I read Permutation City a few years ago now. It's certainly a very interesting book that I'd highly recommend. Greg Egan is very much an "ideas" man though. I find that his narratives while intellectually stimulating sometimes don't translate well to a novel format. I find Egan's short stories to be a delight (check out Axiomatic if you haven't) but his novels can be a real slog if you are not a subject matter expert.

Neal Stephenson writes in the same "genre" but he has a much more approachable style while not sacrificing on any "hard" elements.

My recommendation for anybody who's never read Egan's stuff is to start with his short-stories first.

I'm a huge fan of Egan's work, but his writing definitely has its strengths and weaknesses.

In addition to being an "ideas man", I think his prose is generally excellent. He has a real talent for crafting sentences that are clear, concise, descriptive, and often evocative. (He's mentioned that outside of his writing career, he's a programmer, and I get the sense that any technical documentation he produced would be a joy to read.) It's a testament to his skill that his work is as comprehensible as it is.

The downside is that he has a tendency to write character dialogue the same way he writes everything else. Every sentence is carefully constructed to advance an argument, or to reveal a specific detail about a character's viewpoint. The characters end up feeling less like fully-realized people, and more like mouthpieces in a Socratic dialogue.

I agree with the recommendation to start with his short stories. Of the ones that are legally available online, I'd suggest "Singleton" (http://www.gregegan.net/MISC/SINGLETON/Singleton.html) as a good starting point.

I don't know why, I thought Egan was a physics teacher.

Well, he kind of is.

(In the sense that a lot of his novels are, at heart, mostly physics exposition, whether of real or imaginary physics.)

'Permutation city' deserves a top spot on any list that has hard, comp and fi in the title. Although it's less about implementation details and more about theoretical CS. Here's an excerpt [1].

[1] https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Excerpt/PermutationExce...

Starts off like a diamond but gets progressively softer until the end is just pudding.

Try Schild's Ladder, but consult your dentist first.

Diaspora is a particularly good fit.

Hear, hear. It starts with the birthing of a new AI, the proceeds to its education, its migration into a physical form, its migration into space, the migration into encoded form based on the geometry of a biological organism -- and all of this ancillary to the central plot.

It is a fantastic book, but unfortunately (as far as I can tell) seems to be out of print in paperback, which is a shame.

If you have an American Amazon account, you can get most of Greg Egan's books on Kindle for $2 a pop.

I also found it interesting how it considered the "clock speed" of simulations and how that impacts interactions with real world inhabitants.

Was coming to add Greg Egan. A lot of his other novels and short stories would classify as well.

As someone who went into it with great expectations based on threads like these, I'll add my contrary opinion: it was a pretty disappointing read. The story is pretty lukewarm and doesn't particularly drag your interest into it, which would be fine if the point was the philosophical/metaphysical underpinnings were the point - but unfortunately those are pretty weak and superficial as well. Overall it felt like a half-baked mediocre work by a talented author.

I came here to recommend this because I learned about it from another HN thread. It was a great read and gave me tons to think about.

I also learned about Permutation City from an HN thread years ago. It's my favorite book now, and I immediately ctrl+F'd this list for Permutation City because everyone else on HN should know it exists.

All of Greg Egan's books would be at the top of the list if I was creating it.

Also surprised to not find Permutation City on the list.