Science Quote by Greg Egan

There is a quiet provocation in Egan admitting, almost offhandedly, that novelty has stopped landing with the force it once did. It reads like a scientist’s field note on his own attention span: not a dramatic lament about “kids these days,” but an observation about diminishing returns. The line “rarely grabbed” is doing a lot of work. It frames aesthetic experience as a kind of applied physics - an external force acting on you - and suggests that with age, the coefficient of friction changes. You can still move, but it takes more to budge you.

The name-dropping matters because Beck and They Might Be Giants aren’t just “new” (even then, they’re hardly newborns); they’re artists whose whole appeal is recombination, wit, and structural play. Beck is a collage engine, splicing genres like samples in a lab. TMBG treat pop like a logic puzzle with a punchline. If Egan is best known for rigorous, idea-dense science fiction, his taste here signals a preference for music that behaves like speculative thinking: self-aware, modular, restless.

Subtext: cultural discovery is not purely about what’s available; it’s about what your brain is prepared to register as surprising. Egan’s restraint is also a mild flex: he’s not claiming superior discernment, just acknowledging that the window for being “grabbed” narrows, and only artists with high conceptual volatility can still get through. In that sense, it’s less nostalgia than an honesty about cognitive habituation - and a reminder that “new” is an effect, not a release date.