Greg Egan is fantastic. Too many authors just magic stuff into existence all over the place and it leads to large, annoying inconsistencies. Egan's stuff mainly seems to follow the rule of only using magic once, and having the rest of the storyline come from that and make sense/be consistent.

I wish more stories would start off with one magic point, cast one universe-altering spell, suspend my disbelief once, and then just deal with the consequences.

Yeah I hear people call this "hard sci-fi", but that's not really fitting. It can apply to any fiction. There's fantasy like Harry Potter where the world is just unbelievably inconsistent (as HPMOR loved to point out). Compared to, say, Mistborn (I don't read a lot of fantasy), which introduces its restricted magic system and more-or-less deals with it from there.

And the one big change can be huge, unrealistic, too! Like the Culture books - posit that we've got hyperintelligent friendly AI that can warp many dimensions at will - the rest fits in more-or-less from there; but no one would call Culture hard sci-fi.

+1 for Diaspora, if you have any interest in trans-humanism this book has one of the most plausible/believable post-singularity worlds I have encountered.

6 tabs later and a $4 copy of Permuation City on its way to me from Amazon, I had to go back and find what started me on that rabbit hole. Thanks for the recommendation, that sounds fascinating.

If you don't mind highly technical hard SF, Schild's Ladder is also very good. It's not explicitly spelled out in the text, but it serves as a good pseudo-sequel to Diaspora.

Egan's publisher recently ran off a new printing of many books in his back catalog that were hard to find in the US.

http://www.amazon.com/Schilds-Ladder-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/1597...

Awesome, thanks for sharing. I'm a big hard scifi fan, although I tend to stick to the middle half of the last century (there's just so much good stuff!)