Been asking myself the same question for months. So Egan's stories are basically a mathy whodunit -- start from first (fictional) principles and eventually sol

Been asking myself the same question for months. So Egan's stories are basically a mathy whodunit -- start from first (fictional) principles and eventually solve some universe-scale question or crisis. His characters are basically walking textbooks meant for info dumping / FAQing the derivations. In that light, some similar stories I've found are... - Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward) - Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Liu Cixin, 3 body problem author) - The Andromeda Strain (Crichton, more medsci than math) - Schilds Ladder, Diaspora (other Egan stuff) The first two are especially similar to Egan's stuff in that the only real character is the civilization / setting not the people. I've also tried some of the more common hard scifi recommendations like Reynolds and Stephenson, but I personally don't enjoy the dialogue / scenes meant for character development. I guess it's because the stories usually take a human-scale perspective instead of taking a what-if to its reality-bending extreme like Egan does.