Diaspora by Greg Egan is one of the most amazing books I've ever read, in terms of the ideas it explores. A serious treatment of the future where humans' minds are scanned into machines: what senses do you have in a virtual world? How do you spend your time when you want for nothing? What do love and reproduction mean? Space exploration when you slow your subject day to a solar year. Wonderful, beautiful, and mind-bending.
It used to be hard to find, but these days it seems to be available [edit: at least digitally] (ebook, audio) from the retailers you'd expect.
It's not a "change your outlook on life" kind of book, but as a science fiction exploration of humanity's distant "singularity" future, set in 2975, it was the best I've read. (I would appreciate references to any other books on those topics - I haven't found many.)
I have to second this. It took me years to thoroughly grasp some of its parts (and I have a math background) but Diaspora is without a doubt my favorite book of fiction.
The first chapter of the novel is particularly approachable & worthwhile. It's titled Orphanogenesis and is a beautiful, detailed (~30 page) account of the digital birth of a new AI consciousness, from embryo to newborn to gaining self-awareness.
Next year several Greg Egan's books will be reprinted. Diaspora comes out January 6, 2015!
If you want a softer approach to Egan's fiction, check out his short stories. Reasons to be Cheerful is my favorite one as well as Egan's. It's part of the Luminous collection, available as a $3 kindle ebook:
Same here. It profoundly widened my ideas on the universe and how to deal conceptually with its immensity in time and space. It's a beautiful story.
His other books have been so-so, but his short stories are the hardest science fiction around. Nobody else has explored ideas of quantum mechanics intersecting with biology and humanity like he has. I think "Axiomatic" is a good set of them.
> how to deal conceptually with its immensity in time and space
Yes! Dimensions (not even the most objective, physical ones) are not absolutes but subject to changing, creative interpretation through the abilities of our tech.
Compare the meaning of a meter when squirming vs walking vs cycling vs driving vs flying... Modern computing makes a mockery of our past capabilities for information processing / storage / transmission.
Put another way, "there is no bad or good weather, only different gear requirements."
Same goes for everything, not only distance & information, but also scale, temperature, calories, food, output, wealth, energy, users, complexity, manufacturing effort, ... and time! Both time as speed (how much happens in a certain period) and time as something to traverse (need to wait for a result for decades or centuries). With Diaspora & Permutation City I first learned to imagine a future where we could treat centuries with the same amused detachment with which we now treat intercontinental distances as we jet over the oceans.
Disclaimer: I've read and enjoyed most of his books and short stories, but Egan's not for everyone. He favors ideas and world-building over characters and storytelling.
I most like Egan when he avoids math and goes to a dark, cynical place. His short story The Extra[1] is probably the best example. If you like The Extra, you'll probably enjoy Blindsight by Peter Watts[2]. Some of the late Ian M. Banks titles fit as well: Against a Dark Background and Matter are both grim, somewhat hard sci-fi.
If you're a fan of Greg Egan, you'll likely enjoy Ted Chiang[3]. He doesn't write much, but he writes well.
My God, but "Story of Your Life" is a marvellous story. I'm not sure that it's the intended effect, but I read it at a very stressful time in my life, and it had a marvellously calming effect.
Both "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (not science fiction at all) and "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" were fine, but, for me, nothing touches the shock of reading that first story.
(I think that perhaps the greatest recommendation that I can give for Chiang is to say that, for a long time, I remembered "The Infinite Assassin" as being his story.)
I'm reading Schild's Ladder atm, wherein the fictional Quantum Graph Theory plays a large role. This is the first paragraph:
In the beginning was a graph, more like diamond than graphite. Every node in this graph was tetravalent: connected by four edges to four other nodes. By a count of edges, the shortest path from any node back to itself was a loop six edges long. Every node belonged to twenty-four such loops, as well as forty-eight loops eight edges long, and four hundred and eighty that were ten edges long. The edges had no length or shape, the nodes no position; the graph consisted only of the fact that some nodes were connected to others. This pattern of connections, repeated endlessly, was all there was.
If you've not read any of Greg Egan's books this is your lucky day - an incredible writer to discover! His books have an unusually high ideas/page ratio, and are very readable.
I've had friends mention that they liked Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon", except for the lengthy digressions into mathematics. One day, I'll get mad at them, and get revenge by suggesting an Egan novel.
That's funny: the only thing I usually like about Neal Stephenson books are the digressions into nonfictional material. Everything else is just a needless exercise in people being shitty to one-another and Stephenson re-announcing his belief in '90s-era "hacker" ideologies.
2/3 way through Incandescence (first GE book I've read). Not disappointed. Was on the hunt for Stephenson equivalent in brilliance of writing, but with slightly more hard science. Wow...
I liked Eternal Flame and Clockwork Rocket, they are an interesting exploration of the possibility that the Time is an actual spatial dimension orthogonal to the other three spatial ones.
http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html
It used to be hard to find, but these days it seems to be available [edit: at least digitally] (ebook, audio) from the retailers you'd expect.
It's not a "change your outlook on life" kind of book, but as a science fiction exploration of humanity's distant "singularity" future, set in 2975, it was the best I've read. (I would appreciate references to any other books on those topics - I haven't found many.)