/lit/ - Literature

>>20785535
Bit Players (2014)
This is surely the funniest work I've read from Egan. If you take this seriously, you're doing it wrong. It's clearly intended to be a parody. The title is quite the versatile bit of wordplay. I searched a bit and found the assumed author and the work it's parodying and why. It's about speculative physics, but the speculation is mostly irrelevant because the world doesn't have to conform to them. It also has various other amusing ideas, like a book to VR world converter. If this were a light novel I'd name it: "I was reincarnated in a VR kusoge that has nonsensical physics and the devs expected me to be an NPC, but I only cared about doing experimental isekai physics!" That may seem like an absurd title, but it isn't relative to light novel naming conventions.
Enjoyable

Break My Fall (2014)
The transit between Earth and Mars involves slingshotting from stepping stone to stepping stone. It doesn't always work out well, but difficulties can be overcome. This would be neat to see visually.
Ok

3-adica (2018)
This is a continuation of Bit Players. The new world is stated to be a mash-up of works from Doyle, Dickens, Stoker, Stevenson, and Shelley. Their goal is to use a GPU exploit involving color values and graphical glitches to transition to the world of 3-adica, which is based on the principles of 3-adic numbers. An accurate visual representation of that world be mind-boggling at the very least. I still found this to be rather amusing. Egan wrote an essay about the math involved, but it certainly isn't required to enjoy this, and I'm not going to pretend that I understood it on anything more than the most superficial level.
The essay: https://fromearthtothestars.com/2018/09/05/inside-3-adica/
Enjoyable

The Slipway (2019)
A surprisingly beautiful story about the nature and process of science. A cosmic event being momentous and unknown doesn't inherently make it frightening, let alone disastrous. Sometimes what we think changes everything doesn't have any practical significance at all. Those who focus solely on the technical aspects of this story are missing out on a lot.
Enjoyable

Instantiation (2019)
The third story after 3-adica. It's interesting in how these worlds are composites of various works and the characters are composites that this story itself would read like a composite of Egan's own work. The real world VR hardware is much more similar to Ready Player One than Sword Art Online.
Enjoyable