/lit/ - Literature

>>23043214
Death's End - Remembrance of Earth's Past #3 - Cixin Liu - (2010/2016)

Death's End begins with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE. That may seem odd, but its purpose is to set expectations that something may seem like magic, but it's not, because magic doesn't exist. It's simply a phenomenon inexplicable to us with our current level of understanding. The book then follows a different narrative than was presented in the second book, which was mainly about the Wallfacer Project. For this book it's the Staircase Program, though it's not followed as closely. Eventually it catches back up to right after the second book ended, though following a different character. From there on it goes far further into the future than you may expect, but that's the power of hibernation, time dilation, and even more advanced technologies. The scope of the series greatly increases as do the consequences of its decisions. Humanity faces their greatest challenges yet.

There's so much in this series that's done very well that raises it in my estimation. The future eras and the specific details that make up the world are wonderful, especially the space habitats. The scientific ideas are intriguing thought experiments and are detailed in fantastical ways. However, there's considerably more that drags it down to where it's frustrating, if not tortuous for me to read. It's not that I don't understand the perspective, or even at times think it's wrong given a specific set of circumstances. The problem is how unrelentingly heavyhanded it is about its social ideals. Seemingly almost every situation has the same problem and resolution, repeated over and over. Does society as a whole ever learn from what is considered to be their mistakes? No, no, they don't. What frustrates me the most is how much idiocy has to be allowed for plot reasons. That being said, I consider the character that was considered to be the stupidest and worst by many simply to be a scapegoat for ideological reasons.

Depending on personal preferences some may be annoyed that although there's explanations for a lot of what happens and why, the advanced technology may as well be magic for a lot of it, especially the further along in the book that it goes. Three fairy tales are also included that metaphorically explain science and I was surprised by their inclusion and their length. There's also a considerable number of events that occur because they need to, rather than having any plausible reason, but I found that to be far easier to accept than the idiocy.

Despite the numerous issues I have with this book, author, series, and otherwise, it does a lot of things that I enjoy, though I prefer how Greg Egan did them in his novels and short fiction. Overall I'm glad that Oepin had me finish the series. If nothing else, it provided a rather different perspective on human nature, societal limitations, and morality than what I'm used to.

Rating: 3.5/5

Phoresis - Greg Egan (2018)

Phoresis is another of Egan's extremely science based books. In this case the novella is told in three parts covering many generations, each representing a different phase of an epic feat of interplanetary engineering in the form of connecting two nearby planets. The speculation about engineering, physics, geology, and earth sciences is all that matters. It's to the point where all the characters are more or less interchangeable and probably only exist so that it isn't a sole character monologuing all the time. There's almost nothing at all besides the practical matters of their many lives long projects, so expecting anything other that would be a mistake.

I tried reading this before, though I wasn't able to get very far. It was a struggle to read this and it probably wasn't worthwhile for me personally, but I wanted to do anyway. Egan's more science based works are usually a miss for me. Even so, sometimes it's possible to get a weird sense of pleasure from just letting all the explanations wash over you. That wasn't so much the case here for me. I have no doubt that it's far more interesting for those who'd have a specific interest in the experiments detailed by the novella. Not every book is for every reader and several of Egan's are clear examples of that, yet I persist in trying even for those that clearly aren't for me.

As with some of Egan's other writings, starting with his first published work, how reproduction functions for the species of this book could be considered body horror in human terms. You might think the engineering project depicted on the cover might have something with the title, but that'd be wrong. It's their reproductive system that it's referring to. All the characters are female, in the sense that they're the ones who give birth. All the males, in the sense of that which impregnates, have separate bodies, and live inside the female for the duration of their lives and only emerge to procreate. To say that this species is sexually dimorphic is an extreme understatement. There's a single sex scene and what it made me imagine based on what was written was honestly horrific, and even more so based on what's later described.

I'd like to read everything Egan has written despite that being rather difficult for me due to there being some such as this. Yes, it's an arbitrary and irrational idea, and one that I don't know that I'll be able to do, though I want to try anyway. There's already been a few that I don't know if I'll ever go back to though. Even if I don't enjoy all of what Egan does, I appreciate that someone is writing stories like this. That's an abstract idea of questionable merit as well, especially considering when he's written other books of wider appeal, but I think a creative should do what they want. That's arguably not in the best interest of anyone, which may just be one of the costs of having unrestricted creative freedom.

Rating: 2/5

>>21811321
Leviathan Falls, The Expanse #9 - James S.A. Corey (2021)

Thus the series ended and my turmoil began. Usually I write about a book the day after reading it and I don't have any trouble doing so. Unfortunatey, this was a disappointing finale, though it's not anywhere near the worst conclusion I've experienced. This is a decent book, but it's a bad The Expanse book. Neither the plot nor the characters met my expectations, especially in terms of their consistency. It's the sort of development where I question whether there were extensive deviations or if I didn't ever understand the series for what it was. What bothers me the most is its reliance on Things Just Happen, which I didn't feel was the case in the previous books, regardless of whether it was.

A lot of cool stuff happened that I enjoyed and various ideas were played with that I thought were neat. The ones that I liked the most reminded me of Greg Egan's Luminous and the one that I despised and seemed to have direct references was Arthur C. Clarke's (antagonist's plans spoiler) <spoiler>Childhood's End</spoiler>. The problem was that I felt they were in the wrong series. Ideally for me, the protomolecule would've been only a plot device for allowing human expansion and played no further role than accomplishg that. I'd also have been fine with it going the opposite way to where it explored its ideas completely. This middle path wasn't satisfying and lacked commitment. The epilogue provided an answer to a question, but nothing else.

There were a lot of character viewpoints again, but I'm only interested in writing about two of them. Aliana Tanaka is a first time viewpoint though returning character. She's a mess, both as a person and a character. She's not the character I like the least, but I think she's possibly the least properly realized character in that she read like a plot-driven caricature. Holden regained his position of having the most chapters. The conclusion to his story is entirely in character and follows from the first book, but that's not how I wanted it to go. The worst offender though is what was done with Winston. I was entirely satisfied with how his story went in the previous book. What happened with him in this book was a travesty and I can't be convinced otherwise.

Whose story is The Expanse? After consulting a spreadsheet image someone made of all the viewpoint characters (43 by a maximal definition) and their chapters I went a bit further and calculated that Holden is 24% of the total chapters. I don't think the word count is substantially different than that, but I didn't check. Does having a quarter of the chapters and being the only viewpoint character to be in every book suffice? Yeah, it does for me, which I find to be somewhat surprising. Overall, I'm very pleased by this book series and I'm glad that I read it.

Rating: 3/5

>>20982423
Zendegi - Greg Egan (2010)

The most important thing to know coming into this, especially if you've only read Egan's most popular novels, is that you ought adjust your expectations. This is a small scale character focused novel where the scientific ideas serve more for the character's story than the other way around. There are two POVs. One is a 46 year old Australian male journalist and the other is an 25 year old Iranian female researcher whose mother fled with her from Iran. The first third from his perspective is a political thriller about an Iranian revolution in 2012 that overthrows the theocracy. From hers it's scientific research and trying to decide to the course of her life. The synopsis for this book leaked shortly before Egan went on a research trip to Iran and he was concerned that the government wouldn't look kindly on an author whose book included the overthrow of their government, but nothing came of it. The latter two thirds are a near-future speculative fiction character drama, which from his perspective have a focus on parenting, mortality, and social mores. From hers it's developing better proxies (NPCs) for Zendegi-ye-Behtar (Better Life), their spherical VR rigs and gaming platform, and the ethics involved with doing so.

At the end of the first chapter, a character tells the protagonist: "...if we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we’re standing right now, we’re going to trip and fall flat on our faces, over and over again." This is foreshadowing for the rest of the novel and a cautionary warning, which the book as a whole could be also considered as. There is considerable criticism leveled against various futurists, who aren't named, but two seem evident to me. Those two being Ray Kurzweil and his arguably religious reverence for the Singularity and Aubrey de Grey's supplement regimen.

There's a scene of a person buying a Salman Rushdie book in Farsi in Iran without any problems, which considering the recent attempted assassination of Rushdie by an Iranian, brought a different perspective of that scene for me. There are also extended VR scenes of historical fantasy, which I understood the purpose of, but even so, weren't really to my preference. There are a few, mostly superficial, similarities with the ongoing TV series Pantheon, which is based on some of Ken Liu's short fiction.

I've seen several write that the ending feels abrupt and unfinished, which is because it is, for the ideas at least. The story that Egan wanted to tell about the character's lives though seems finished though to me. Egan later wrote three stories for the ideas in Zendegi though, which are: Bit Players, 3-adica, and Instantiation. Even though this isn't what Egan usually writes, let alone what most of his readers may want, it was a worthwhile look at a near future that may have went for too much for naturalism, especially the arbitrary procession of life events.

Rating: 3.5/5

>>20784958
Instantiation - Greg Egan (2020)

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine (2017)
A social science fiction story set in the present day about the causes and effects of economic precarity as told through the everyday life of an average Australian family.
Enjoyable

Zero For Conduct (2013)
A story about chemistry and physics set in the present day. An Afghani girl whose parents were murdered lives with a relative in Iran. She's an industrious genius determined to make the most of her life. It would've been better if weren't essentially all set-up.
Ok

Uncanny Valley (2017)
The protagonist is a sideload, an embodied sentient AI that's a very fuzzy simulacrum of a specific human, hence the title. On top of that the original can choose not to transfer certain memories and traits, which causes selective amnesia in the sideload. Most of the story is the protagonist trying to determine which memories weren't transferred and why, so it reads as a SF mystery. The problems are that it continually undercuts its own findings and never quite finds the right tone that would resonate with the reader.
Meh

Seventh Sight (2014)
A twelve old boy with artificial retinas uses an app to reconfigure his trichromat eyes to allow him to become a heptachromat. The story explores what differences this could bring as it follows him through a couple decades of life. It also has a lot of metaphors.
Ok

The Nearest (2018)
This started as a police investigation and became a psychological horror story. It's the kind of story where I tried to view it as the protagonist did, but I failed. It was just too obvious to me what was going on, and I think that was intended. It made for an interesting case study, though I have a lot of doubts about it, but nothing more than that.
Ok

Shadow Flock (2014)
The protagonist is coerced by a shadowy organization to use her drone expertise to help with a heist of physical cryptowallets.
Meh

Oceanic - Greg Egan (2009)

Lost Continent (2008)
A teenager is smuggled out of his home universe that has been invaded by those from a future universe. He arrives in a future universe where everything is much better, but they strongly prefer not having any more refugees from war-torn universes. And so he waits in the refugee camp...and he waits.
Ok

Dark Integers (2007)
A sequel to Luminous. This one was a mathematical conspiracy thriller as well. Although a distinct narrative existed this time, it remained mostly infodump. Two of the story's ideas were that the same physical expression of an integer may qualitatively differ and that dark integers existed. A dark integer was analogous to dark matter. They're integers that had remained undetectable but may have constituted the majority of integers. What did that mean in practical terms? I haven't the slightest idea. The problems that were thought to have been resolved, weren't.
Ok

Crystal Nights (2008)
A billionaire wanted to create AI far greater than humanity that would in turn out of gratitude allow his own apotheosis. A world simulation was thus created. His attempts at being a benevolent creator almost immediately failed due to not being omnipotent. Ethics become irrelevant. Consequences occurred.
Enjoyable

Steve Fever (2007)
A non-sentient though goal-directed AI nanoswarm that temporarily commandeered human brains to suitable biological computation and physical presence compelled the protagonist to go to Atlanta.
Meh

Induction (2007)
A simple story of creating the means to travel light years as data and then doing so.
Ok

Singleton (2002)
Many-Worlds Interpretation is assumed to be true. That means that every possible action may be occurring in some other world. What if there was a Singleton though, an entity whose actions were always the same?
Enjoyable

Oracle (2000)
Singleton is the prequel to this story. A character travels back in time to a different world and teaches him all he needs to know to make technological breakthroughs well ahead of their time.
Ok

>>20420704
Luminous - Greg Egan (1998)

Chaff (1993)
The newest front of the drug war is a drug that alters the user's neurological function to where arbitrary stimulus can create any effect on sensory experience. A DEA agent who believes that consciousness is irrelevant and instinctual drives control everything is tasked with retrieving a biochemist, a traitor, from a massive bioengineered rain forest in the Amazon Lowlands.
Enjoyable

Mitochondrial Eve (1995)
A man in love with a woman reluctantly visited the local establishment of The Children of Eve, a genealogy obsessed ancestor worship cult of Mitochondrial Eve. Eventually he's tasked with scientifically proving that all humans descended from a single woman. I was rather amused by the politics of the story.
Enjoyable

Luminous (1995)
I'd describe this as a metaphysical mathematics conspiracy thriller. I have no doubt though that I would've enjoyed it more if I had more of a background in mathematics, but even so I enjoyed anyway, mostly in an abstract way. The infodump is the narrative - there's no meaningful difference between the two. The basic idea of the story is that all mathematical theorems must be tested by a physical system to be proven true or false. Mathematical Platonism is ridiculed. By doing so they realize that truth is locally defined and there are competing systems of mathematical logic that are in conflict. Then it gets weirder.
Enjoyable

Mister Volition (1995)
An impoverished man robs a wealthy man of a neural prosthetic, which he discovers is called PANDEMONIUM. Despite the ominous name and his need to sell it for money to pay for rent, he decides to use it for himself. It lives up to its name. Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus are explicitly mentioned and the narrative is based on their ideas, though the idea being explored is inspired by Minsky and Dennett.
Ok

Cocoon (1994)
A corporation develops a cocoon for fetuses with the stated purpose that harmful actions by the mother or environmental hazards don't affect their development. Their R&D laboratory is bombed and an investigator, seemingly all government services have been privatized, is hired to find the culprit. The primary idea here is the convergence of sexual politics and corporate greed.
Enjoyable

Transition Dreams (1993)
It's unclear how much, if any, of this is unreliable narration. Usually I'm at least indifferent to that, but in this case I didn't like it. If everything is accepted as presented in the story then this is about the dreams a consciousness has while being transferred from a biological body to an artificial body. Strangely, nothing interested me about it.
Meh

>>20301590
Learning to Be Me (1990)
A story about identity, consciousness, and mind uploading.
Highly Enjoyable

The Moat (1991)
An attack on anti-immigration racists and the ultra-wealthy who may be conspiring to create a genetically engineered master species which would be unable to reproduce with normal humans.
Ok

The Walk (1992)
A man is held at gunpoint. His murder is imminent. The murderer decides to engage him in a philosophical discussion about the meaning of life and existence.
Ok

The Cutie (1989)
Greg Egan's first published story. An obsession with having a baby leads to a male pregnancy and birth that becomes a horrific nightmare.
Enjoyable

Into Darkness (1992)
Some suspected alien technology changes the local physics of an area from being isotropic to radially anisotropic. In practical terms, this means any movement away from the core is lethal. The protagonist tries to rescue people by leading them towards the core, where they then wait for the effect to dissipate.
Ok

Appropriate Love (1991)
An insurance company wants to cut costs in a full body replacement procedure. His wife is coerced into carrying his brain in her womb for two years until the clone is an a viable state for transplantation.
Enjoyable

The Moral Virologist (1990)
A deranged religious virologist develops a virus that will kill all homosexuals and adulterers, which he defines as anyone who has ever had sex with more than one person. It will also kill anyone who gets blood on them from someone else. However, he's overlooked one critical issue. I laughed a lot because I read this as a tragicomedy. Maybe I shouldn't have, but I found it to be utterly hilarious in how ridiculously absurd it all was.
Highly Enjoyable

Closer (1992)
An exploration of sexuality, intimacy, and identity.
Highly Enjoyable

Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies (1992)
Ideology has become infectious and has formed ideological basins. Anyone who enters them becomes indoctrinated. There are still a few yet who remain in the center and have not fallen into ideology. But, perhaps there's no escape from ideology and they're unable to accept their own.
Ok

>>20294840
Axiomatic - Greg Egan (1995)

Most of the "Ok"s here are at the threshold of enjoyable, so it was almost the case that I enjoyed every story. Although Egan is known for Hard SF, several of these aren't. Quite a few are arguably horror stories as well. I couldn't have reasonably expected to have enjoyed myself more than I did. His ideas all are almost always interesting, but it's less often that they have enough substance outside of the idea itself for me to enjoy.

The Infinite Assassin (1991)
A relatively invariant assassin is to sent to kill those who create reality whirlpools, which is where an infinite number of realities swirl together. If this were represented visually, it'd be extremely surreal. What I assume to be the relevant mathematical concepts are presented, but I only understood the most basic aspects required to understand their relevance to the narrative.
Enjoyable

The Hundred Light-Year Diary (1992)
At birth every child receives a diary, provided that they wrote one, that chronicles their life as written by their future self. Are these absolute decrees? Can we trust who we will be in the future? Are there other unknown forces acting upon our lives?
Enjoyable

Eugene (1990)
The title is a play on words, as it's primarily about eugenics, but many other social issues are forcibly expounded upon as well.
Ok

The Caress (1990)
A crime investigation horror story about the titular chimera.
Ok

Blood Sisters (1991)
Biological warfare research goes awry and infects the world. This provides the backdrop for exploring the ethics of triple-blind medical trials.
Ok

Axiomatic (1990)
Beliefs can be bought and implanted. Anything you want to believe is possible. A cautionary tale about moral clarity.
Enjoyable

The Safe-Deposit Box (1990)
A man awakens every day as a different pre-existing man in the same city and almost the same exact age.
Enjoyable

Seeing (1995)
A man is shot in the head and has a brain lesion that forces him to view himself from a bird-eye view that feels like an out of body experience.
Ok

A Kidnapping (1995)
A kidnapper holds a questionably conscious digital reproduction of his wife hostage for ransom.
Ok

Ancillary Justice, Imperial Radch #1 - Ann Leckie (2013)

I chose this cover because it's far more relevant and accurate to what the book is about rather than its standard cover. This was a science fiction of manners. Apparently the following books only emphasize that more and more. I don't have any interest in authors such as Jane Austen or works like Downton Abbey. I'm glad that Leckie was able to write what she wanted in the latter books, because I felt there was a clash of intentions in this one. Although there was a clear revenge plot, it seemed to be a framework to allow everything else and perhaps for wider acceptance among science fiction readers. I wouldn't have minded this if I cared for the characters, but alas, my engagement with them was near zero. The primary antagonists were the Radch, which I can't help but read instead as Reich (Empire). Leckie stated that the Roman Empire was an inspiration, as it is for many fictional civilizations. There also were alien species who vary in power, but they're more of a background presence than anything else.

The science fiction concepts, particularly the importance of synchronization in distributed consciousness was an interesting and worthwhile one. It was somewhat like a thematic expansion of Greg Egan's "Learning To Be Me". The protagonist was a sentient AI housed in both artificial and organic bodies and had a full range of emotions. The first person viewpoint of a character who is in many bodies and places at once was handled well. Unfortunately, these ideas only served as consolation for my indifference towards almost everything else. Overall, this was more about emotion and aesthetic than anything else. I felt like I was reading an attempted creation of a mythos, which was an intriguing feeling, but I only felt what must have been the shadows of its full effect.

One oft repeated point of contention I've seen is how much focus there was on tea. There were 117 direct mentions of tea over the course of somewhat more than 300 pages. Another issue is how pronouns were used. I think there's too much fuss about both. The protagonist's use of "she" for everyone, except when doing so upset others, wasn't anything more than presenting a cultural trait. The Radchaai don't seem to correlate behavior with sex or gender at all. The non-Radchaai characters usually mentioned the sex of important characters at some point, though that could be easily missed without careful reading.

I've both rated and felt similarly about both this book and The Raven Tower, another novel by Leckie. As such, I won't be continuing this series and it seems unlikely that I'll read further works by her. This book's many awards and nominations are understandable, but are otherwise irrelevant to how I felt. It's increasingly clear that I'm not fond of anything that's "of manners", but some manage to be just worthwhile enough to read.

Rating: 2.5/5

>>19632069
Learning to Be Me - Greg Egan (1990)
A story about identity, consciousness, and mind uploading.
Highly Enjoyable

Kirinyaga - Mike Resnick (1988)
On a terraformed planetoid, a tribe is determined to retain traditional African culture in contravention of the Eutopian court. The problem is their ritual infanticide. They believe children born in certain ways are demons. This won the 1989 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. It was later included in Kirinyaga, the novel. The Wikipedia pages notes that "The book and its chapters are among the most honored in science fiction history with 67 awards and nominations including two Hugo Awards."
Ok

Cryptic - Jack McDevitt (1983)
Decades ago a SETI researcher hid away incomprehensible notes. A researcher discovers the notes and is determined to understand their meaning.
Enjoyable

I Still Call Australia Home - George Turner (1990)
A spacecraft left to find a new planet to inhabit. 600 years later, 30 subjective, they return to Earth. Earth has regressed. The protagonist is sent to learn how Earth has changed.
Ok

Light of Other Days - Bob Shaw (1966)
Glass has been developed that takes light years to pass through. It's become popular to have stored scenes play in a window. If only it had stuck to that. I may look at the novel this became. This felt like it had been written more recently than 1966.
Ok

Out of Copyright - Charles Sheffield (1989)
A family retains copyright over a relative's DNA for 75 years after their death. After that the combines are allowed to bid for a single-use copyrighted clone. Each clone is indoctrinated and has no legal rights. It's an interesting idea, but the story is lacking.
Ok

Gene Wars - Paul J. McAuley (1991)
Posthumans everywhere, but that's not the life for me, says the baseline human assassin. Based on this and previous works I've read, I just don't like how McAuley writes.
Blah

Down on the Truck Farm - Thomas A. Easton (1990)
This was more a surreal fantasy than SF. People drive inside huge animals. I'm amused when an editor includes their own story.
Blah

Caught in the Organ Draft - Robert Silverberg (1972)
The young are drafted to provide organs for the old. Anyone who provides an organ is given the highest priority to receive an organ later in life. The protagonist must choose whether to continue rebelling or give in to the system.
Enjoyable

The Newest Profession - Phyllis Gotlieb (1982)
Women are paid to be surrogates for genetically modified humans who will have no rights and be sent to colonize worlds unsuitable for humans to generate profits for corporations.
Meh

Legal Rights for Germs - Joe Patrouch (1977)
A satirical story about how concern for anybody is false and profit is all that matters.
Blah

>>17802288
Distress - Greg Egan (1995)
This is a science fiction mystery thriller concerned mostly with its core idea, though as with every other Egan novel I've read that idea is only teased until the climax. For this book that idea is The Theory of Everything and as with his other books it's eventually taken to its metaphysical extreme.
The protagonist is an investigative journalist who creates video documentaries that explore a single subject in-depth for SeeNet, which I thought was possibly a play on CNET, but probably isn't since it was founded the year prior to this book's publication. Most of the book is the protagonist investigating, interviewing, and being a tourist at a scientific conference on a man-made island. The island is governed by an informal system of anarchy, formal concepts and thinkers are explicitly derided.
I'm unable to tell whether this is the most personal novel Egan has written or if he thought it'd be interesting for characters and events to be as they are. Considering the thematic similarity in most of what I've read from him, I lean towards it being personal. A recurring issue is how relationships are handled. The protagonist's relationships continue to be troubled and disagreeable.
Egan provides many political opinions, which seem to be much more relevant today than when they were written. Two of the most prominent are ignorance and identity.
The Murdochs are called out by name as being the worst news publication, Fox News wouldn't even be founded until next year, and a leading promoter of the worst Ignorance Cults. Yes, in this book there are literally cults who worship being ignorant, though of course that isn't how they refer to themselves, let alone think of themselves.
A few of the characters are "asex", including one of the more important ones, though several other variations are presented. Whether they would be called suitable representation considering how fraught the issue has become is a different matter. The other issue of identity is whether it's allowable to voluntarily engage in brain damage to enhance one's life.
As with the other books I've read from him, I enjoyed the majority of the book quite thoroughly, but then when it reveals what it's truly about, I care less. The title is "Distress" and that's certainly how I felt about the disconnect between what I thought of the ending and how it was presented. I don't think it's a reasonable conclusion.
This was an enjoyable SF mystery thriller marred by an unreasonable and heavy-handed ending that tells you not to disagree with its conclusions.
Rating:4/5

>>17532906
Quarantine - Greg Egan (1992)
This begins as a private investigator novel and then eventually shifts into something else. In 2064 neurological modification is a commonplace commodity. However you want to be or feel can be determined by commercially available mods. They can also augment the user by altering biochemistry and providing digital interfaces.
The theoretical ideas expressed by the novel don't come to the fore until roughly halfway through, which seems an odd choice to me, but ironically I may have enjoyed the first half more. The various theories of quantum mechanics are the primary ideas explored. The core questions are what are the practical applications of self-decoherence and how much does free will really matter anyway?
If you thought that the name of the book would be its focus, you'd be wrong. The fact that a volume twice pluto's orbit has been enclosed, not just the Earth, is central to everything that happens in the book, but its significance isn't explained until the end and mostly serves as a plot device.
There's a lot that has been to be taken on faith, as it were, for both the reader and the characters, which Egan realizes and tries to defuse by having the characters repeatedly state that what they're doing isn't quantum mysticism, it's science. I'm very skeptical when retrocausality is used for why everything happens, because it's so very convenient and often unsatisfactory like deus ex machina are.
As seems typical so far of Egan, the ending and what leads up to it are where Egan decides that the theory must be taken to its extreme. I wasn't pleased because it reminded me of Lathe of Heaven by LeGuin, though in this case everyone can do so. It's messy, literally and figuratively.
Rating: 3.5/5

>>17357377
Permutation City - Greg Egan (1994)
As with most anything that Egan has written, this is all about the ideas. If that isn't sufficient, then you'll probably not find this to be sufficiently enjoyable. The central idea, Dust Theory, can't be reasonably described as anything other than insane, and almost every character treats it as such. Readers who are dismissive and/or contemptuous of it and the other ideas in the story may find this book a tough and unproductive slog. Although there are a few viewpoint characters they're all still about their own ideas.

This is a novel in two parts, which in effect reads like a novel followed by a novella. The first part is entirely self-contained, but if you read only that, then it becomes an entirely different work, which is interesting by itself. As a result, it'd be possible to read the second part by itself as well, but that would be ridiculous. Based on the reviews I read, a significant number of people would've preferred that entire novel was written in the style of the second part, but I disagree.

The book begins with existential computation experiments and then goes to organic chemistry simulations, so after you've read those you'll have a general idea what rest of the book will be like. You may find that you'll enjoy that more than it sounds like. The only way to know for sure is to try it out, maybe more than once if it doesn't work the first time.

There are philosophical and religious arguments, though sometimes the difference between them can be difficult to tell, despite Egan being a professed atheist. Each character has their own arguments for how life ought to be lived and what matters in it. I found myself agreeing with some and entirely rejecting others, but enjoyed reading about them regardless of how I felt about the arguments.

Our current year is catching up to some technological mentions in the book, which perhaps is only to be expected with technological optimism. The 2020 mention has come and gone and next is the 2024 mention of "ran a fully conscious copy of himself in a crude Virtual Reality" which doesn't seem likely. Most of the book takes place in the mid 2040s and early 2050s. When those years come, I wonder if the book will be looked upon as quaint like those from mid-20th century often are. The years are merely anchors for the ideas of an age.

It's difficult to express what specifically I enjoyed. Maybe it's simply that the book describes going through the process of an insane idea that has to be taken on faith step-by-step. Once I settled into reading it, I was completely absorbed. Permutation City will remain among the top novels that I enjoyed reading this year.
Rating: 5/5

>>17020298
Perihelion Summer - Greg Egan (2020)

I haven't read nearly enough Egan to know for sure, but his recent works seem considerably different from his early work, but that's to be expected. A lot can change for someone over the course of their life.
The odd thing about this short novel is that the hard sf isn't so much about the idea as it is a reason to explore how the characters react to the changes that occur.
The novel begins with Earth being concerned whether a black hole will pass close enough to destroy all life or not, which you might think that's what this novel is about. It isn't. The black hole is only there to set up the premise and nothing more. The novel is about WHAT IF THE WORST EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE HAPPENED TODAY!? YES, TODAY! NOT DECADES FROM NOW! NO! TODAY! YOU AREN'T PREPARED! ALMOST NONE OF US ARE! NEARLY THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE WORLD IS GOING TO DIE WITHIN YEARS! YET YOU SCORN US AND REFUSE TO BELIEVE THE LOOMING CATASTROPHE IS REAL, LET ALONE IMMINENT! is probably what Egan is going for, but the characters and story itself are much more detached and resigned than that. Considering that Egan lives in Australia, this may be especially personal and relevant to him as their federal government has arguably the worst climate policies and the country has the highest emissions per capita of any developed country.
Unfortunately, I couldn't have cared less about any of the characters. I think the only people would be interested in reading this is those who want a very staid, stolid, and mundane, and look at daily life in a peri-apocalyptic world. The vast majority involves seasteading as staying in the same place for the entire year on land is a death sentence for almost anyone.
There are more contemporary pop culture references than you may expect, such as...REDDIT! WE DID IT AGAIN! This is no means the first time Egan has used Reddit in his stories. Yes, 4chan has been referenced before as well.

Excerpts:
"I'll feel bad for not feeding my family sleeping pills and dragging them out here against their will."
"The Ghost of Climate Future to shake us up before it's too late!"

Rating: 2/5

The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred - Greg Egan (2016)
This was unlike anything else by Egan that I've read. It's about politics and little else. The two primary issues are discrimination and refugees, though several other issues are are present to varying degrees. There are many indictments against the perceived failures of their government, which doesn't take much of a stretch to relate them to existing governments. There are also ethical dilemmas presented, though at this point the trolley problem doesn't mean much to me, but its inclusion seems to have affected others quite a bit. Personally, I think in this case it would have been better to destroy the metaphorical train and avoid the problem altogether, though that quite possibly present a far greater problem. The best option would have been for the train to never have been built, but that's far more difficult proposition.
Rating: 3.5/5, rounded down.

>>16637103
Diaspora - Greg Egan (1997)
Multiple people of similar taste assured me this was a masterpiece and that I ought to give it another chance.

How much you'll be able to enjoy this may depend how much tolerance you have for scientific explanation and discussion as a primary mode of exposition. It may be almost as important that you are to appreciate that which you may not understand, as there are many mathematical and physics concepts presented that seem to assume that the reader has at least some familiarity with them. As this book is almost exclusively concerned with ideas and theorizing to the exclusion of almost all else, I strongly caution anyone to temper their expectations if they would think to read it for anything else other than that.

Various perspective are followed and they are all important and have their roles to play that no other character would be able to do. There is a character that could be called the protagonist but I don't believe that would be accurate. The plot, setting, and everything exists to provide a narrative framework for the ideas.

It's difficult for me to tell how much of this should be interpreted religiously or as a general warning against worship of anything other than the fundamental truths of the universe, namely math, physics and similar. The initial perspective character has an immaculate conception and several of the characters have religiously themed names. However, religion is also explicitly described by a main character as being something to have been long since forsaken by even the most primitive conservatives.

It has a lot of great ideas that were at the forefront of his time, some of which have become realized in minor ways. Unfortunately this is mired in the science which decreases its level of accessibility. This could have been major hit and bestseller if done differently, but I don't think that's ever what Egan had gone for, but I could be wrong. For some it's better to entirely satisfy relatively few than to satiate many. I wouldn't include myself in that entirely satisfied.

Overall I'd classify this as a work of intellectual masturbation. It starts off slow and slowly increases tempo over time trying to last a long time, but eventually all restraint is lost and it's going at it as quickly as possible. Orgasm is reached and one begins to wonder with one's post-orgasmic insight why one had done any of it all and resumes what one was doing beforehand.

I'll get around to reading more of his novels.
Rating: 4/5