3 ms·

Good writing is highly subjective. The way his books focus more on the interesting concepts and not the characters is precisely why I enjoy them so much. There

Good writing is highly subjective. The way his books focus more on the interesting concepts and not the characters is precisely why I enjoy them so much. There are enough books in the world about people and why they do what they do for books like Greg Egan's to do their own thing. I think he achieved exactly what he set out to do with his writing.

0xEF 3y ago
Agreed. Been a fan of Egan for years and I've never met anyone who reads his books for the prose. Egan's stories are a delivery package for the ideas he wants to present, and nothing more. Interestingly, that is why I enjoy his work. Sometimes I want to have my mind a little blown by stuff that is just at the far edge of my intellectual understanding. Other times I want to be simply entertained, so I turn to other sci-fi authors for that.
- Filligree 3y ago
  He's gotten better at it. You can compare Clockwork Rocket to (say) Schild's Ladder, both of which show off interesting concepts; there's no question that Clockwork Rocket has the more interesting characters. But the characters still aren't why anyone reads them. Nowadays they're serviceable; years back they were cardboard cutouts. Nobody who enjoys Egan is bothered by either.
bossyTeacher 3y ago
Indeed. The point of the story is the concepts presented. This is what hard sci-fi is all about. When I think sci fi, I think Egan rather than Star Wars
danbmil99 3y ago
If I'm really being honest, I don't think any of the great SF writers are great writers if you take away the SF. The Only Exception I can think of where the pros and character development are roughly equivalent to well-known novelists is Walter J Williams. He could have been a non-sf writer but he chose SF probably because it allowed him to get published.
danbmil99 3y ago
If I'm really being honest, I don't think any of the great SF writers are great writers if you take away the SF. The Only Exception I can think of where the prose and character development are roughly equivalent to well-known novelists is Walter J Williams. He could have been a non-sf writer but he chose SF probably because it allowed him to get published.
- jerf 3y ago
  I think it was Larry Niven who pointed out that if you think of conventional writing as consisting of something like some combination of plot, prose, and characters, that the science fiction author labors under the additional constraint of also having to establish setting. (IIRC he broke it into five categories, but the total number and exactly what they are isn't important.) And given how few authors ever reach the level of firing on all cylinders in a non-science-fiction setting on those metrics, a science fiction fan must extend the science fiction authors some grace on the other fronts of good writing if they're going to enjoy it at all. I don't think I've ever seen a science fiction story that establishes a truly different setting that also gets a 5 out of 5 across the board on all the other metrics, and it's debatable whether such a thing is even possible. If such a story hypothetically existed it would probably be too verbose to count as good writing. You can get all sorts of combinations of various attributes, but you just can't get them all. Certainly Egan is in the Silver Age Asimov/Clarke tradition of sacrificing characters to fit the rest in, but what he does is so good I can't complain. For all the crazy science fiction I've read, Egan has, just to name one example, the only story set in a serious attempt at an alternative space-time geometry in which there are two space and two time dimensions, and not in some vague what-if "parallel dimension" sense, but by actually working out the consequences of what two spatial and two temporal dimensions looks like when you feed that into the equations of general relativity: https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/00/DPDM.html https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/00/DPDM.html (I find this one particularly interesting because many of us have imagined "what if there were two time dimensions"; Egan shows that what came to most of our imaginations was so laughably wrong as to not even be in the ballpark, and that in fact you can perfectly sensible discuss the topic grounded in real physics.) Even in the field of science fiction writers there's only a certain percentage of writers who could even properly follow that page, let alone generate it themselves.
cauch 3y ago
While I agree with that and still enjoy some of Egan's writing, his text would definitively be better and more interesting if the characters were not so artificial, without losing anything about the science. It is amusing to think that a lot of people who are defending Egan on this point would probably be uncompromising on their very low opinion on a book containing badly put together science. They will probably not say "it's not for me, but why not, the author was interested in the characters, the science is just an excuse", but rather "no, they use science, so they need to do the science correctly". But they will ignore this argument ("they use characters, so they need to do characters correctly") is the case of Egan.
- lmm 3y ago
  Are his characters really artificial? Boring and single-minded, sure, but there are plenty of boring and single-minded people in the world - too many literary critics lose track of how unusual (indeed unrealistic) most of the characters in literature are.

0xEF 3y ago

Agreed. Been a fan of Egan for years and I've never met anyone who reads his books for the prose. Egan's stories are a delivery package for the ideas he wants to present, and nothing more. Interestingly, that is why I enjoy his work. Sometimes I want to have my mind a little blown by stuff that is just at the far edge of my intellectual understanding. Other times I want to be simply entertained, so I turn to other sci-fi authors for that.

Filligree 3y ago
He's gotten better at it. You can compare Clockwork Rocket to (say) Schild's Ladder, both of which show off interesting concepts; there's no question that Clockwork Rocket has the more interesting characters. But the characters still aren't why anyone reads them. Nowadays they're serviceable; years back they were cardboard cutouts. Nobody who enjoys Egan is bothered by either.

bossyTeacher 3y ago

Indeed. The point of the story is the concepts presented. This is what hard sci-fi is all about. When I think sci fi, I think Egan rather than Star Wars

danbmil99 3y ago

If I'm really being honest, I don't think any of the great SF writers are great writers if you take away the SF. The Only Exception I can think of where the pros and character development are roughly equivalent to well-known novelists is Walter J Williams. He could have been a non-sf writer but he chose SF probably because it allowed him to get published.

danbmil99 3y ago

If I'm really being honest, I don't think any of the great SF writers are great writers if you take away the SF. The Only Exception I can think of where the prose and character development are roughly equivalent to well-known novelists is Walter J Williams. He could have been a non-sf writer but he chose SF probably because it allowed him to get published.

jerf 3y ago
I think it was Larry Niven who pointed out that if you think of conventional writing as consisting of something like some combination of plot, prose, and characters, that the science fiction author labors under the additional constraint of also having to establish setting. (IIRC he broke it into five categories, but the total number and exactly what they are isn't important.) And given how few authors ever reach the level of firing on all cylinders in a non-science-fiction setting on those metrics, a science fiction fan must extend the science fiction authors some grace on the other fronts of good writing if they're going to enjoy it at all. I don't think I've ever seen a science fiction story that establishes a truly different setting that also gets a 5 out of 5 across the board on all the other metrics, and it's debatable whether such a thing is even possible. If such a story hypothetically existed it would probably be too verbose to count as good writing. You can get all sorts of combinations of various attributes, but you just can't get them all. Certainly Egan is in the Silver Age Asimov/Clarke tradition of sacrificing characters to fit the rest in, but what he does is so good I can't complain. For all the crazy science fiction I've read, Egan has, just to name one example, the only story set in a serious attempt at an alternative space-time geometry in which there are two space and two time dimensions, and not in some vague what-if "parallel dimension" sense, but by actually working out the consequences of what two spatial and two temporal dimensions looks like when you feed that into the equations of general relativity: https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/00/DPDM.html https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/00/DPDM.html (I find this one particularly interesting because many of us have imagined "what if there were two time dimensions"; Egan shows that what came to most of our imaginations was so laughably wrong as to not even be in the ballpark, and that in fact you can perfectly sensible discuss the topic grounded in real physics.) Even in the field of science fiction writers there's only a certain percentage of writers who could even properly follow that page, let alone generate it themselves.

cauch 3y ago

While I agree with that and still enjoy some of Egan's writing, his text would definitively be better and more interesting if the characters were not so artificial, without losing anything about the science. It is amusing to think that a lot of people who are defending Egan on this point would probably be uncompromising on their very low opinion on a book containing badly put together science. They will probably not say "it's not for me, but why not, the author was interested in the characters, the science is just an excuse", but rather "no, they use science, so they need to do the science correctly". But they will ignore this argument ("they use characters, so they need to do characters correctly") is the case of Egan.

lmm 3y ago
Are his characters really artificial? Boring and single-minded, sure, but there are plenty of boring and single-minded people in the world - too many literary critics lose track of how unusual (indeed unrealistic) most of the characters in literature are.