Greg Egan - Hard SciFi to the nth

A plug for the latest Egan novel I've read. Incandescence is about:

A million years from now, the galaxy is divided between the vast, cooperative meta-civilisation known as the Amalgam, and the silent occupiers of the galactic core known as the Aloof. The Aloof have long rejected all attempts by the Amalgam to enter their territory, but have permitted travellers to take a perilous ride as unencrypted data in their communications network, providing a short-cut across the galaxy's central bulge. When Rakesh encounters a traveller, Lahl, who claims she was woken by the Aloof on such a journey and shown a meteor full of traces of DNA, he accepts her challenge to try to find the uncharted world deep in the Aloof's territory from which the meteor originated.

Greg fuses some intriguing math and physics in his stories, even as he develops characters that you care about. A very rare set of gifts.

His web site offers supplemental information for his novels, which I think is very cool.

If humanity survives and evolves, Egan's vision of its future seems to me to be a very probable outcome. Traveling through the galaxy in data form, leaving backups along the way, becoming embodied when and where and how you choose...what's not to like?

Greg Egan