Consider that I like the particular philosophical style of Greg Egan; giving me a list of top "hard science fiction" won't help me.

This sounds like an acquired taste; if you only came to like Egan's style because it exists, and you would've come to like some style even if Egan had never been...

It's not so much "doing this stuff will make you a better person" as much as, "the entire point of this being-a-person business is doing stuff, and it might as well be this as not."

Well, OK. If writing books are leisure activities, then why does it need any protection or subsidies? You don't hear many panicked cries that there is a papier-mâché deficiency which needs state intervention.

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."