Luminous
Greg Egan is the author of some of the most surprising and intuitive short fictions in the genre. His stories range from near future predictions to far future, far space improvisations and this new collection of ten stories includes 'The Planck Dive', Transition Dreams', 'Our Lady of Chernobyl', 'Cocoon' and the title store 'Luminous'.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
20mentions
17people
2008–2026years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- That earring story, as some commenters pointed out, is an alternate version of Greg Egan's short story "learning to be me", now easily found in one of his short story compilations. If you haven't yet read Axiomatic as well as Luminous, I highly recommend both.
- Also read Greg Egan's short story Luminous :)
- Seconding this, Greg Egan is one of the best of all time.
The short stories "Luminous" and "Dark Integers", the novels "Diaspora" and "Schild's Ladder". So good.
qntm (another author) hits somewhat similarly.
- Big Fan of Egan's short stories. I feel like they are his strongest work and maybe because they can lean more on ideas. Luminous about math grad students discovering some secrets in math is pretty great.
Wang's Carpets which became Diaspora is mind blowing.
Zendegi is an interesting novel by him I never see anyone mention. I enjoyed it and the characters are a bit more developed. It also has a Eliezer Yudkowsky stand in as the big bad guy i seem to recall. Which made me chuckle.
- Egan's short stories are great. Luminous is an excellent collection. I've never been huge fan of his long form novels, and will remember forever the sex scene in one of them that ends with a cramped testicle. Why Greg, why?
- "Luminous" was what got me hooked on Greg Egan.
Of his recent fiction, I enjoyed "Zeitgeber" [1] and "The Nearest" [2]. I found the latter to be an interesting exploration of what happens when you suddenly discover that you don't recognize your loved ones as human.
