Battle of the Gregs
Posted: Tue Dec 27, 2005 4:41 am
Which one is the greatest science fiction author?Me, I recently read Darwin's Radio by Bear and found it lacking. It seemed like a bit of a tragic case - the main idea (spoiler in rot13: Angher nf na vagryyvtrag pbzchgre, cbffvoyl rira bar jvgu npghny qrfverf naq tbnyf, gung qrfvtaf arj fcrpvrf. Gur pbzchgre hfrf whax QAN sbe vgf zrzbel) is too preposterous to be presented in a short story, but it seemed to me that everything in the book aside said idea was just clunky narrative, strange side stories about mass murders in Eastern Bloc countries that I didn't understand at all, lectures on biology, and the obligatory love story.My favourite of these is... Egan, I think. The scientific premise in Permutation City, the last novel I read by him, is even less plausible than that in Darwin's Radio, and I'm not surprised why so many people say they didn't understand at all... but it's full of other good ideas like the Autoverse. The first chapter with its depiction of life in a small simulated world that's designed to run with only the most necessary computations is already a pleasure to read, and the rest of the novel is... pretty good, too.Cox and Keyes here are "filler" competitors, picked from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci...on_authors and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat...on_writers since they seem like they might actually be popular in the US. I've never heard of either guy. BearBenfordCoxEganKeyesShow results The league of sadistic telepaths: "There's someone in your head and it's not you"