Distress

Greg Egan's works, mainly permutation City and Distress. These books go far beyond just LLMs and Greg Egan's novels really put the "hard" in hard sci-fi. But they describe a world where compute is extremely important. The first half of Permutation city especially covers this very well. Distress delves more into biotech and particle physics, but has its share of AI stuff. FWIW, Egan has a Twitter account and is mostly not that gung-ho about the current LLMs.

I've just discovered Greg Egan, so I've read Diaspora, Quarantine, and I just finished Distress. I'm working on Axiomatic, which is a collection of his short stories. His characters are a little flat and his endings feel a little odd, but I love the worldbuilding and the ideas. I'm having trouble finding other people who've read him and want to talk about his books, though.

I got myself a Sony Reader mid-2009 and started reading about twice more than I had been before. 2009 was also the first year in which I wasn't too lazy to document which books I read (I'm really glad I wasn't). Here're some of the favourites this year: Classics: Kafka's The Process and America - both stunning novels that deserve to be read as much as his most famous, The Castle. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - a trippy collection of tales organised in multiple nested frames. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago. Science Fiction: Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe, whom I hadn't read before, turns out to be in a class of his own. It's literary SF, overwhelmingly masterful and beautiful in its prose and characters, yet it could give any hardcore SF novel a run in terms of its ideas. It demands and richly rewards a close reading. I'll be reading more Wolfe in 2010.…