Greg Egan


Greg Egan is an Australian science fiction writer and amateur 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 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 2018, Egan described a construction of superpermutations, thus giving an upper bound to their length. On 27 February 2019, using ideas developed by Robin Houston and others, Egan produced a superpermutation of n = 7 symbols of length 5906, breaking previous records.

Personal life

As of 2015, Egan lives in Perth. Egan 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 represented photos of other people with the same name as those of the writer.

Awards

Egan is a multiple Seiun Award winner.
Teranesia was named the winner of the 2000 Ditmar Award for best novel, but Egan declined the award.

Works

Novels

Axiomatic,
Our Lady of Chernobyl,
Luminous,
Dark Integers and Other Stories,
Crystal Nights and Other Stories,
Oceanic,
The Best of Greg Egan,
Instantiation

Other short fiction

Excerpted

The production of a short film inspired by the story "Axiomatic" commenced in 2015, and the film was released online in October 2017.