Diaspora and Axiomatic while still within the first few chapters of Permutation City because I liked it so much. That was on the tail end of a sci-fi binge though, and I haven't read Diaspora yet, or much sci-fi since. Next time I feel like it though, I know I've got a very good backlog waiting for me.
Here's hoping I don't want to finish his other novels either :)
Permutation City's ending is actually quite uplifting. Has a very Star Trek-like "To boldly go where no man has gone before" feel to it.
On the other hand, I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to finish Diaspora. Although its opening chapter is fantastic.
The last book I did this with was "Permutation City" by Greg Egan. There's probably less than an hour's worth of reading left, but I just don't want it to end. This was maybe a year ago and I still haven't touched it since. Eventually I'll probably re-read it from the beginning and actually finish it.
I also do it for bands I really like that are slow to put out albums. I haven't heard the latest GSY!BE (from early 2015) yet, not because I don't want to, but because who knows if they're going to go through another 13 year gap between albums! Maybe in 2020 I'll be having a really bad night and 40 minutes of "new" music from one of my favorite bands is exactly what I'll need.