I dunno, man. SF exists as a lens to say something about people. The whiz-bang technology is...I want to say "wank", but I don't mean it pejoratively. That stuff just doesn't mean much. I have great admiration for folks like Robert Forward as people, but...once you take away the technology, they're not saying much. It's potboiler stuff. And that's fine, but I look at that, and then I look at somebody like Spider Robinson, whose inclusion in Analog got Ben Bova no end of shitty emails, and...he's actually sayin' stuff. Like, you don't have to agree with it, but there's something, once you put the book down, that you can take away.

I don't care how hard your SF is: it is always and without exception about what technology does to people--otherwise it's an engineering manual for something that doesn't exist. A lot of the "greats" of hard SF never got that. (Forward, again, comes to mind.) I have a more charitable opinion of Egan than the OP does, to be sure, but I have a strong reaction to the notion that the human element of this should ever, ever be played down. Everything, ultimately, is about people. We miss that at our peril.

This is why most of Heinlein (the tail end of his career notwithstanding--we all know it gets weird, let it lie) still holds up so well despite so much of technology and society having changed in the interim. Even books that weren't trying to be hard SF (his juveniles, which IMO are some of his weakest books, tended towards this) had engineering and mathematical verisimilitude, but it was a concern set well behind the characters who had stuff to do and learn and grow through. (Most of the time. Lookin' at you, Red Planet.)

> The whiz-bang technology is wank

Egan is good because nothing in his books is "whiz-bang". He's not writing about turboencabulators or laser guns; he's writing about worlds in which nature itself is fundamentally different, and in a much more fulfilling way than you would find in a fantasy book (because you know Egan's worlds are at least as mathematically viable as our own).

I disagree that SF exists to say something about people. Authors like Egan use it to say something about the universe itself, which is a much more vast and beautiful topic than the everyday goings-on of humans. Perhaps your focus is too anthropocentric to enjoy it.

As I said, some readers don't care that much about "people stuff". Personally I do, but I also independently care about the sci/tech stuff, and "an engineering manual for something that doesn't exist" sounds really exciting to me. Hell, I spent better part of my youth writing such manuals for technology of Star Trek and some other sci-fi universes.

For example, I've been reading Weber's "Safehold" series recently. Sure, characters are interesting. But I'm as much - if not more - interested in how the characters solve problems within the constraints of the environment they live in. I love to read about politics, I love to learn about naval and ground warfare strategy, about how development of technology transforms the society (not individuals).

I believe both kinds of preferences deserve to be satisfied. But the "people stuff" is done by 99% of the books out there. So I don't see lack of character-focus as a valid criticism of the remaining 1%.

> I dunno, man. SF exists as a lens to say something about people...otherwise it's an engineering manual for something that doesn't exist.

I don't think you're appreciating how much other people's tastes differ from yours. I love to read an engineering manual for something that doesn't exist. That is exactly why I read Greg Egan books. The plot is a motivation to get me to think about physics, not vice versa.

> I dunno, man. SF exists as a lens to say something about people.

That sounds incredibly boring to me. Count me as one sci-fi fan who doesn't think about it that way at all.