Happy birthday Greg Egan!

Greg Egan was born on August 20, 1961, in Perth, Australia.

Greg Egan studied at the University of Western Australia, where he graduated in mathematics. He began his career as a writer in 1983 but his first novel – “An Unusual Angle” – was not science fiction but fantasy.

In the ’80s Greg Egan wrote several science fiction and fantasy stories then he specialized in science fiction and published his first novel of this genre, “Quarantine”, in 1992.

Greg Egan isn’t a prolific writer and so far has written only a few more novels: the winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award “Permutation City” (1994), “Distress” (1995), “Diaspora” (1997), “Teranesia” (1999), “Schild’s Ladder” (2002), “Incandescence” (2008), “Zendegi” (2010) and “Orthogonal: Book One: the Clockwork Rocket” (2011).

His magnificent novella “Oceanic” (1998) won the Hugo Award, Locus Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award.

Greg Egan is perhaps the “hardest” author in the world of science fiction. His speculations in physics, biology and artificial intelligence reach levels more extreme than almost all other writers. However, even when his stories unfold through millennia and thousands of light years and are set in a distant future they maintain a consistency in their scientific component, extrapolated from today’s most advanced knowledge.

In some ways Greg Egan has reinvented the “super-science” stories of the ’30s. However, he gives them a much more accurate scientific background and develops those elements in a manner quite different from that sometimes naive of the authors of the past. For Egan technological progress doesn’t automatically lead to prosperity for people, on the other hand the writer isn’t a catastrophist who sees potential disasters in every new technology.

Despite the heavy scientific and technological background of his novels, over the years Greg Egan has developed his characters better and better. This is useful to explore the problem of the nature of consciousness and its possible transfer into computers or robotic bodies.

Greg Egan is a very private person so he doesn’t go to science fiction conventions or meetings in which authors sign their novels to the people who buy them. There are no public photographs of him: occasionally someone claims to have found a picture of him on the Internet but so far it was someone with the same name. It seems that Greg Egan is a common name in the Anglo-Saxon world so it’s easy for a fan with too much enthusiasm to get confused.

The latest novel by Greg Egan is the first of a trilogy: it could be an opportunity for him to be a little more prolific.

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