Greg Egan is fantastic. Too many authors just magic stuff into existence all over the place and it leads to large, annoying inconsistencies. Egan's stuff mainly seems to follow the rule of only using magic once, and having the rest of the storyline come from that and make sense/be consistent.
I wish more stories would start off with one magic point, cast one universe-altering spell, suspend my disbelief once, and then just deal with the consequences.
Yeah I hear people call this "hard sci-fi", but that's not really fitting. It can apply to any fiction. There's fantasy like Harry Potter where the world is just unbelievably inconsistent (as HPMOR loved to point out). Compared to, say, Mistborn (I don't read a lot of fantasy), which introduces its restricted magic system and more-or-less deals with it from there.
And the one big change can be huge, unrealistic, too! Like the Culture books - posit that we've got hyperintelligent friendly AI that can warp many dimensions at will - the rest fits in more-or-less from there; but no one would call Culture hard sci-fi.
I wish more stories would start off with one magic point, cast one universe-altering spell, suspend my disbelief once, and then just deal with the consequences.
Yeah I hear people call this "hard sci-fi", but that's not really fitting. It can apply to any fiction. There's fantasy like Harry Potter where the world is just unbelievably inconsistent (as HPMOR loved to point out). Compared to, say, Mistborn (I don't read a lot of fantasy), which introduces its restricted magic system and more-or-less deals with it from there.
And the one big change can be huge, unrealistic, too! Like the Culture books - posit that we've got hyperintelligent friendly AI that can warp many dimensions at will - the rest fits in more-or-less from there; but no one would call Culture hard sci-fi.