this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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I'm currently working my way through Distress by Greg Egan, a bit more than halfway through.
This is my last Egan novel, I've read everything else he's written, and have thoroughly enjoyed the ride.
It's been interesting to connect completely separate unrelated universes by the language he uses. Several of his books have various trans-human or post-gender characters that use Ve/Ver pronouns, which I didn't know were an actual thing because I'd never heard that before.
Also, he used the word "Tarpaulin" in 2 different novels (Orthogonal trilogy, and I just came across it in Distress yesterday). Another word that's apparently just a fancier name for "tarp", but again, I had never seen it used before. It was used extensively in the Orthogonal trilogy as an item characters interacted with often, but it seems to just be one random instance slipped in to Distress to describe a shanty truck with a tarp on the back the main character has to ride to some location. It was just kind of a funny "Aha!" moment reading it in Distress, as the word kind of stuck with me as one of the few new words I added to my vocabulary from reading the Orthogonal trilogy.
Also, many of his novels are based in or have plot points centered in Australia, because he's Australian... Nothing really odd about that, but reading so many different books back-to-back all set in various iterations of future Australia has been different. I can't think of any other author I've read recently that bases anything in Australia.