I liked diaspora but permutation city (also Greg Egan) is a book which reenters my thoughts multiple times a week and often leaves me dazed/confused/wonderous. I have never experienced this from any form of media in my life.

[…] you read a book and it completely blows your mind. That’s what happened to me when I read Diaspora or Line of Resistence. Only Forward is not one of these […]

Greg Egan truly writes “hard science fiction for hard scientists”. As a Maths PhD, it blows my mind and I often feel I do not know enough differential geometry and theoretical physics to fully grasp what he writes. It’s both crazy and awesome at the same time.
For instance, if you don’t know what a fiber bundle is, probably you’re not getting 100% of what’s happening in Diaspora. That glossary at the end really isn’t there just for color.

That said, I strongly suggest you go on reading him, he’s definitely in the top-3 of my favorite writers, too. I suggest short stories: get the collections Luminous, Axiomatic, and Dark Integers. There are some hidden gems there (pun intended).

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

Thanks! I will definitely check him out! Sounds like his stuff would be right up my alley.

@ Athanor:

OMG! Dat web design. That’s like Peter Watts all over again. What is it with these writers having shitty websites from hell. I guess they they work at a higher level of abstraction and can’t be bothered with design details. :P

@ Gui13:

Yep – on my reading list already. :)

I’d suggest Permutation City and Quarantine if you want to get blown away again :)

Luke,
For Greg Egan’s work, you really must check out his website: http://www.gregegan.net. He has technical notes, and for most books java applets to give visual explanations for the physics involved, usually that you can tweak settings on to see how it changes things.
Another author to read is Robert L. Forward, although he only wrote a couple of books. I love a book with a nice large technical appendix.

i don’t remember currently if i mentioned him before, but to me one of those guys writing such great books was Wil McCarthy. Mainly for his explanation and idea of Wellstone, but he includes some nice Chapters about Teleportation (and immortality through that), Space-Travel, extremely dense matter and microworlds too.
As opposed to Stephenson (“cookie cutters”, glas knives) and the likes i didn’t find huge errors in his books (but that could be because his ideas seem far further away from our current technology).

BTW: i recommend reading that wired-article named “Ultimate Alchemy” by McCarthy