In a world where the cells that make up our bodies are not committed to any one organism, Marla is confronted by the fickleness of her cytes, and resolves to understand them with help from Ada, a centuries-old Flourisher. Swappers like Ruth embrace fluidity, and meet with others to exchange cytes, seeking the perfect mix. But Ruth faces her own crisis, and as the technology to manipulate cytes advances, all three are drawn into a struggle to shape the future of life.
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Rigorous hard science fiction centered on mathematical physics, quantum ontology, and digital consciousness defines a major body of late-twentieth and twenty-first-century speculative literature. Greg Egan, an Australian science fiction writer and mathematician, has earned widespread critical acclaim for intellectually demanding novels such as Permutation City and Diaspora, which explore the fundamental physics of reality and simulated human minds.
Born on August 20, 1961, in Perth, Western Australia, Gregory Mark Egan earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of Western Australia. He subsequently worked as a computer programmer while publishing speculative fiction. His debut novel, An Unusual Angle, appeared in 1983, followed by his first genre short story, "Artifact," in the same year. Over a career starting in the 1980s, Egan emerged as a premier author of hard science fiction, winning prestigious honours such as the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Locus Award.
Egan's writing focuses on rigorous hard science fiction, incorporating sophisticated concepts from mathematics, theoretical physics, biology, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence. His narratives frequently investigate quantum ontology, mind transfer, simulated reality, posthumanism, genetics, and the philosophical implications of rational naturalism. Although third-party bibliographies sometimes group certain novels into a sequence called "The Subjective Cosmology Cycle," Egan clarified that those books share thematic similarities noticed in retrospect rather than an intentional series. Alongside full-length novels like Morphotrophic, Egan creates applets, science articles, and mathematical notes on his personal website to supplement his fiction.
