Greg Egan (born 20 August 1961) is an Australian science fiction writer and mathematician, best known for his works of hard science fiction.
Egan has won multiple awards including the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Award.
Egan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Western Australia.
1983
He published his first work in 1983.
He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness.
Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind uploading, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism to religion.
He often deals with complex technical material, like new physics and epistemology.
He is a Hugo Award winner (with eight other works shortlisted for the Hugos) and has also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
His early stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror.
Egan's short stories have been published in a variety of genre magazines, including regular appearances in Interzone and Asimov's Science Fiction.
1989
• The Cutie (1989)
1990
• Eugene (1990)
• The Caress (1990)
• Axiomatic (1990)
• The Safe-Deposit Box (1990)
• Learning to Be Me (1990)
• The Moral Virologist (1990)
1991
• The Infinite Assassin (1991)
• Blood Sisters (1991)
• The Moat (1991)
• Appropriate Love (1991)
1992
• The Hundred Light-Year Diary (1992)
• The Walk (1992)
• Into Darkness (1992)
• Closer (1992)
• Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies (1992)
1995
Axiomatic (1995), ISBN 1-85798-281-9
• Seeing (1995)
• A Kidnapping (1995)
Our Lady of Chernobyl (1995), ISBN 0-646-23230-4
2000
Teranesia was named the winner of the 2000 Ditmar Award for best novel, but Egan declined the award.
2014
In 2014, Egan conjectured a generalization of the Grace–Danielsson Inequality about the relation of the radii of two spheres and the distance of their respective centres to fit a simplex between them to also hold in higher dimensions, which later became known as the Egan conjecture.
2015
As of 2015, Egan lives in Perth.
He is a vegetarian and an atheist.
Egan does not attend science fiction conventions, does not sign books, and has stated that he appears in no photographs on the web, though both SF fan sites and Google Search have at times mistakenly represented photos of other people with the same name as those of the writer.
Egan's work has won the Japanese Seiun Award for best translated fiction seven times.
2018
A proof of the inequality being sufficient was published by him on 16 April 2018 under a blog post of John Baez.
A proof of the inequality also being necessary was published by Sergei Drozdov on 16 October 2023 on ArXiv.
In 2018, Egan described a construction of superpermutations, thus giving an upper bound to their length.
2019
On 27 February 2019, using ideas developed by Robin Houston and others, Egan produced a superpermutation of n = 7 symbols of length 5906, breaking previous records.
