Greg Egan Books in Order

Egan's debut novel follows a high school student who develops an extraordinary ability to create films inside his own mind. It starts with a playful, odd premise, then turns it toward stranger consequences.

This early collection is full of body mods, copied selves, engineered emotions, and warped realities. It is probably the quickest way to see Egan's recurring obsessions with consciousness, choice, and the unintended consequences of powerful ideas.

Private investigator Nick Stavrianos is hired to find a missing woman in a future where the Solar System has been sealed inside the Bubble. His case leads into quantum manipulation, neural mods, and a reality that may depend on human observation.

Paul Durham sells digital copies of human minds the promise of continued life in virtual reality. As the project grows into a whole new world, the novel digs into identity, immortality, and whether reality needs hardware at all.

Science journalist Andrew Worth heads to a floating enclave where physicists may be close to a Theory of Everything. Assassins, fringe movements, and a spreading mental plague turn the search for truth into a near-future thriller.

This collection gathers some of Egan's sharpest short fiction about broken mathematics, copied minds, altered bodies, and dangerous new technologies. It is a strong snapshot of the ideas and tensions that made his reputation.

This small collection gathers four early stories, including the title piece, and shows Egan moving toward the hard science fiction style he became known for. Expect bleak futures, sharp thought experiments, and a darker edge.

A man learns TAP, a powerful new language that seems to change what thought itself can do. The story combines culture-war panic with a classic Egan question: what happens when a tool rewires the mind that uses it?

In a far-future civilization of fleshers, robots, and software citizens, orphan Yatima is drawn into a crisis that opens onto galaxy-scale exploration. It is a huge, idea-heavy novel about posthuman life, survival, and what minds become when bodies are optional.

Two identical twin sisters are diagnosed with the same rare fatal illness, but only one survives. The aftermath drives the survivor into a grim investigation that mixes biotech, grief, and revenge.

After a childhood on an isolated Indonesian island marked by strange evolutionary change, Prabir grows up into a world still haunted by what he witnessed. Genetics, politics, and personal identity collide as the mystery of Teranesia deepens.

In an alternate twentieth century, a brilliant scientist and a mysterious visitor use branching histories to test the limits of mathematics and computation. It is an ambitious story about possible worlds, impossible machines, and grief that will not stay local.

Centuries after an experiment creates a runaway region of new vacuum, posthuman investigators travel beside the expanding frontier to understand it. The novel mixes catastrophe, deep physics, and fierce debate over whether the unknown should be stopped or embraced.

Two humans inhabit alien bodies to mediate a local conflict and investigate the vanished culture of the Niah. Diplomacy and archaeology gradually open into a story about mathematics, history, and cosmic perspective.

This compact collection ranges from broken arithmetic to posthuman exploration and first contact. The mood shifts from abstract math to intimate emotion, but the fascination with reality's hidden rules never lets up.

A pre-industrial species living deep inside a dense cosmic environment slowly works out the truth of gravity and motion. Their story runs alongside a far-future investigation, making scientific discovery itself the central drama.

This collection brings together stories of AI, virtual beings, social engineering, and mathematical weirdness, including the standout title piece. It is brisk, unsettling, and full of classic Egan puzzles about what counts as real or alive.

Built around the Hugo-winning title novella, this collection moves between faith, science, first contact, and far-future speculation. It shows how well Egan can balance huge ideas with quieter emotional stakes.

Set in a near-future Iran shaped by political upheaval and rapid tech change, this follows journalist Martin Seymour as virtual worlds edge toward digital copies of real minds. It is one of Egan's more grounded, human-scale novels.

Yalda grows up in an alien civilization whose physics, biology, and family structures are nothing like ours. When incoming Hurtlers threaten the world, she helps launch a generation-spanning plan to find the knowledge needed to survive.

Aboard the generation ship Peerless, Tamara and Carlo face fuel shortages, crowding, and the limits of their mission. As the voyage deepens, scientific discovery and social strain become equally dangerous.

Researchers study alien life forms that look like vast carpets, only to discover they behave like living computation. It is a short, idea-rich story about intelligence, pattern, and how strange minds might be built.

The final Orthogonal novel follows the returning ship Peerless as its crew tries to use everything they have learned to save home. Reverse time, hard choices, and alien physics push the trilogy toward its biggest questions.

On twin asteroid colonies with unequal lives and shrinking options, a desperate plan becomes the only path to freedom. Egan uses a tight space setting to turn a moral dilemma into a tense, human novella.

Seth and Theo live in a world with two directions of time and a brutally narrow habitable zone. Their expedition to the edge of survival uncovers a planet-sized danger, turning very strange physics into a tense journey of discovery.

In a future where the rich can rebuild themselves with curated memories and replacement bodies, a young man confronts what survival really means. It is an unusually emotional Egan story about identity, family, and the price of choosing a better self.

On the twin worlds of Tvibura and Tviburi, a young woman commits herself to a project that may take generations to matter. It is a patient, thoughtful novella about survival, engineering, and building a future you might never live to see.

What starts as a family murder investigation becomes something stranger when Kate realizes the people around her may not be what they seem. Egan turns domestic tragedy into a disorienting puzzle about perception, geometry, and trust.

A wandering black hole system shifts Earth's orbit and turns climate into immediate disaster. Matt and his friends try to survive on a self-sustaining boat, making this one of Egan's most grounded stories of adaptation and mutual aid.

Selected by the author, this retrospective offers twenty stories spanning roughly three decades of his work. It is a strong one-volume sampler, from early identity shocks to later tales of cosmic scale and stranger physics.

A new disease knocks human circadian clocks out of sync, letting every body drift to its own rhythm. As rumors of sabotage spread and a possible cure appears, Egan turns a medical crisis into a sharp story about time, labor, and social order.

On a world divided into six mutually invisible, usually intangible fractions, a new disease starts breaking the old boundaries. The novella mixes strange geometry with social suspicion as people struggle to understand a crisis that rewrites reality.

Eleven stories from the 2010s explore software beings, artificial intelligence, odd mathematics, and the social fallout of new tech. If you want later-period Egan in shorter bursts, this collection is a great place to look.

Del lives in a world where crossing certain hoops carries you to a new sky instead of back home. A stolen ancient map, a chase into the unknown, and a hidden planetary truth drive this inventive adventure.

In a society where humans exist at seven different body scales, detective Sam Mujrif investigates a missing woman from a much larger caste. The case opens into a tense story about inequality, engineering, and radically different physics.

This volume collects the novellas The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred, Dispersion, and Phoresis. Together they make a neat sampler of Egan at novella length, with strange worlds, survival problems, and carefully worked-out science.

This collection gathers ten recent stories, mixing alternate history, near-future biotech, social breakdown, and mind-bending speculation. It shows Egan still stretching into new corners while keeping his focus on how ideas change lived experience.

In this alternate biology, living cytes are not locked inside one body, and swapping them can change health, lifespan, and even species boundaries. Marla's sudden collapse pulls her into a struggle over who gets to control life itself.