Greg Egan (born 20 August 1961) is an Australian science fiction writer and mathematician, best known for his works of hard science fiction. Egan has won multiple awards including the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Award.
Life and work Egan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the University of Western Australia. He published his first work in 1983. He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind uploading, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism to religion. He often deals with complex technical material, like new physics and epistemology. He is a Hugo Award winner (with eight other works shortlisted for the Hugos) and has also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. His early stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror. Egan's short stories have been published in a variety of genre magazines, including regular appearances in Interzone and Asimov's Science Fiction.
Mathematics In 2002, Egan co-authored two papers about Riemannian 10j symbols, spin networks appearing in Riemannian quantum gravity, together with John Baez and Dan Christensen. Spin networks also play a central role in his novel Schild's Ladder released the same year. In 2014, Egan conjectured a generalization of the Grace–Danielsson inequality about the relation of the radii of two spheres and the distance of their respective centres to fit a simplex between them to also hold in higher dimensions, which later became known as the Egan conjecture. A proof of the inequality being sufficient was published by him in 2014 under a blog post of John Baez. They were lost due to a rearrangement of the website, but the central parts were copied into the original blog post. Further comments by Greg Egan on 16 April 2018 concern the search for a generalized conjecture involving ellipsoids. A proof of the inequality also being necessary was published by Sergei Drozdov on 16 October 2023 on ArXiv. In 2018, Egan described a construction of superpermutations, thus giving an upper bound to their minimum length. On 27 February 2019, using ideas developed by Robin Houston and others, Egan produced a superpermutation of seven symbols of length 5906, breaking previous records.
Personal life As of 2015, Egan lives in Perth. He is a vegetarian and an atheist. Egan does not attend science fiction conventions, does not sign books, and has stated that he appears in no photographs on the web, though both SF fan sites and Google Search have at times mistakenly identified him as the subject of photos of other people with the same name.
Awards Egan's work has won the Japanese Seiun Award for best translated fiction nine times. Teranesia was named the winner of the 2000 Ditmar Award for best novel, but Egan declined the award.
Works
Novels An Unusual Angle (1983), ISBN 0-909106-12-6 Quarantine (1992), ISBN 0-7126-9870-1 Permutation City (1994), ISBN 1-85798-174-X Distress (1995), ISBN 1-85798-286-X Diaspora (1997), ISBN 1-85798-438-2 Teranesia (1999), ISBN 0-575-06854-X Schild's Ladder (2002), ISBN 0-575-07068-4 Incandescence (2008), ISBN 978-1-59780-128-7 Zendegi (2010), ISBN 978-1-59780-174-4 Dichronauts (2017), ISBN 978-1597808927 Perihelion Summer (2019), ISBN 978-1-250-31378-2 The Book of All Skies (2021), ISBN 978-1-922240-38-5 Scale (2023), ISBN 978-1-922240-44-6 Morphotrophic (2024), ISBN 978-1-922240-51-4
Orthogonal trilogy
The Clockwork Rocket (2011), ISBN 978-1-59780-227-7 The Eternal Flame (2012), ISBN 978-1-59780-293-2 The Arrows of Time (2013), ISBN 978-0-575-10576-8
Collections Axiomatic (1995), ISBN 1-85798-281-9
Our Lady of Chernobyl (1995), ISBN 0-646-23230-4
Luminous (1998), ISBN 1-85798-551-6
Dark Integers and Other Stories (2008), ISBN 978-1-59606-155-2
Crystal Nights and Other Stories (2009), ISBN 978-1-59606-240-5
Oceanic (2009), ISBN 978-0-575-08652-4
The Best of Greg Egan (2019), ISBN 978-1-59606-942-8
Instantiation (2020), ISBN 978-1-922240-39-2
Sleep and the Soul (2023), ISBN 978-1-922240-47-7
Phoresis and Other Journeys (2023), ISBN 978-1-922240-50-7
Other short fiction
Excerpted Diaspora: "Orphanogenesis" in Interzone issue 123, September 1997
Academic papers An Efficient Algorithm for the Riemannian 10j Symbols by Dan Christensen and Greg Egan Asymptotics of 10j Symbols by John Baez, Dan Christensen and Greg Egan Conic-Helical Orbits of Planets around Binary Stars do not Exist by Greg Egan
Short movies The production of a short film inspired by the story "Axiomatic" commenced in 2015, and the film was released online in October 2017.
Notes
References
External links
Official website Greg Egan at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database Greg Egan at Library of Congress Authorities – with 11 catalogue records Stories currently online at Free Speculative Fiction Online
