end with general position “akshually, grandiose sci-fi assumptions are not that important, what I want is to write commentary on contemporary society” [...] hard or speculative sci-fi is considered to be low status, while “commentary on contemporary society” is high status and writers want to be high status.
But this clearly isn’t true of Egan. The particular story reviewed in this post happens to be commentary on contemporary Society, but that’s because Egan has range—his later novels are all wildly speculative. (The trend probably reached a zenith with Dichronauts (2017) and The Book of All Skies (2021), set in worlds with alternate geometry (!); Scale (2023) and Morphotophic (2024) are more down-to-earth and merely deal with alternate physics and biology.)
Though — I haven’t read all of his recent novels, but I think — none of those are (for lack of a better word) transhumanist like Permutation City or Diaspora, or even Schild’s Ladder or Incandescence. Concretely: no uploads, no immortality, no artificial minds, no interstellar civilization. I feel like this fits the pattern, even though the wildness of the physics doesn’t. (And each of those four earlier novels seems successively less about the implications of uploading/immortality/etc.)
But this clearly isn’t true of Egan. The particular story reviewed in this post happens to be commentary on contemporary Society, but that’s because Egan has range—his later novels are all wildly speculative. (The trend probably reached a zenith with Dichronauts (2017) and The Book of All Skies (2021), set in worlds with alternate geometry (!); Scale (2023) and Morphotophic (2024) are more down-to-earth and merely deal with alternate physics and biology.)
Though — I haven’t read all of his recent novels, but I think — none of those are (for lack of a better word) transhumanist like Permutation City or Diaspora, or even Schild’s Ladder or Incandescence. Concretely: no uploads, no immortality, no artificial minds, no interstellar civilization. I feel like this fits the pattern, even though the wildness of the physics doesn’t. (And each of those four earlier novels seems successively less about the implications of uploading/immortality/etc.)