1. greg egan in the '90s absolutely fucking hates religion, spirituality, all humanities subjects and the people who study them, with an intensity i find jarring. i guess this might've made more sense during the height of the atheism wars but it strikes me as ridiculous now
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possibly ironically, the characters in his '90s short stories are constantly grappling with - they wouldn't use this language, but the death of god, nihilism, the question of where meaning comes from in a universe where physics is the only true law
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his characters ask themselves: if people are just particles obeying the schrodinger equation then what does it matter whether i treat them one way or another? several characters almost explicitly conclude that it doesn't matter (e.g. in The Vat) but pull back at the last second
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it's a little difficult to tell to what extent greg egan as an author is agreeing with the words he's putting in his main character's mouths, but the frothing hatred of the humanities and the worshipping of physics as practically a religion is extremely consistent between stories
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i think you could actually argue that a bunch of these stories are about what called "stage 4.5 nihilistic depression," the gap between kegan stages 4 and 5 a certain kind of STEM-worshipping person can fall into
metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-
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2. at least in Axiomatic there's a consistent trend of men in relationships with women who are, to my mind, bizarrely cold and unempathetic, and i just have no idea what's going on here or what point he's trying to make. i wonder if greg was going through something 😬
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3. greg egan does this cool thing i've seen few other authors do (only borges and ted chiang?) of taking some very abstract idea from mathematics or physics and managing to make it the basis of a story with real dramatic tension. i would love to learn how to do this
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after all i know a lot of very abstract ideas from mathematics and physics and it would be nice to finally get some use out of them 😛
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4a. several of his near-future stories feature teenagers getting radical body modifications in this very cyberpunk way; as a prediction i don't think this panned out at all. not a single new form of body modification has become popular in my lifetime that i can think of
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I think back in the 90s many of us imagined there was a biotech revolution coming comparable with the computer revolution. Seems we were wrong.
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i was too young then to have any sense of this but that would explain some things!