Science Quote by Greg Egan

Egan’s warning lands like a lab result: clean, replicable, and hard to argue with. The line isn’t romantic about art; it’s diagnostic about incentives. “Fastest way” signals he’s not talking about vague corruption over time but an accelerant - the moment the reward structure shifts, the work deforms. For a writer, that deformation can look like chasing prestige, controversy, branding, or the warm bath of audience affirmation. None of those are automatically evil; Egan’s point is that they become fatal when they outrank craft as the primary feedback loop.

The subtext is almost scientific: measurement changes the system being measured. If the thing you optimize is attention rather than quality, your prose will evolve toward whatever reliably produces attention, even if it’s shallow. The phrase “anything other than” is deliberately blunt; it collapses a dozen respectable motivations (awards, sales, identity signaling, networking) into the same category: external validation. That’s a heresy in industries built on visibility. It’s also a relief: quality becomes the one variable you can still control.

The tag that “it isn’t only new ones” widens the indictment. Beginners are easy to picture as pliable, hungry, desperate to please. Egan insists the more dangerous version is the established writer who thinks they’ve earned the right to coast, or who mistakes a market-tested persona for a creative compass. Coming from a scientist-turned-fiction heavyweight, the context feels pointed: treat writing like research. Let the work, not the applause, be the experiment’s outcome.