I've always been really disappointed in Egan's work. He's been praised to the stars, so my expectations were kind of high. But when I actually read his work, I found it to be pretty shallow and dry, with cardboard characters, like much hard scifi. He kind of reminds me of Vernor Vinge, for whom I'd also had high hopes, as both authors deal with the singularity a lot -- an idea I really find compelling. Unfortunately, I find their execution to be pretty weak, and even their ideas are mediocre.
I think a lot of sci-fi fans (myself included) don't pay much attention to that because, well, it's not why we read sci-fi. People are boring. Cool science and weird technologies and interplanetary-scale politics are fun. For every story you'd like to tell to make a character "deep", there's a whole genre dealing with it in real-world settings already. Troubled teenagers? Sure, there's a section on Amazon just for that. People in love? Every other book is about this. Etc.
I dunno, man. SF exists as a lens to say something about people. The whiz-bang technology is...I want to say "wank", but I don't mean it pejoratively. That stuff just doesn't mean much. I have great admiration for folks like Robert Forward as people, but...once you take away the technology, they're not saying much. It's potboiler stuff. And that's fine, but I look at that, and then I look at somebody like Spider Robinson, whose inclusion in Analog got Ben Bova no end of shitty emails, and...he's actually sayin' stuff. Like, you don't have to agree with it, but there's something, once you put the book down, that you can take away.
I don't care how hard your SF is: it is always and without exception about what technology does to people--otherwise it's an engineering manual for something that doesn't exist. A lot of the "greats" of hard SF never got that. (Forward, again, comes to mind.) I have a more charitable opinion of Egan than the OP does, to be sure, but I have a strong reaction to the notion that the human element of this should ever, ever be played down. Everything, ultimately, is about people. We miss that at our peril.
This is why most of Heinlein (the tail end of his career notwithstanding--we all know it gets weird, let it lie) still holds up so well despite so much of technology and society having changed in the interim. Even books that weren't trying to be hard SF (his juveniles, which IMO are some of his weakest books, tended towards this) had engineering and mathematical verisimilitude, but it was a concern set well behind the characters who had stuff to do and learn and grow through. (Most of the time. Lookin' at you, Red Planet.)
Egan is good because nothing in his books is "whiz-bang". He's not writing about turboencabulators or laser guns; he's writing about worlds in which nature itself is fundamentally different, and in a much more fulfilling way than you would find in a fantasy book (because you know Egan's worlds are at least as mathematically viable as our own).
I disagree that SF exists to say something about people. Authors like Egan use it to say something about the universe itself, which is a much more vast and beautiful topic than the everyday goings-on of humans. Perhaps your focus is too anthropocentric to enjoy it.
As I said, some readers don't care that much about "people stuff". Personally I do, but I also independently care about the sci/tech stuff, and "an engineering manual for something that doesn't exist" sounds really exciting to me. Hell, I spent better part of my youth writing such manuals for technology of Star Trek and some other sci-fi universes.
For example, I've been reading Weber's "Safehold" series recently. Sure, characters are interesting. But I'm as much - if not more - interested in how the characters solve problems within the constraints of the environment they live in. I love to read about politics, I love to learn about naval and ground warfare strategy, about how development of technology transforms the society (not individuals).
I believe both kinds of preferences deserve to be satisfied. But the "people stuff" is done by 99% of the books out there. So I don't see lack of character-focus as a valid criticism of the remaining 1%.
> I dunno, man. SF exists as a lens to say something about people...otherwise it's an engineering manual for something that doesn't exist.
I don't think you're appreciating how much other people's tastes differ from yours. I love to read an engineering manual for something that doesn't exist. That is exactly why I read Greg Egan books. The plot is a motivation to get me to think about physics, not vice versa.
In some sense, science fiction isn't really a genre. It's really more the lifting of certain restrictions that are in the other genres. You want alternate rules of physics, which is how Greg Egan rolls? Well, you're pretty much automatically in science fiction... even if the story you subsequently tell within those alternate rules of physics are an otherwise normal romance, or adventure, or whatever.
So whereas a when you read a western, you basically know everything about all the basics of the world, from the basic laws of physics through having a pretty decent idea of why "the Claytons would like to burn down the town" (despite having just those nine words, a genre-savvy Western reader has already got three or four basic plots in mind), and thus those things do not need to be explained, in science fiction you need at least some explanation of how the world is different.
Jamming that into a story pretty much has to come from somewhere else. Even in non-science fiction, seeing a novel perfectly balance Character, Plot, and Dialogue, to say nothing of the other elements of a story, is extremely unusual. I mean, like, award-winning unusual. Throw in the requirement that you have World Building in there and you'll generally have to pay the penalty somewhere else. It's just part of reading science fiction.
I can not recall if I first saw this argument from Niven or Asimov (or, worst case, one of the other classic writers); anyone who does please reference if you'd like. Unfortunately, my science fiction bookshelf is all meatspace and the indexing is terrible.
Honestly, that just sounds like an excuse for bad writing. There are science fiction authors who can do a good job at maintaining this balance. For me, Greg Egan just hasn't been one of them.
Yes, there are science fiction authors who do good characters. Lots of them, even.
However, I would ask you to consider how many of those stories take place in a literally different shape of space-time.
Not just lip service to vaguely handwaved "strange space-times" in the style of Lovecraft, either, but extensively realized alternate geometries that drive the story.
There's a reason you don't get all of these things at once. At least, I can't think of a story that hits all these points at once.
Btw, I'm not expecting you to change your mind about Egan's work. Even by the standards of science fiction, I'd consider him a niche taste. If he's not to yours, party on and enjoy what you want to. I'm just trying to explain his work.
Do you have, in mind, superior works that deal with similar concepts? I'm looking for new reading material & would appreciate more author/book recommendations.
If you like tales of the singularity and you haven't read it yet, try Charles Stross's Accelerando. It's a hell of a yarn and has no lack of character.
It's true Egan's characters are extremely dry with weak character development but that's the beside the point. The plot and the characters are just a facade on the exploration of new physics.
Snow Crash is a loving parody of the cyberpunk genre. Everything is way over the top. Every trope is turned up to 11. When you look at it that way, you'll see why it comes across as childish (and in many ways, it is).
I read Marooned in Real Time, and was disappointed, as with everything else I've read by him. By now, I think I've given both Vinge and Egan enough of a chance.
I'll check out Diamond Age, however, as I'm a fan of nanotech and am interested in how far scifi can push it.
