Greg Egan’s website is what happens when an author treats the Web as part of the work instead of as a disposable marketing layer around it.
The site says it was created on October 25, 1997. Nearly three decades later, it is still active and still recognizably a personal website.
Egan describes himself simply as a science-fiction writer and computer programmer. The site contains a bibliography, links to works available online, illustrations and applets that supplement his fiction, introductory science articles under the Foundations heading, more technical notes, and an applet gallery.
That mix is unusually revealing.
A conventional author site might give you a biography, book covers, tour dates, and a purchase button. Egan’s site gives you mathematical and scientific scaffolding for the ideas behind the fiction.
The author controls the context
This matters especially for a writer whose work regularly leans into mathematics, physics, computation, consciousness, cosmology, and speculative biology.
A novel such as Diaspora, Permutation City, Schild’s Ladder, or Dichronauts can send a reader looking for explanations that ordinary promotional copy is not equipped to provide. Egan’s site can answer with diagrams, notes, applets, and references built by the same person who wrote the story.
The site also preserves a very old-Web idea: the home page as sovereign territory.
Egan links to his own work, keeps his own bibliography, publishes science material directly, provides an RSS feed, and states his contact boundaries in his own words. He even explicitly warns readers that photographs circulating online under his name are not actually him.
That kind of direct authorship is increasingly rare. Modern writers are often represented online through publisher pages, retailer listings, social accounts, search summaries, and scraped biographies. Here, the author is still the primary source.
The site was being revised in September 2026, proving that “Ancient Web” does not have to mean abandoned. Sometimes the more interesting artifact is a site that survived because its owner never saw a reason to replace a useful structure with a trendier one.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes plenty of dead pages and fossils, but sites like Egan’s are arguably better evidence of what the independent Web got right.
It is old, current, specific, and still owned by the person it is about.