I agree with those titles, and would add Diaspora which I just finished. Truly mindblowing stuff, although it may be a bit too abstract and technical for some.

I second Diaspora; his vivid description of artificial intelligence is worth the read by itself.

Egan's stuff divides evenly into near-future and distant future science fiction; the distant future stuff tends to be very abstract. His latest novel, Zendegi, is a very near-future setting, and coincidentally is a more accessible read than most of his other stuff. I'd recommend it to start with.

I wasn't too keen on Zendegi. About a third of it is how a revolution could happy in Iran next year, and seemed a bit too influenced by the Iranian presidential election protests. I was also annoyed at how it wasn't as hard sf as his other books.

Don't miss his short stories, like luminous and dark integers. Egan rekindled my excitement for SF recently, great stuff!

yeah, his short stories are mind blowing. I really liked Distress, too.

Quarantine had me running around in high school reading Quantum Physics books and mostly failing to understand them. Good book.

It's also his most tautly plotted novel because of the detective noir framework. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan and the earlier Vlad Taltos books by Steven Brust also used detective noir conventions to great effect. It's a writer's crutch, but so many fantasy and science fiction writers suck at plotting and pacing that I'd prefer they lean on crutches occasionally rather than bore their readers to death.

Egan's two most recent books, Incandesence and The Clockwork Rocket, are great if you're a math and physics guy.

Egan looks interesting. Which is a good book to start reading Egan?

Depends on what you like. Permutation City and Diaspora are fan favorites. They are heavy on idea porn but not very good yarns. That goes for most of Egan's books. His short stories are probably his most polished works because the form's constraints force him to keep everything tight. But on the flip side it means he doesn't have time to develop his ideas in great depth.

If you're a programmer, Permutation City would be my recommendation. If you're more mathematically inclined, Diaspora is a good choice. Just so you know what kind of book you'd be in for, the first chapter of Diaspora has a proof outline of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem. His short story The Planck Dive gives a good flavor of Diaspora: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PLANCK/Complete/Pla...

Thanks - I'll have to check those out.