Not awful, but shows too little interest in the social part of its setting compared to exciting stuff like "how to visualise the inverse square law" and the exact weight you need to crack an ice sheet. There's a lot of writing on things like the effects of gravity but basically nothing on how a seemingly quite small society with minimal surplus was able to create a megastructure (the last chapter turns this up to 11). The characters are as thin as thin can be, just names without personalities. There's some interesting concepts here, the author just seems to not want to dig into the implications and how things actually work or tell a human story about how people live in that. And for something where he's clearly concerned with some degree of "hard sci fi" realism it feels he didn't think it through outside of a narrow band of physics. ( )

I haven’t liked any of the recent Greg Egan books as much as the older ones. In this case, the science hook from which everything derived is easy enough to understand and fairly interesting (small/low mass planets, with frozen atmospheres, in a too-cold environment for civilization to continue), but the story itself follows a bit too directly from it. There were a few high points — one plan and an alternate plan and how to convince people of it, sacrifice, some interesting biological aspects of the aliens), but it really wasn’t anything in the same class as Diaspora or Permutation City. ( )

made me think of Kino's Journey for some reason ( )

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 [b:The Clockwork Rocket|9756310|The Clockwork Rocket (Orthogonal, #1)|Greg Egan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309397561l/9756310._SX50_.jpg|14645596]: 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--[b:Mission of Gravity|525285|Mission of Gravity|Hal Clement|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328628795l/525285._SY75_.jpg|894625] 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. ( )

I kept expecting something terrible to happen to the characters in this story, but it never did. That’s probably a spoiler, but it’ll be my only one. I really enjoyed this. The people were so rational and selfless.

The book, while short, is divided into three stories and each take place some unspecified number of years or even generations after the last. Fundamentally the book is about a species that evolves under a harsh binary-planet environment. I found it fascinating, and it was quite a quick read. ( )