"Phoresis" by Greg Egan

Fantastic short novella from the master of hard SF. I'm particularly happy with this because I finally have a short Egan work to suggest people start with; it's light enough for people to get their toes wet, but still rich in Egan-y big ideas.

This reads a lot like the "lite" version of The Clockwork Rocket: interesting aliens, entire civilization threatened, find a solution using science & the peculiarities of their world. Egan does a good job of getting the characters comfie in your head as just people before their (extreme) biological differences become apparent.

If you find the phrase "ice-world xenobiology" enticing, look no further! Here's your book. Twin Europa/Enceladus-like planets with intelligent, modest-tech-level inhabitants who have to figure out how to move between the two. Great fun.

Phoresis feels like a spiritual successor to Hal Clement's short SF novels--Mission of Gravity and the like. Fun aliens, big-but-graspable astronomical ideas. Character and plot are not super-deep here, but the scientific premises are enjoyable enough to carry you through. And, I can't help thinking, this style of story--bold, takes existential crises seriously, uses both engineering and social movements to forge a better future--is a welcome strain of science fiction alongside climate disaster fiction & fact.

Chi-SF: Distress

It's always a bit of a mystery to me why Greg Egan isn't more known to SF enthusiasts. He's consistently written work that combines the massive scope and radical reimagining of the very hardest science fiction, the technology-drenched energy and occasional body-horror of the cyberpunks, and a sometimes brutal incorporation of modern cognitive science. Despite the brilliance of his writing, his work has been sometimes hard to find. That situation might be improving, as Night Shade Books is reprinting them for US audiences (see Patrick Lohier's Boing Boing article for more on that deal, and more on how Egan is awesome).

So, it was with some delight that I heard that the Chicago Speculative Fiction Community had selected Egan's 1995 novel "Distress". "Distress" is a near-future story, told from the perspective of a journalist--a kind of science documentarian, really. Burnt out from a project covering some horrific weirdness, Andrew Worth opts to report on a physics conference--which rapidly turns into a story about the Theory of Everything and the fate of all humanity/the universe. The main plot idea is big, heady, and maybe ultimately pretty silly, but it's packed into a world rich in other fascinating ideas--particularly on gender, neurodiversity, and rationality/belief.  There may be SPOILERS BELOW: