#greg egan

[orchidblack]

Cover art for Greg Egan's Quarantine by Philippe 'Manchu' Bouchet.

[wanderrealms]

Finished reading Bruce Springsteen's autobiography. Now reading Diaspora by Greg Egan.

I have varied tastes in books.

[noosphe-re]

‘Imagine ... a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what's left? A cloud of random numbers. 'That's it. That's all there is. The cosmos has no shape at all – no such thing as time or distance, no physical laws, no cause and effect. 'But ... if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet... why shouldn't the pattern we think of as "the universe" assemble itself, find itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers ... then what makes you think that you're not doing the very same thing?'

Greg Egan, Permutation City

[moons-wish]

'together, we might as well have been alone, so we had no choice but to part. nobody wants to spend eternity alone.'

greg egan, 'closer' (1992).

[hymneminium]

It's unfortunate how bad Greg Egan is at character writing especially when so many of his stories revolve around people with unusual opinions or psychological quirks. Border Guards features a character who's rude and aloof for unclear reasons, which made me sickos.png, but then at the climax when she delivers the exposition she reverts to the default Greg Egan voice and her personality deflates. I read this story before and still remembered the quantum football but if he had stuck the landing I might have remembered both that character and the crux of the story.

[churchofthecomet]

greg egan novel bingo

[fortificationspectra]

"...fell into perfect alignment with all the immutable rules of all the levels beneath it. Like a punched card fed into a Jacquard loom, it ceased to be an abstract message and became a part of the machine"

[revelware]

been rotating this quote from Diaspora by Greg Egan around in my mind

"Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice."

It so neatly encapsulates my disgust with the idea of space colonization. Why do you presume that unchecked exponential growth is the only fate we can choose?