Greg Egan

Here are some authors to try out instead, biased towards Science Fiction -

Greg Bear - Amazing science fiction author who builds incredible far future worlds. He is asking questions like "what will humanity be like 10k years in the future".

Charles Stross - First off, wonderful characters. His Laundry Files series is like "what is a 1990s geek, complete with a Palm Pilot, worked for a secret government agency that handles occult issues" but over time it gets deeper and the characters get really fleshed out. It is also awesome because you get to see technology move with the time, since the books take place concurrent with our technological progress, so technology like PDAs make way for smart phones.

Elizabeth Bear - Just all around great characters.

Greg Egan - Science Fiction but deeply rooted in real science and math, his homepage https://www.gregegan.net often dives deeper into the math behind his books and includes citations for further reading! Many of his books lack the "science fiction gadgetry" feel (although some have it) if you are trying to avoid that.

Cory Doctorow - He used to be huge in the open source community (not sure, maybe he still is?) his books all explore interesting social issues through the lens of technology driven change.

FWIW many people do not like Brandon Sanderson and I avoid recommending his books.

IMHO all of the above authors have good characters, Doctorow tends to write younger characters (early to mid 20s), but the rest focus on…

> I have read novels written by engineers. More often than not, they are unreadable. They fail to understand why people read (or write). They are an engineer's idea of what a novel should look like.

On the other hand: Greg Egan ([1], [2]) is a mathematician and novelist. His novels are sometimes considered to be barely readable (if you are not part of his audience). On the other hand: he does seem to understand why people read his novels - he knows his audience. :-D Readers praise his novels for the worldbuilding (though commonly the story is considered to the weaker side of many of his novels).

So I do imagine that such engineers who write novels perfectly know why people read - they just write for a different audience. :-)

[1] https://www.gregegan.net/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan

A related interesting problem is superpermutations [1]. This is the same problem that an anonymous 4chan poster helped bring some light to lower bounds on shortest superpatterns [2]. The Google group is worth a shout for their efforts [3].

Surprisingly, we only have optimal superpermutations for really low values on N [4].

I tried my hand at auto-generating symmetric patterns (which turn out to not be optimal after some value of N (6?)), but the problem is quite tough. Currently the best approaches appear to be achieved by using a TSP solver.

[1] https://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/Superpermutations/Superpermutations.html

[2] https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf

[3] https://groups.google.com/g/superpermutators

[4] https://github.com/superpermutators/superperm/tree/master/superpermutations

Funnily enough I went into it with a background in math and was surprised about one specific claim that I couldn't quite understand, and it turns out it was subtly incorrect in such a way that it actually adds an interesting twist to the story (Greg Egan acknowledged it). I can't quite find the web page with the discussion (ETA: found it, it's the addendum at the end of the FAQ about the book [0]) but it's about <spoilers>the Garden of Eden configuration of the automaton.</spoilers>

ETA: I realize this sounds nitpicky and stickler-y so I just want to point out that I loved the book (and Greg Egan's work in general) and figuring out the automaton stuff was genuinely some of the most fun I've had out of a book.

[0] https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html

I'll go in to plug the Clockwork Rocket series (Orthogonal and its sequels) and Incandescence, all of which have much more to do with physics and spacetime than Permutation City and short story collections like Instantiation (which I also love).

I think Incandescence is my favorite book of the physics set, but the Orthogonal books and their corresponding web notes [1] are an absolute tour de force of deriving a whole universe of physics from a tiny modification to the rules we're familiar with. It was wild to read those as a physics undergrad and still very cool to think about today.

[1] -https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html

Time to repost my favourite Greg Egan short, Crystal Nights:

https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html

“What created the only example of consciousness we know of?” Daniel asked.

“Evolution.”

“Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of variation more targeted.”

Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious, human-level AI?”

“Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to measure her words before speaking.

“With respect,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve thought that through.”