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.
Blindsight is his best book, but Watts has written a lot of great stuff, I recommend all of Rifters and, for something a bit different, especially the Sunflowers cycle.
You might want to read his blog [0] to get more insight into his character. I got the impression that the author is a great and likeable human being that became rather cynical due to his disillusionment with humanity.
Second this recommendation. Blindsight hits much harder and faster than Egan - and in my opinion the writing is much tighter. Similar focus on science-based idea exploration, particularly in regards to theories of consciousness, brain structure, probability, and vampires. If you like Egan I'd be shocked if you didn't like watts. He is one of the hidden gems of science fiction and an absolute gift to humanity.
Brilliant fan fiction that takes a few liberties, but it would be interesting to have The Thing's perspective if The Thing was made into a series. I think in the movies was just supposed to be cosmic horror who's only real goal was to survive by spreading. Communicating with it would be pointless, unlike in Watt's story, where you have a fundamental philosophical difference based on The Thing's understanding of biology, but you could at least have a meaningful conversation with it.
Maybe we read totally different books called "Blindsight" by Peter Watts because this sounds like a completely different experience than what I and most other readers have had.
The one with sort-of-vampires with epileptic effects triggered by corners, creatures capable of movement starting and completing in way their movement was not noticeable by human brain and curiously trusting people in way that ended in predictable bad ending?
Yeah the crucifix glitch is kind of silly though it does have an internally consistent explanation. I feel like maybe you didnt read the notes and references (complete with citations)? Because otherwise you would know this?
Was the ending actually bad? like badly written or bad for the characters? Personally I thought the ending was good. It felt inevitable and also positive. Humanity got to keep living and the main character reached some type of personal growth.
Anyway heres the section from the notes and references that you must not have read about the "creatures capable of movement - not noticeable by the human brain"
For example, the invisibility trick of that young, dumb scrambler— the one who restricted its movement to the gaps in Human vision— occured to me while reading about something called inattentional blindness. A Russian guy called Yarbus was the first to figure out the whole saccadal glitch in Human vision, back in the nineteen sixties15. Since then, a variety of researchers have made objects pop in and out of the visual field unnoticed, conducted conversations with hapless subjects who never realised that their conversational partner had changed halfway through the interview, and generally proven that the Human brain just fails to notice an awful lot of what's going on around it16, 17, 18. Check out the demos at the website of the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois19 and you'll see what I mean. This really is rather mind-blowing, people. There could be Scientologists walking among us right now and if they moved just right, we'd never even see them.
"bad ending" not as in "badly written" but as in "bad end" - bad things in general happen in fictional world and to this fictional characters (as opposed to "good ending" or "bittersweet ending").
Somebody will always say something like this on any thread anywhere on the internet about any sci-fi. I dont know whats so attractive about gatekeeping "hard scifi" but it must be satisfying since so many people feel compelled to do so.
Regardless Blindsight is a good book and definitely has interesting concepts and good writing throughout.
In all seriousness, I thought I had seen it in a list of "top hard sci-fi books" awhile back and a quick Kagi search seems to imply that a lot of people seem consider it hard sci-fi for whatever reason.
If you enjoyed Permutation City, you‘d probably also like „The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect“ by Roger Williams!
It explores a similar premise of a post-singularity future (though the mechanism is superintelligence rather than cellular automata/mind uploading), but rather than imagining exactly how we‘d get there, it tries to imagine what human flourishing would look like in a world of perfect abundance!
Oh, is that the one with the incredibly explicit, and incredibly unnecessary, sex based around the authors obsession with fucking dead bodies and fucking and impregnating his daughter?
I’m very far from a prude, but JFC. Its clearly the authors vehicle to play out his fantasies, masquerading as a scientific-fi novel.
Not sure we are talking about the same book here. It's certainly quite twisted, with people taking out death contracts that allow them to die painfully (but they are ressurected by the godlike AI every time). There's also torture and other unsavoury things.
To me, this was not unnecessary, but quite fundamental to the story. Everyone was trapped by the AI who would not let anyone come to harm without their permission anyway, and nobody could die. Various people tried to push back against these constraints in creative but disturbing ways.
I was going to post the final few pages of the book here as one example, but it’s way more graphic than I remembered, so I won’t.
But nothing at all was served by us reading about how deftly the main characters 13 year old daughter blew him until he was hard enough to ride. Or the main characters musings about their two (very underage) children having sex and how he was totally
ok with it. Or the long section about the wife urging him to impregnate his daughter. Or the other dozen weird-ass things in that chapter.
There’s several more examples like this in the book.
The author is not exactly the first to explore potential consequences of effective immortality, but they are one of the few who was seemingly unable to do it without repeatedly getting to multi-page, graphic, and violent, sex scenes.
Like, if one feels the need for that kind of thing, William S Burroughs and Tom Wolfe already beat that one to death decades ago.
As another example more relevant to this crowd, Altered Carbon covered the exact same subject matter, and did so without needing to write smut for teenage boys.
I confess I had forgotten the very end, where they are trying to rebuild the human race with a limited pool of people. It definitely did not need to be that graphic, although it is somewhat in keeping with the generally disturbing themes throughout.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed it as something very different to the usual sci fi fare.
I also liked Altered Carbon, although I found it read more like a hyper violent blockbuster action movie than a novel. Other than they both use ressurection as a plot device, they are very different stories. The violence in it I actually find more gratuitous than in Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
You could try his other writings, such as The Curators, which I just finished and can recommend. It has some sex in it but much more normal, and the violence is mostly abstract (like destroying a planet by teleporting it into its star). Available at his website http://localroger.com/ .
> Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good.
You could consider „Diaspora“ by the same author a good sequel a couple of thousands of years into the future where humanity is but a faint memory called „dream apes“ as living fossils in this story.
Have you read Gibson's "Sprawl" and "Bridge" trilogies? I read them > ten years ago and haven't read any sci-fi since, these books kinda put a subconscious "it does not get better, better diversify into other genres" attitude into my brain and personally I'm OK with that. Was reading a lot of sci-fi before that.
Excellent Sci-Fi yarn, with nostalgic references. I particularly liked the VAX-11 and LISP reference ("ideograms in a formal language full of parentheses")
Yeah, this book was incredible and the tech in it has aged extremely well. Have you tried any of Ted Chiang's books? They're also great hard sci-fi.
Another one that plays with similar ideas to Permutation City is the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor.
The only think I have read of Baxter is his short story Last Contact[1], but I still think about it very often. Reading the Xeele sequence is in my todo list.
If you can handle the science changing since publication in the 1930s(!!!) Olaf Stapledon is simply remarkable.
"Last and first men" is one of my favorite books for just how unique it is, but "star maker" has some interesting parallels
The Netflix version is a diluted version of a rough and angry book. The idea of consciousness executed in hardware is explored, including simulated torture in subjective slow time (possibly in one of the sequels: Broken Angels or Woken Furies).
I think they also changed the societal and cultural aspects quite a bit. In the book, everything was accepted and there were weren’t any “downtrodden.” The show changed all this with the meths being super billionaires and then there being lots of poor people. And the whole thing with the rebellion.
Book takashi was an envoy super spy person with immense training that stuck with him through sleeves. Tv takashi is like a rebel/terrorist who just got some training and has personality.
In the book, it was fruitless to fight against the government because what’s the point? The tv show seems to want to make a more simple rebels vs big brother.
Still cool, but I think changed the flavor quite a bit.
Second season, of course, is rubbish and I wouldn’t recommend watching it to anyone. It’s suspiciously horrible given how good the first was.
Not sure about "it was fruitless to fight against the government because what’s the point", a rebellion is a worthwhile thing in itself. "Make it personal" [1] is almost a call to arms.
Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good.