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greg egan defends his crown as the hardest motherfucker writing fiction and wows us with his almost unique ability to make autism real on the printed page. there's a plot and characters in this one, like his other books. they're all kinda genderless (yet at the same time kinda gendered), like his other books. egan's awesome power lies in part in how you know all his characters watch anime despite him never needing to explicitly say they watch anime.

once again he includes a sex scene, or maybe it was javascript.

the casus aspie this time is binary neutron stars which, rather than expending most of their gravitational potential energy as gravitational waves during terminal-millisecond inspiraling (the sweet "chirps" of LIGO), divest their angular momentum via retrorockets of mesons due to a wacky QCD effect in their cores. rather less satisfying than schild's ladder's Quietener and novo-vacuum. there were no images so striking as that latter's rindler trundling along at half light speed a few meters in front of the expanding sphere. while it sounds kinda ridiculous, there were no moments so fraught with emotion as the title scene of schild's ladder either, which come to think of it was literally just a lesson in differential geometry atop Levi-Civita parallelogramoids. i guess it was emotional because the protagonist's father was teaching him the construction? which says a lot about the level of emotion in greg egan novels.

i liked the little topological adventure when Bianca/Blanca figured out the degrees of freedom of the fibers, though i liked it less because i hated Bianca/Blanca, who was obnoxious as hell, and clearly a woman yet insisted on this "ve" horseshit, and the printing in this copy wasn't great so i was never sure whether she was Bianca or Blanca, and if she was Bianca that's a breath freshener, and if she was Blanca that's a green monster from Street Fighter II. ver name ought have just been Pretentious Bitch but i suppose that's too gendered so call ver Asshole.

i liked when Ishurito, whom i always imagined as a ninja because his name was japanese, ate the heroin meme and fucked off. as far as Old Man Dank is concerned, Ishurito won the Diaspora.

anyway, as always, greg egan is fun because even if someone is fairly smart and literate and sociable and asks "what're you reading?" you can hand it to them, and watch their smile melt away as their day is slowly ruined until they hand it back to you and are like "nevermind, man, nevermind" and you reply "yeah fuck outta here with your human shit."