Published back in 1994 and 1998, the novels seem very prescient about our new cusp-of-AI age. In the novels, scanning and uploading of conscious human sentience is achievable. It feels like that could be 50 years away, at this point in 2023 (considering that 50 years ago, 1973, there basically were no computers at all for practical purposes). Egan then deals with a lot of the issues of how these computer programs would interact and evolve, in an environment without embodied boundaries. Our slow human trait of mind-training (basically the idea that consciousness is self-consciously alterable) is vastly sped up when a computer program simply edits itself, perhaps after running many trial and error simulations in a sandbox. Computing power is a central issue, but the assumption is that when computing moves to the quantum scale, this somehow goes away, in the same way it is mysteriously accomplished in our brains. Lots of food for thought about philosophical questions of meaningfulness. As novels, however, they are pretty clunky!