Reviews and Comments

A good debut effort! I wish it were longer - it's trying to do a lot of things in a relatively short read.

I think I figured it out now.

There are two writers named Greg Egan. One is a staunch humanist with a fine insight into the nature of the mind, but which unfortunately suffers from heavy depression. This writer wrote Permutation City, Diaspora and Zendegi.

The other Greg Egan really likes writing equations and figuring out how a planet would look if gravity was inside out, describe that in dizzyingly accurate detail, and just throw in a vaguely pro-science plot so that the whole endeavour is technically a "story" and not topological fanfiction. This Greg wrote the Arrows of Time trilogy, Dichronauts and now The Book of All Skies.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good description of a bridge. I'm just wondering what this Greg has done with the other one's body.

Very evocative, very tense, even emotional.

Only nitpicks: Many things that would be very complicated for the protagonists to figure out is resolved by them having very strong hunches and concerns. The book would be probably three times as long if they had to worry about that, though.

good lord jeff really didn't know what was good about Annihilation did he

The movie was better. I think mostly because you expect movie protagonists post-The Sixth Sense to be half-spaced-out, unemotional piles of unresolved feelings that communicate only in stilted sentences.

Bought this after watching I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Fast read. A nice sleight-of-hand, although if you watched the movie, the final reveal may feel too spelled-out.

A much more uneven story collection than Three Moments of an Explosion.

Something between an extended Borges story and the script of a Myst-like game. Unfortunately, without the puzzle solving and the placidness of the protagonist, it makes for quite light reading.

I'd give it a four but for the weird orientalism at times and that the book sort of... doesn't know what it wants to be.

There's good parts but then there's enormous stretches about office romance and... screenwriting? Why am i reading about screenwriting?

It's... a superhero story? in book form? I guess?

I guess it could have seen as a deconstruction of the form before Megamind came out.

Describes emergent complexity in various common decentralized systems: anthills, the human brain, cities, slime molds. Decent layman description of terms involved.

The "modern tech" sections - on my 2001 edition at least - may be slightly outdated: SimCity and eBay are mentioned, while it's weird to have Alexa mentioned as a data-mining company recently purchased by Amazon.