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Incandescence
The long-awaited new novel from Greg Egan! Hugo Award-winning author Egan returns to the field with Incandescence, a new novel of hard SF.
The Amalgam spans nearly the entire galaxy, and is composed of innumerable beings from a wild variety of races, some human or near it, some entirely other. The one place that they cannot go is the bulge, the bright, hot center of the galaxy. There dwell the Aloof, who for millions of years have deflected any and all attempts to communicate with or visit them. So when Rakesh is offered an opportunity to travel within their sphere, in search of a lost race, he cannot turn it down.
Roi is a member of that lost race, which is not only lost to the Amalgam, but lost to itself. In their world, there is but toil, and history and science are luxuries that they can ill afford.
Rakesh's journey will take him across millennia and light years. Roi's will take her across vistas of learning and discovery just as vast.
The Amalgam spans nearly the entire galaxy, and is composed of innumerable beings from a wild variety of races, some human or near it, some entirely other. The one place that they cannot go is the bulge, the bright, hot center of the galaxy. There dwell the Aloof, who for millions of years have deflected any and all attempts to communicate with or visit them. So when Rakesh is offered an opportunity to travel within their sphere, in search of a lost race, he cannot turn it down.
Roi is a member of that lost race, which is not only lost to the Amalgam, but lost to itself. In their world, there is but toil, and history and science are luxuries that they can ill afford.
Rakesh's journey will take him across millennia and light years. Roi's will take her across vistas of learning and discovery just as vast.
300 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
About the author
Greg Egan
241 books2,445 followersGreg Egan specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind transfer, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism over religion.
He is a Hugo Award winner (and has been shortlisted for the Hugos three other times), and has also won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. Some of his earlier short stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror, while due to his more popular science fiction he is known within the genre for his tendency to deal with complex and highly technical material (including inventive new physics and epistemology) in an unapologetically thorough manner.
Egan is a famously reclusive author when it comes to public appearances, he doesn't attend science fiction conventions, doesn't sign books and there are no photos available of him on the web.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
He is a Hugo Award winner (and has been shortlisted for the Hugos three other times), and has also won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. Some of his earlier short stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror, while due to his more popular science fiction he is known within the genre for his tendency to deal with complex and highly technical material (including inventive new physics and epistemology) in an unapologetically thorough manner.
Egan is a famously reclusive author when it comes to public appearances, he doesn't attend science fiction conventions, doesn't sign books and there are no photos available of him on the web.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 217 reviews
April 12, 2019
This book definitely falls under a hardcore sub-category of Hard-SF. Great for fans of Dragon's Egg, Flux, The Inverted World, or The Integral Trees / The Smoke Ring where we get a significant amount of time from the PoV's of the aliens as they discover the science and topography of their world.
I love these kinds of books for exactly that reason. Great science, fascinating discoveries, and truly ODD topographies. They're mystery novels for physical sciences. :)
BUT. For the same reasons, I often get angry at the tediousness of them. The dragging pace and the often boring characters. *sigh*
But it's not a reason to throw out the novels altogether. There's a real rich atmosphere going on in them. Incandescence arrives at a lost, genetically enhanced alien species that forced itself into a kind of survival in the tight liveable bands surrounding a neutron star. We're forced to discover this the hard way, along with the aliens, from first principles.
If you love math and topography and discovery, I TOTALLY recommend this novel. For everyone else more interested in characters... look elsewhere. :)
I love these kinds of books for exactly that reason. Great science, fascinating discoveries, and truly ODD topographies. They're mystery novels for physical sciences. :)
BUT. For the same reasons, I often get angry at the tediousness of them. The dragging pace and the often boring characters. *sigh*
But it's not a reason to throw out the novels altogether. There's a real rich atmosphere going on in them. Incandescence arrives at a lost, genetically enhanced alien species that forced itself into a kind of survival in the tight liveable bands surrounding a neutron star. We're forced to discover this the hard way, along with the aliens, from first principles.
If you love math and topography and discovery, I TOTALLY recommend this novel. For everyone else more interested in characters... look elsewhere. :)
September 1, 2020
Un momento, por favor, while I analyze this book’s Brain Melt Rating (BMR) using my Brain Melt-O-Meter:
[by Bryant Arnold]
Ah, yes... carry the 0... move the decimal place... apply the Lorentzian transformation... calculate the Rhiemannian connection... and the covariant derivative... and, ah yes, a Tensor field, wonderful wonderful…!
...Which gives Incandescence a BMR of FOUR, out of a possible FIVE. It’s not five because it's not an ACTUAL textbook on orbital mechanics and relativity. Of all the hard sci-fi books I’ve read, Incandescence takes the cake as the hardest.
But only half is like that. As is all the rage these days, Greg Egan wrote this book as a split PoV narrative:
The first point of view is that of Rakesh, and it features the Standard Egan Far Future Milieu, as seen in his other books like Schild’s Ladder and Diaspora.
In these far future settings, you can expect the following futuristic delights: Everyone is immortal, at least in the physical sense. At worst, a person’s temporary physical body is destroyed and a new one is created using a data backup as template. Indeed, there’s no such thing as hunger or privation of any kind. You can chop the bottom 80% of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs right off. Furthermore, VR-scapes are both common and largely indistinguishable from reality. As a whole, our engineering mastery of **CURRENTLY KNOWN PHYSICS** is essentially complete.
I’m a big fan of this milieu because it allows us to explore more novel conflicts than those seen in the vast majority of historical and contemporary stories. Egan’s character conflicts tend to be extremely high level self-actualization conflicts, while external conflicts usually take the form of mysteries of the universe. In this land of plenty, the vices of greed, lust, and tribalism have no real bite.
I also like the optimism of the milieu. It’s not just that no one goes hungry or dies traumatically. Nor even that it’s portraying a future I haven’t the slightest confidence humanity will survive long enough to reach. It’s the entire vision of it all, the staggeringly creative glimpse of what MIGHT BE. For example, in one chapter Rakesh and his alien companion are hunting for a certain star, so they spend a couple thousand years making hundred-year leaps at the speed of light. This epic millenia long journey takes up about a paragraph. Imagine that, to have such freedom to undertake such an investigation.
Anyway, that’s Rakesh’s PoV: a space archaeological journey, in which a post-human and his alien companion make their way into the hitherto-restricted inner space/bulge of the Milky Way, in search of long lost, extremely distant genetic cousins. It’s pretty neat and not at all difficult to understand.
The second PoV is that of one such distant genetic cousin, Roi, a small crab-like alien who lives in a primitive civilization on an asteroid orbiting a black hole and subsisting on the energy contained within its accretion disk.
Roi's half of the story is all about science saving the day.
In particular, it’s about these crab-people rediscovering orbital mechanics, differential geometry, and relativity, in an attempt to understand their world and hopefully avoid its destruction. It’s also pretty neat, but it is DIAMOND level of hard science. Here’s a demonstrative excerpt:
That isn’t just me picking one random difficult quote. That is the ENTIRE HALF OF THE BOOK, okay?
What Egan set out to do here was to write a book that showed how an alien civilization might discover laws of physics, like SR's light-speed as the universal speed limit. Not just in summary, either, but in thorough, explicit detail. He describes the experiments, the terminology, and the machinery of calculation.
I can’t stress this enough: it is basically a novelized summary of the basic ideas of Kepler, Newton, and Einstein. It is hard science. Really. If you don’t know anything about physics and don’t care to know anything about physics, I cannot imagine you will enjoy Incandescence. (Also don't do as I did and read this every night just before going to sleep, when your mind is at its weakest).
On the other hand, very few sci-fi novels out there do what Incandescence does. It is extremely rare to find a human-being capable of both writing novels and understanding advanced mathematics. It is even more rare for said human being to actually write a novel that makes use of such mathematical thinking because such a novel’s appeal will be limited in the extreme.
So understand that Incandescence is a rare vintage that will delight those who understand and want what they are getting but whose unique flavors will fall afoul of your typical sci-fi palate.
****************
SOME (basic) HARD SCIENCE HELP TO GET YOU STARTED:
Roi's people use their own specialized jargon for spatial directions, which is fair but can get distracting. But basically: sard-garm; shomal-junub; and rarb-sharq are your three pairs of spatial dimensions. Sard-garm is basically longitude; shomal-junub is basically latitude; and rarb-sharq is basically altitude. Or just realize they represent -+ x, y, and z.
I originally considered Roi's asteroid akin to a moon or planet, in that the most important source of gravity relative to their perspective is the gravity from the moon/planet itself. This is not the case. Instead, it's best to consider the asteroid as akin to a space station (or an asteroid, derp). For any person on these celestial bodies, the gravity of the asteroid itself is unimportant relative to the gravity caused by the larger object around which the asteroid is orbiting So the 'null line' represents an arc from this larger orbit (and thus any object will be in 'weightless' free-fall at the null line).
Later in the novel, they switch from symbolic solving to numerical methods. This is necessary since they're calculating a two or three-body problem, which is basically impossible to solve symbolically.
********************
ALSO SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!:
Many readers state these PoVs never actually link up. Even though Rakesh’s crab-people are orbiting a neutron star and Roi’s crab-people are orbiting a black hole, this is not true. Roi’s PoV is millions of years before Rakesh’s. Roi and her people eventually become the ‘Aloof.’ The last chapter strongly hints at that fate.
[by Bryant Arnold]
Ah, yes... carry the 0... move the decimal place... apply the Lorentzian transformation... calculate the Rhiemannian connection... and the covariant derivative... and, ah yes, a Tensor field, wonderful wonderful…!
...Which gives Incandescence a BMR of FOUR, out of a possible FIVE. It’s not five because it's not an ACTUAL textbook on orbital mechanics and relativity. Of all the hard sci-fi books I’ve read, Incandescence takes the cake as the hardest.
But only half is like that. As is all the rage these days, Greg Egan wrote this book as a split PoV narrative:
The first point of view is that of Rakesh, and it features the Standard Egan Far Future Milieu, as seen in his other books like Schild’s Ladder and Diaspora.
In these far future settings, you can expect the following futuristic delights: Everyone is immortal, at least in the physical sense. At worst, a person’s temporary physical body is destroyed and a new one is created using a data backup as template. Indeed, there’s no such thing as hunger or privation of any kind. You can chop the bottom 80% of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs right off. Furthermore, VR-scapes are both common and largely indistinguishable from reality. As a whole, our engineering mastery of **CURRENTLY KNOWN PHYSICS** is essentially complete.
I’m a big fan of this milieu because it allows us to explore more novel conflicts than those seen in the vast majority of historical and contemporary stories. Egan’s character conflicts tend to be extremely high level self-actualization conflicts, while external conflicts usually take the form of mysteries of the universe. In this land of plenty, the vices of greed, lust, and tribalism have no real bite.
I also like the optimism of the milieu. It’s not just that no one goes hungry or dies traumatically. Nor even that it’s portraying a future I haven’t the slightest confidence humanity will survive long enough to reach. It’s the entire vision of it all, the staggeringly creative glimpse of what MIGHT BE. For example, in one chapter Rakesh and his alien companion are hunting for a certain star, so they spend a couple thousand years making hundred-year leaps at the speed of light. This epic millenia long journey takes up about a paragraph. Imagine that, to have such freedom to undertake such an investigation.
Anyway, that’s Rakesh’s PoV: a space archaeological journey, in which a post-human and his alien companion make their way into the hitherto-restricted inner space/bulge of the Milky Way, in search of long lost, extremely distant genetic cousins. It’s pretty neat and not at all difficult to understand.
The second PoV is that of one such distant genetic cousin, Roi, a small crab-like alien who lives in a primitive civilization on an asteroid orbiting a black hole and subsisting on the energy contained within its accretion disk.
Roi's half of the story is all about science saving the day.
In particular, it’s about these crab-people rediscovering orbital mechanics, differential geometry, and relativity, in an attempt to understand their world and hopefully avoid its destruction. It’s also pretty neat, but it is DIAMOND level of hard science. Here’s a demonstrative excerpt:
"If the ratio between the garm weight and the spin weight keeps increasing the closer we get to the Hub, then the loop will keep growing longer and skinnier. But the shape changes faster than the ratio, and the ratio only has to reach a value of four in order for the loop to stop being a loop at all. If the ratio becomes four, then a stone tossed garmwards will never return to the Null Line. The swerve weight will still bend the stone’s path around, but the garm weight will be strong enough to tip the balance, and ensure that the stone never comes back."
That isn’t just me picking one random difficult quote. That is the ENTIRE HALF OF THE BOOK, okay?
What Egan set out to do here was to write a book that showed how an alien civilization might discover laws of physics, like SR's light-speed as the universal speed limit. Not just in summary, either, but in thorough, explicit detail. He describes the experiments, the terminology, and the machinery of calculation.
I can’t stress this enough: it is basically a novelized summary of the basic ideas of Kepler, Newton, and Einstein. It is hard science. Really. If you don’t know anything about physics and don’t care to know anything about physics, I cannot imagine you will enjoy Incandescence. (Also don't do as I did and read this every night just before going to sleep, when your mind is at its weakest).
On the other hand, very few sci-fi novels out there do what Incandescence does. It is extremely rare to find a human-being capable of both writing novels and understanding advanced mathematics. It is even more rare for said human being to actually write a novel that makes use of such mathematical thinking because such a novel’s appeal will be limited in the extreme.
So understand that Incandescence is a rare vintage that will delight those who understand and want what they are getting but whose unique flavors will fall afoul of your typical sci-fi palate.
****************
SOME (basic) HARD SCIENCE HELP TO GET YOU STARTED:
Roi's people use their own specialized jargon for spatial directions, which is fair but can get distracting. But basically: sard-garm; shomal-junub; and rarb-sharq are your three pairs of spatial dimensions. Sard-garm is basically longitude; shomal-junub is basically latitude; and rarb-sharq is basically altitude. Or just realize they represent -+ x, y, and z.
I originally considered Roi's asteroid akin to a moon or planet, in that the most important source of gravity relative to their perspective is the gravity from the moon/planet itself. This is not the case. Instead, it's best to consider the asteroid as akin to a space station (or an asteroid, derp). For any person on these celestial bodies, the gravity of the asteroid itself is unimportant relative to the gravity caused by the larger object around which the asteroid is orbiting So the 'null line' represents an arc from this larger orbit (and thus any object will be in 'weightless' free-fall at the null line).
Later in the novel, they switch from symbolic solving to numerical methods. This is necessary since they're calculating a two or three-body problem, which is basically impossible to solve symbolically.
********************
ALSO SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!:
Many readers state these PoVs never actually link up. Even though Rakesh’s crab-people are orbiting a neutron star and Roi’s crab-people are orbiting a black hole, this is not true. Roi’s PoV is millions of years before Rakesh’s. Roi and her people eventually become the ‘Aloof.’ The last chapter strongly hints at that fate.
November 2, 2012
Much like
Diaspora
, Incandescence is more of a fictional treatise on esoteric ideas than it is a novel. A loosely convergent tale of two plots, Incandescence is a showcase of Greg Egan's ability to think big--really, hugely, mindbogglingly big. Once again, Egan sidesteps the traditional boundaries of consciousness and identity. There is nary a human to be seen in this book--personalities descended from DNA, yes, but nothing we could call humanity. Incandescence is posthuman to a very literal degree.
The first plot follows Rakesh, “a descendant of DNA” and his friend, whose origins are not so mundane. They travel by transmission into the centre of the galaxy, territory held by the aptly named "Aloof". The Aloof eschew communication with the larger Amalgam society that inhabits the outer area of the galaxy. But they have made an exception by reaching out to Rakesh, who pursues a chance to find a heretofore unknown planet where DNA-based life might have evolved. It’s the type of discovery of a lifetime Rakesh has been yearning for in an age where everything has been seen and done.
The second plot follows Roi, a member of a species that lives within an asteroid in the halo of a neutron star. At the beginning of the story, Roi is content with tending the crops on the surface of the asteroid. Then she meets Zak, who piques her interest in the natural mysteries of their world. What follows is an Eganesque development of physics, from Galileo to Newton to Einstein, in the language and frame of reference of these very alien beings. The more Roi and Zak discover about their world, the more it becomes apparent they need to learn even more in order to save it from impending disaster.
These two plots converge in a very obvious way, but most of the time I found myself more entertained by the latter. It’s intriguing to watch Roi, Zak, and their colleagues deduce, derive, and hypothesize new theories and laws of physics that we take for granted as the received wisdom passed down to us through the institutions of high school and university. I love reading about the history of science and learning how exactly we came to know what we know. Here, Egan shows us how a species that lives in a radically different environment from what we are familiar with on Earth could deduce the same laws of physics through different observations. It’s clever and fun, and even if you don’t know a lot of physics, you should still be able to derive some satisfaction from watching Roi and Zak’s knowledge grow.
The search for the missing DNA world by Rakesh and his friend interests me less. Firstly, it’s kind of boring. Nothing bad ever really happens to them; there are no real threats. We hear that the Amalgam might not let them return to civilized society, on the grounds that this is all some kind of plot by the Aloof and the Rakesh who returns might not be the real Rakesh … but nothing ever really materializes from that. Secondly, as much as I want to sympathize with Rakesh’s desire to make a big discovery and alleviate his wanderlust and boredom, he is curiously ethical and moral. Are there no bad people this far into the future? He eventually wrestles with a genuine moral conundrum, and I admit I liked that. But for most of the book, he essentially does the right thing all the time, as does his friend.
Incandescence also doesn’t quite live up to the expectations set by the jacket copy. I was told that the convergence of these plots would reveal the motivations of the Aloof—and that really intrigued me. I wanted to know why the Aloof were so different from the Amalgam and why they had chosen to make this communication at this time. But we never really learn the answer to such questions. In fact, we never really learn anything. Egan takes us on a great ride, but there is no free T-shirt at the end of it. You just get thanked for riding and unceremoniously kicked out of the amusement park—see you next year.
As a novel, Incandescence fails to sustain interest or present much in the way of a compelling plot. Its virtues lie entirely in Egan’s ability to explore and explain science through very alien points of view. That’s certainly impressive … but I can’t say it’s sufficient to make this book great. In the end I’m still looking for a good story, and that’s where this book doesn’t deliver.
The first plot follows Rakesh, “a descendant of DNA” and his friend, whose origins are not so mundane. They travel by transmission into the centre of the galaxy, territory held by the aptly named "Aloof". The Aloof eschew communication with the larger Amalgam society that inhabits the outer area of the galaxy. But they have made an exception by reaching out to Rakesh, who pursues a chance to find a heretofore unknown planet where DNA-based life might have evolved. It’s the type of discovery of a lifetime Rakesh has been yearning for in an age where everything has been seen and done.
The second plot follows Roi, a member of a species that lives within an asteroid in the halo of a neutron star. At the beginning of the story, Roi is content with tending the crops on the surface of the asteroid. Then she meets Zak, who piques her interest in the natural mysteries of their world. What follows is an Eganesque development of physics, from Galileo to Newton to Einstein, in the language and frame of reference of these very alien beings. The more Roi and Zak discover about their world, the more it becomes apparent they need to learn even more in order to save it from impending disaster.
These two plots converge in a very obvious way, but most of the time I found myself more entertained by the latter. It’s intriguing to watch Roi, Zak, and their colleagues deduce, derive, and hypothesize new theories and laws of physics that we take for granted as the received wisdom passed down to us through the institutions of high school and university. I love reading about the history of science and learning how exactly we came to know what we know. Here, Egan shows us how a species that lives in a radically different environment from what we are familiar with on Earth could deduce the same laws of physics through different observations. It’s clever and fun, and even if you don’t know a lot of physics, you should still be able to derive some satisfaction from watching Roi and Zak’s knowledge grow.
The search for the missing DNA world by Rakesh and his friend interests me less. Firstly, it’s kind of boring. Nothing bad ever really happens to them; there are no real threats. We hear that the Amalgam might not let them return to civilized society, on the grounds that this is all some kind of plot by the Aloof and the Rakesh who returns might not be the real Rakesh … but nothing ever really materializes from that. Secondly, as much as I want to sympathize with Rakesh’s desire to make a big discovery and alleviate his wanderlust and boredom, he is curiously ethical and moral. Are there no bad people this far into the future? He eventually wrestles with a genuine moral conundrum, and I admit I liked that. But for most of the book, he essentially does the right thing all the time, as does his friend.
Incandescence also doesn’t quite live up to the expectations set by the jacket copy. I was told that the convergence of these plots would reveal the motivations of the Aloof—and that really intrigued me. I wanted to know why the Aloof were so different from the Amalgam and why they had chosen to make this communication at this time. But we never really learn the answer to such questions. In fact, we never really learn anything. Egan takes us on a great ride, but there is no free T-shirt at the end of it. You just get thanked for riding and unceremoniously kicked out of the amusement park—see you next year.
As a novel, Incandescence fails to sustain interest or present much in the way of a compelling plot. Its virtues lie entirely in Egan’s ability to explore and explain science through very alien points of view. That’s certainly impressive … but I can’t say it’s sufficient to make this book great. In the end I’m still looking for a good story, and that’s where this book doesn’t deliver.
August 3, 2020
So much of the fun of this one is uncovering the world that one of the main characters lives in. Beware reviews of this book, because many of them just flat out tell you what the Incandescence is and how Roi's world fits into it.
The galaxy-spanning civilization of the Amalgam is a stable post-biological society composed of essentially immortal consciousnesses from a wide range of backgrounds, including biologically evolved and technically designed. They can go anywhere in the galaxy except for the Bulge in the center which is controlled by a non-communicative civilization that the Amalgam call "the Aloof". So when an emissary with connections to the Aloof comes to the Amalgam with evidence of a lost biological ecosystem, it proves too much for Rakesh and Parantham of the Amalgam to resist.
In the other storyline Roi is a member of a strange alien society that seems to be completely enclosed in rock, have variable gravity and surrounded by an intense heat and light source called the Incandescence. We follow Roi through a chance meeting with an amazingly smart individual and onto deriving the truth about her world through experimentation, math and physics theory that might end up saving the entire world.
If you're familiar with the author's work, you won't be surprised to learn that there's a hell of a lot of hard science in this book. Enough that the actual plot feels a lot like scaffolding for speculation about what alien intelligences living in such an environment might be able to find out about their world. But I think the author himself probably understood that Roi's story is just a bit too much on "the foundation of physics in a relativistic world" study course to make an engaging novel, hence the intrusion of Rakesh and his partner along with the Aloof/Amalgam societies. Rakesh's story doesn't really go anywhere though, and is largely tangential to the point of the book. There's a very loose connection between the two if you squint carefully, but I think it's safe to say that Rakesh's story is actually unnecessary to the rest of the novel other than to explain the origins of Roi's society.
The galaxy-spanning civilization of the Amalgam is a stable post-biological society composed of essentially immortal consciousnesses from a wide range of backgrounds, including biologically evolved and technically designed. They can go anywhere in the galaxy except for the Bulge in the center which is controlled by a non-communicative civilization that the Amalgam call "the Aloof". So when an emissary with connections to the Aloof comes to the Amalgam with evidence of a lost biological ecosystem, it proves too much for Rakesh and Parantham of the Amalgam to resist.
In the other storyline Roi is a member of a strange alien society that seems to be completely enclosed in rock, have variable gravity and surrounded by an intense heat and light source called the Incandescence. We follow Roi through a chance meeting with an amazingly smart individual and onto deriving the truth about her world through experimentation, math and physics theory that might end up saving the entire world.
If you're familiar with the author's work, you won't be surprised to learn that there's a hell of a lot of hard science in this book. Enough that the actual plot feels a lot like scaffolding for speculation about what alien intelligences living in such an environment might be able to find out about their world. But I think the author himself probably understood that Roi's story is just a bit too much on "the foundation of physics in a relativistic world" study course to make an engaging novel, hence the intrusion of Rakesh and his partner along with the Aloof/Amalgam societies. Rakesh's story doesn't really go anywhere though, and is largely tangential to the point of the book. There's a very loose connection between the two if you squint carefully, but I think it's safe to say that Rakesh's story is actually unnecessary to the rest of the novel other than to explain the origins of Roi's society.
March 5, 2014
2.5 Stars
I love Greg Egan. I love his hard science fiction. I enjoy his near lecture style of his novels. Unfortunately, this book left me unable to bond with any of the characters. I kept putting this book down do to how slow I felt that it was going. As a result of start up and start again, I really lost most of this novel. I skim read, blanked out, and totally forgot things as I went along....
Oh well, I will reread this another day if I decide to give it a second chance.
I love Greg Egan. I love his hard science fiction. I enjoy his near lecture style of his novels. Unfortunately, this book left me unable to bond with any of the characters. I kept putting this book down do to how slow I felt that it was going. As a result of start up and start again, I really lost most of this novel. I skim read, blanked out, and totally forgot things as I went along....
Oh well, I will reread this another day if I decide to give it a second chance.
September 5, 2021
Quando inizio un libro di Greg Egan, le prime pagine sono sempre così disorientanti, è un autore molto anti-convenzionale e scientifico. Aprendo un qualsiasi suo libro, ti ritrovi nell'infinito? universo, magari all'interno di una sonda spaziale oppure liberamente fluttuante tra una stella ed un'altra o anche come osservatore esterno da lontanissimo, magari attraverso "l'occhio" di un osservatorio astronomico super-mega evoluto e quindi come essere lì nello sterminato, infinito? spazio profondo. Ed eccomi lì a girovagare fra i pianeti, le galassie, le stelle, le meteore ecc... ed Egan è lì al mio fianco, in una capsula ipertecnologica e mi racconta di miriadi di avventure spaziali.
Incandescence è un'avventura ai confini della cosmologia, come sempre Egan nei suoi libri "spacchetta" le teorie sulle origini dell'universo, innestandoci nozioni varie di fisica, di matematica, di biologia, per far sì che i dubbi e le ipotesi umane sull'universo vengano risolte definitivamente, ma una legge definitiva esisterà mai?
Incandescence è un'avventura ai confini della cosmologia, come sempre Egan nei suoi libri "spacchetta" le teorie sulle origini dell'universo, innestandoci nozioni varie di fisica, di matematica, di biologia, per far sì che i dubbi e le ipotesi umane sull'universo vengano risolte definitivamente, ma una legge definitiva esisterà mai?
June 12, 2012
Brilliant. Hard SF at its absolute best.
It's almost impossible to imagine a galaxy-spanning civilization in a universe still bounded by the absolute limitation of the speed of light, but Egan manages to do it, and do it well. Yet, the galactic civilization is almost a throwaway in this tale. The true story is about a microcosmic society in a hidden backwater.
The people of the Splinter (from the start, clearly recognizable as some kind of orbital habitat) are clearly post-apocalyptic, their science has fallen into disuse (to the degree that people know what multiplication is, but rarely learn it), and yet, faced with a threat to their future, they develop a knowledge of celestial mechanics, from Newton to Einstein, in less than a generation. That might seem hard to believe, but Egan makes it all perfectly reasonable - after all, a spinning, orbiting, object is a continually (measurably) accelerating frame of reference. Newton might have worked out Einstein's theories in such a place.
I have a background in mathematics, but my geometry is weak (I can work out geometry all the way up to 2 dimensions), and this was heavy on 4 dimensional geometry, so very hard work to keep track of. I always felt I almost understood it all, but it was absolutely worth the effort.
It's almost impossible to imagine a galaxy-spanning civilization in a universe still bounded by the absolute limitation of the speed of light, but Egan manages to do it, and do it well. Yet, the galactic civilization is almost a throwaway in this tale. The true story is about a microcosmic society in a hidden backwater.
The people of the Splinter (from the start, clearly recognizable as some kind of orbital habitat) are clearly post-apocalyptic, their science has fallen into disuse (to the degree that people know what multiplication is, but rarely learn it), and yet, faced with a threat to their future, they develop a knowledge of celestial mechanics, from Newton to Einstein, in less than a generation. That might seem hard to believe, but Egan makes it all perfectly reasonable - after all, a spinning, orbiting, object is a continually (measurably) accelerating frame of reference. Newton might have worked out Einstein's theories in such a place.
I have a background in mathematics, but my geometry is weak (I can work out geometry all the way up to 2 dimensions), and this was heavy on 4 dimensional geometry, so very hard work to keep track of. I always felt I almost understood it all, but it was absolutely worth the effort.
February 6, 2020
2nd try, 2020. I might have gotten a bit further, but this one is *definitely* not for me. I think I took some notes for this try, but they have gone astray.
In general, I've liked Egan's shorts more than his novels, and his earlier stuff more than the more recent. But maybe that's just me?
In general, I've liked Egan's shorts more than his novels, and his earlier stuff more than the more recent. But maybe that's just me?
June 15, 2021
(...)
While the blurb isn’t wrong, it does undersell one crucial thing about Incandescence: the nature of Roi and Zak’s deciphering of subtle clues. The book alternates every other chapter between Rakesh point of view, and the Splinter’s. Each viewpoint takes up about 50% of page time, so nearly half of the book deals with the deciphering.
This deciphering half embodies the novel’s main idea: on Scalzi’s blog Egan wrote that the book “grew out of the notion that the theory of general relativity — widely regarded as one of the pinnacles of human intellectual achievement — could be discovered by a pre-industrial civilization with no steam engines, no electric lights, no radio transmitters, and absolutely no tradition of astronomy.”
Big parts of Roi and Zak’s chapters are descriptions of and dialogue about physics experiments concerning gravity, motion and orbits, and your mileage may vary. That is to say: at times it was a bit too dry, long-winded and detailed for my tastes. Not that I don’t like science or non-fiction (on the contrary), but the subject matter and the way it was presented wasn’t fully for me. This is not to say I didn’t like the book, but it did alter my reading experience, and ultimately knocked off a star or 2 should I have to rate that reading experience – mind you, not the book per se. More on that later.
(...)
I’ve read Schild’s Ladder myself, and while some of its science went over my head, I loved it. Incandescence is another affair, structurally, but also because much more of its page time deals with science, and more specifically gravity & motion. That’s something very specific, and more or less predictable too: fairly early on readers get the idea of where Roi and Zak are heading – even though they discover things in a totally different manner than we did, due to their different surroundings – and as such the scientific joy of this book is procedural. Still, the fact that it is a well-known theory takes some of the tension out of the story, and that’s a crucial difference with Schild’s Ladder.
(...)
Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It
While the blurb isn’t wrong, it does undersell one crucial thing about Incandescence: the nature of Roi and Zak’s deciphering of subtle clues. The book alternates every other chapter between Rakesh point of view, and the Splinter’s. Each viewpoint takes up about 50% of page time, so nearly half of the book deals with the deciphering.
This deciphering half embodies the novel’s main idea: on Scalzi’s blog Egan wrote that the book “grew out of the notion that the theory of general relativity — widely regarded as one of the pinnacles of human intellectual achievement — could be discovered by a pre-industrial civilization with no steam engines, no electric lights, no radio transmitters, and absolutely no tradition of astronomy.”
Big parts of Roi and Zak’s chapters are descriptions of and dialogue about physics experiments concerning gravity, motion and orbits, and your mileage may vary. That is to say: at times it was a bit too dry, long-winded and detailed for my tastes. Not that I don’t like science or non-fiction (on the contrary), but the subject matter and the way it was presented wasn’t fully for me. This is not to say I didn’t like the book, but it did alter my reading experience, and ultimately knocked off a star or 2 should I have to rate that reading experience – mind you, not the book per se. More on that later.
(...)
I’ve read Schild’s Ladder myself, and while some of its science went over my head, I loved it. Incandescence is another affair, structurally, but also because much more of its page time deals with science, and more specifically gravity & motion. That’s something very specific, and more or less predictable too: fairly early on readers get the idea of where Roi and Zak are heading – even though they discover things in a totally different manner than we did, due to their different surroundings – and as such the scientific joy of this book is procedural. Still, the fact that it is a well-known theory takes some of the tension out of the story, and that’s a crucial difference with Schild’s Ladder.
(...)
Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It
October 29, 2008
Maybe 3 and a half stars...
Greg Egan continues to write about the far far future in an intelligent thoughtful creative manner.
On the other hand, you have to be ready to deal with things like a large portion of the narrative of this book focusing on the discovery of newton/einsteinian laws of motion and relativity by an alien race. What made it more annoying to me was that all the terms were made up. So you have to remember that template mathematics means... algebra? and memorize (if you are really interested, I wasn't) the 4 or was it 8 directional terms which apply to the strange world they live in, so you can follow their discovery of the laws of motion...
Another odd thing about this book-- chapters alternate between points of view of 2 very different parties. It seems for the whole book that they will eventually meet up, as one would expect from this sort of narrative convention, but guess what? They never do!!! We don't know if one occurs in the past or future of the other, or even if they end up in the same place, since some small mention is made of the fact that the setting they both end up in may have been duplicated by the original makers. WTF, Greg?
Or did I just miss something while my eyes were glazing over during the discovery of the laws of motion?
Greg Egan continues to write about the far far future in an intelligent thoughtful creative manner.
On the other hand, you have to be ready to deal with things like a large portion of the narrative of this book focusing on the discovery of newton/einsteinian laws of motion and relativity by an alien race. What made it more annoying to me was that all the terms were made up. So you have to remember that template mathematics means... algebra? and memorize (if you are really interested, I wasn't) the 4 or was it 8 directional terms which apply to the strange world they live in, so you can follow their discovery of the laws of motion...
Another odd thing about this book-- chapters alternate between points of view of 2 very different parties. It seems for the whole book that they will eventually meet up, as one would expect from this sort of narrative convention, but guess what? They never do!!! We don't know if one occurs in the past or future of the other, or even if they end up in the same place, since some small mention is made of the fact that the setting they both end up in may have been duplicated by the original makers. WTF, Greg?
Or did I just miss something while my eyes were glazing over during the discovery of the laws of motion?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 18, 2016
I was a little skeptical of this one at first, owing to some of the reviews saying it's just a bunch of boring physics lessons. Well yes, but no. Imagine what it would be like to hear Galileo, Newton, Bohr, Einstein, and Feynman all going at it in the same room. All working together, and moreover gifted with a fortuitous vantage point that allows them to conduct experiments and gain direct insight into phenomena within hours with simple instruments that took humanity hundreds of years and the help of sophisticated technology. Amazing stuff!
The end of the book was both surprising and very satisfying. I won't spoil it, but it seems that a number of people miss it on the first reading, so I'd advise to read the last chapter carefully...
The idea content goes far beyond the physics as well, covering genetic engineering and significant ethical questions. Overall, one of Egan's best.
The end of the book was both surprising and very satisfying. I won't spoil it, but it seems that a number of people miss it on the first reading, so I'd advise to read the last chapter carefully...
The idea content goes far beyond the physics as well, covering genetic engineering and significant ethical questions. Overall, one of Egan's best.
February 10, 2016
From Greg Egan's site: "A few reviewers complained that they had trouble keeping straight the physical meanings of the Splinterites’ directions. This leaves me wondering if they’ve really never encountered a book before that benefits from being read with a pad of paper and a pen beside it, or whether they’re just so hung up on the idea that only non-fiction should be accompanied by note-taking and diagram-scribbling that it never even occurred to them to do this."
Also: "much of what I write is coming from the position that mathematics and the natural sciences are intrinsically interesting, and are as suitable as the central concerns of fiction as anything else"
:) Go Greg! Keep writing them!
Also: "much of what I write is coming from the position that mathematics and the natural sciences are intrinsically interesting, and are as suitable as the central concerns of fiction as anything else"
:) Go Greg! Keep writing them!
January 18, 2013
Every time a bit of plot threatens to pop up, a physics lecture swoops in and nips it right in the bud. SKIP IT.
April 23, 2014
The POV’s of the two alternating narratives that comprise this novel are so wildly different in style, that it feels like two separate authors are at work. One follows a restless citizen of a far future galactic civilization on a quest to discover something, anything, new and mysterious in the aseptically tame society he inhabits. The other narrative observes an alien species in an environment wildly different than our own discovering fundamental physics on their own terms under the threat of environmental disaster. Of the two, I must say I preferred the space opera former to the ‘rock opera’ latter because it offered a broader cosmic scope in dimension and more wonder. As others have noted, the alien (‘ark dweller’) storyline is incredibly thick with mathematical exposition. None of it was deep enough to completely suffocate me, but it did begin to feel like an algebraic overdose sometime in the first half of the book with the majority of it still to come. Hand in hand with the descriptions of ratios of weight measurements to angles in space-time, however, is a truly engaging story with high stakes drama and interesting alien biology and thought modes. It just wasn’t as thought-provoking for me as Rakesh the post-human’s star system-hopping and at-will body redesigning pursuit. In this half of the book, Egan’s hard SF soars like the space opera I expected, filled with concepts like mind uploads transmitted between stars to be reassembled by nano-machine, and lifetimes spent shifting between digital environments and corporeal ones over the course of millennia.
December 12, 2012
I really enjoyed this book. Greg Egan is the master of not only creating science fiction, but full fledged fictional histories of science, or fictional science. The main scientific point driving this story is the question, "Could General Relativity be rediscovered through a completely different set of ideas by a technologically unsophisticated culture?" The answer is a masterfully crafted "Yes!" which will keep the true fans of science wanting for more.
Of course, a fictional history of science alone would not make a complete story, so the plot line of the discovery of GR is threaded with a second plot line involving the discovery of this race by trans-humans (apologies to Egan since I know he dislikes the term) from outside the core of the galaxy. I'm being intentionally vague here since when Egan listed 4 misconceptions about his book on his webpage:
• The Splinter orbits a neutron star.
• Rakesh visits the Splinter.
• The relationship between the novel's two threads is never revealed.
• The reader learns nothing about the Aloof.
I was guilty of the last two, and thus will hold back on a detailed discussion of the plot until I've unraveled what happened with the care the book deserves.
If you are an Egan fan, Incandescence makes for a superb read. If you are not an Egan fan, maybe reading it will make you into one.
Of course, a fictional history of science alone would not make a complete story, so the plot line of the discovery of GR is threaded with a second plot line involving the discovery of this race by trans-humans (apologies to Egan since I know he dislikes the term) from outside the core of the galaxy. I'm being intentionally vague here since when Egan listed 4 misconceptions about his book on his webpage:
• The Splinter orbits a neutron star.
• Rakesh visits the Splinter.
• The relationship between the novel's two threads is never revealed.
• The reader learns nothing about the Aloof.
I was guilty of the last two, and thus will hold back on a detailed discussion of the plot until I've unraveled what happened with the care the book deserves.
If you are an Egan fan, Incandescence makes for a superb read. If you are not an Egan fan, maybe reading it will make you into one.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 12, 2013
I am very much a fan of Greg Egan's hard scifi. Here he presents us with two stages in the development of society and intelligence. One world that has reached, discovered and understood all there is, and struggles with finding balance and reason to live their eternal lifes. And one that is just in the process of awakening and developing a thirst for knowledge (or so it seems).
The story of the inhabitants of the splinter feels like a visit to a more substantial version of Abbott's Flatland. Even though not 2-dimensional, there are parallels in how the reader is transported into a world that is not understood. Egan let's the reader discover the world together with the protagonists by using for example foreign words to describe their geometry that only slowly start to make sense.
And even though Egan tackles some difficult physics when he lets his heroes discover orbital motion, gravity and the space-time continuum, the user is not necessarily required to follow it all. Because the main message of the book is not the physics, but the pretty universal dilemma that too much knowledge doesn't make you happy.
The story of the inhabitants of the splinter feels like a visit to a more substantial version of Abbott's Flatland. Even though not 2-dimensional, there are parallels in how the reader is transported into a world that is not understood. Egan let's the reader discover the world together with the protagonists by using for example foreign words to describe their geometry that only slowly start to make sense.
And even though Egan tackles some difficult physics when he lets his heroes discover orbital motion, gravity and the space-time continuum, the user is not necessarily required to follow it all. Because the main message of the book is not the physics, but the pretty universal dilemma that too much knowledge doesn't make you happy.
June 26, 2013
(3.5 stars would be a better rating)
Egan's tale of an alien species, in the process of cultural transcendence triggered by resolute need, is really interesting. It's hard to complain about characterization when you're reading about aliens, their thoughts, actions and words, but Egan did a fairly good job with that. While the tiny world of the aliens, the Splinter, is fairly simplistic, I was 90% of the way through the story before I really had a good picture in my mind about its nature. Whether that was by design or not, I'm not sure. It distracted me a bit, but I forged on through the story and didn't let it bother me too much. The ending wasn't very satisfying, but I can't fault Egan for it, because I couldn't think of anything else he could have done. It would be easy for him to write another story with the same plot-line/characters, but I didn't sense it was intended that way (a practice I loath).
(A side note: in my mind, anyway, I could "sense" two different plot resolutions to the way the story was going, and I found it intriguing Egan didn't use either of them.)
I can definitely recommend this for true hard-sf fans.
Egan's tale of an alien species, in the process of cultural transcendence triggered by resolute need, is really interesting. It's hard to complain about characterization when you're reading about aliens, their thoughts, actions and words, but Egan did a fairly good job with that. While the tiny world of the aliens, the Splinter, is fairly simplistic, I was 90% of the way through the story before I really had a good picture in my mind about its nature. Whether that was by design or not, I'm not sure. It distracted me a bit, but I forged on through the story and didn't let it bother me too much. The ending wasn't very satisfying, but I can't fault Egan for it, because I couldn't think of anything else he could have done. It would be easy for him to write another story with the same plot-line/characters, but I didn't sense it was intended that way (a practice I loath).
(A side note: in my mind, anyway, I could "sense" two different plot resolutions to the way the story was going, and I found it intriguing Egan didn't use either of them.)
I can definitely recommend this for true hard-sf fans.
September 14, 2008
This is the hardest SciFi I've ever read.
It comes pretty close to a lyrical exploration of the physics of the General Theory of Relativity.
Not knowing much of the physics, I found some of it a little hard to follow, but overall it was fun, and it looks like on the author's webpage www.gregegan.net there's some nice supplemental material to help understand what's going on.
I'd heartily recommend the book to anyone with an interest in physics, but even ignoring that, it was still a fun, beautiful book.
I did have a bit of a problem with the ending... I felt like the Rakesh plot was not concluded in a very satisfactory (to me) way and the two plots didn't seem to come together in any meaningful way, which I kept expecting. Maybe I missed something though.
It comes pretty close to a lyrical exploration of the physics of the General Theory of Relativity.
Not knowing much of the physics, I found some of it a little hard to follow, but overall it was fun, and it looks like on the author's webpage www.gregegan.net there's some nice supplemental material to help understand what's going on.
I'd heartily recommend the book to anyone with an interest in physics, but even ignoring that, it was still a fun, beautiful book.
I did have a bit of a problem with the ending... I felt like the Rakesh plot was not concluded in a very satisfactory (to me) way and the two plots didn't seem to come together in any meaningful way, which I kept expecting. Maybe I missed something though.
August 5, 2015
Oh, Yeah! This is what I’ve been looking for: hard science fiction which clamps on to you like a pit bull and won’t let go.
Unlikely? Who cares? It’s a great story. In fact, two great stories interwoven.
The drought of engaging, mind-hurting hard SF is over. Maybe.
Love the cover art.
Unlikely? Who cares? It’s a great story. In fact, two great stories interwoven.
The drought of engaging, mind-hurting hard SF is over. Maybe.
Love the cover art.
August 11, 2017
Tedious descriptions of physics without any of the established nomenclature combined with an unsatisfying (nonexistent) ending. Maybe some would enjoy it, but not me.
April 5, 2021
This book was fascinating, unique, and ultimately frustrating.
I recognize that many of the things that frustrated me about it are personal; for example, there's a lot of high-level physics in the book, though explained in what are probably reasonably simple terms. But, because of how my brain works, in the absence of diagrams, I could not pick up what Greg was putting down. I was very happy for a character whenever they solved a problem with incomprehensible physicsbabble, but that part of the novel was ultimately pretty hollow for me.
On the other hand, I loved how unique the structuring was and, now that I'm a little more comfortable in a post-singularity universe, the worlds described herein were very compelling. I could have just used a little more attention to the world and the plot, and less to the very clearly delineated rules for that world.
I recognize that many of the things that frustrated me about it are personal; for example, there's a lot of high-level physics in the book, though explained in what are probably reasonably simple terms. But, because of how my brain works, in the absence of diagrams, I could not pick up what Greg was putting down. I was very happy for a character whenever they solved a problem with incomprehensible physicsbabble, but that part of the novel was ultimately pretty hollow for me.
On the other hand, I loved how unique the structuring was and, now that I'm a little more comfortable in a post-singularity universe, the worlds described herein were very compelling. I could have just used a little more attention to the world and the plot, and less to the very clearly delineated rules for that world.
October 22, 2010
Whew, that's heavy stuff, but fascinating. And yes, the two plot lines ARE connected, but pay attention at the end or you'll miss it.
May 3, 2019
Incandescence by Greg Egan will be your physics homework for this weekend… Oops, let me explain.
This is Greg Egan I’m reviewing. Where others excel at world building, this man dabbles in universe building. Where other authors will mention the notebooks at home with all the math to support what they created, Greg took his teacher’s lessons to heart of “show your work, don’t just write down the answer…” and puts some of that into his novels.
This story is set in the far future where “humanity” in the form of the Amalgam populates the worlds in the disk of the Milky Way galaxy while the core is populated and controlled by the Aloof.
People can travel via matter transmission from world to world but they can’t enter the area controlled by the Aloof. No one knows who they are. Neither side seems to pose a threat to the other. The Aloof even allow the citizens of the Amalgam to cross their territory but prevent visits.
The novel’s story alternates between two narratives. First is Rakesh and his companion being mysteriously allowed to enter the territory of the Aloof to solve a mystery that may herald the discovery of new life that is not part of either group. The second is of creatures that seem to be unaware of the greater universe. They live hard lives within a rocky world. We follow along as they slowly discover that their world and civilization are at risk of being destroyed!
The chapters following Rakesh were enjoyable to me as I liked their search and the God-like existence of these far future humans.
But the other half of the book was tough for me. We follow Roi and her people. Their search for understanding relies heavily on their language and cultural concepts. I felt like I was aceing the test when I realized something that Roi was working at and made the discovery with her. But I struggled with their gravity measurements as they mapped their world and never once did the author use up or down. Rather we the reader were given a circular diagram with four points labeled shomal, sard, junub, garm and the null lines that cut through their world where gravity was absent.
I peeked to the back of the book to the author’s notes. He has a website (notebooks are so 1960’s) that help explain the physics of this environment. He also provided apps you can run to see how objects fall or their trajectory when thrown to better understand the data the characters were collecting in trying to figure out where they lived…
You know the label of “Hard SF” vs “Soft SF?” Well, Mr Egan writes “Ultra-hard SF.” My GPA/SAT scores may not qualify me to enroll as a reader of Greg Egan novels.
This was one of those books that at the end I think I understood the final resolution but wanted to confirm it. I went online and I see that most of us came close to the same understanding. Like a class that comes together for a study group after that day’s lecture, we were circling the truth but all of us were in slightly different orbits.
In the parlance of taking a test, I’m happy that I think I got a B on my understanding of this book. 😉
I’ve read much of his work and have others still to read at home. So why do I tackle his novels if I struggle? Because I appreciate his universe building. He really is an amazing writer for his ideas. I enjoy the structure he creates and worry less on the story that he hangs off the scaffolding.
I’ll go and read some easier works now to keep my “reader” GPA up, but I’ll be enrolling again in his next book. I don’t want to waste the chance for the great education that he provides even if I won’t understand it all.
This is Greg Egan I’m reviewing. Where others excel at world building, this man dabbles in universe building. Where other authors will mention the notebooks at home with all the math to support what they created, Greg took his teacher’s lessons to heart of “show your work, don’t just write down the answer…” and puts some of that into his novels.
This story is set in the far future where “humanity” in the form of the Amalgam populates the worlds in the disk of the Milky Way galaxy while the core is populated and controlled by the Aloof.
People can travel via matter transmission from world to world but they can’t enter the area controlled by the Aloof. No one knows who they are. Neither side seems to pose a threat to the other. The Aloof even allow the citizens of the Amalgam to cross their territory but prevent visits.
The novel’s story alternates between two narratives. First is Rakesh and his companion being mysteriously allowed to enter the territory of the Aloof to solve a mystery that may herald the discovery of new life that is not part of either group. The second is of creatures that seem to be unaware of the greater universe. They live hard lives within a rocky world. We follow along as they slowly discover that their world and civilization are at risk of being destroyed!
The chapters following Rakesh were enjoyable to me as I liked their search and the God-like existence of these far future humans.
But the other half of the book was tough for me. We follow Roi and her people. Their search for understanding relies heavily on their language and cultural concepts. I felt like I was aceing the test when I realized something that Roi was working at and made the discovery with her. But I struggled with their gravity measurements as they mapped their world and never once did the author use up or down. Rather we the reader were given a circular diagram with four points labeled shomal, sard, junub, garm and the null lines that cut through their world where gravity was absent.
I peeked to the back of the book to the author’s notes. He has a website (notebooks are so 1960’s) that help explain the physics of this environment. He also provided apps you can run to see how objects fall or their trajectory when thrown to better understand the data the characters were collecting in trying to figure out where they lived…
You know the label of “Hard SF” vs “Soft SF?” Well, Mr Egan writes “Ultra-hard SF.” My GPA/SAT scores may not qualify me to enroll as a reader of Greg Egan novels.
This was one of those books that at the end I think I understood the final resolution but wanted to confirm it. I went online and I see that most of us came close to the same understanding. Like a class that comes together for a study group after that day’s lecture, we were circling the truth but all of us were in slightly different orbits.
In the parlance of taking a test, I’m happy that I think I got a B on my understanding of this book. 😉
I’ve read much of his work and have others still to read at home. So why do I tackle his novels if I struggle? Because I appreciate his universe building. He really is an amazing writer for his ideas. I enjoy the structure he creates and worry less on the story that he hangs off the scaffolding.
I’ll go and read some easier works now to keep my “reader” GPA up, but I’ll be enrolling again in his next book. I don’t want to waste the chance for the great education that he provides even if I won’t understand it all.
Read
February 10, 2024This book wasn't a priority for me. It was relatively short, so I used it to fill in between other things.
The chapters of the book alternate between two threads:
1) A galactic civilization has many species, but the center of the galaxy is controlled by one species, The Aloof, that heavily restricts access to it. Evidence has emerged suggesting there may be a place with DNA-based life there, and a human is allowed to investigate. However, the Aloof only provide limited information from which Rakesh must try to deduce where in the galactic core to search.
2) In Splinter, a world orbiting a neutron star, some inhabitants are trying to understand the events experienced and learn physics. The characters go on at great length, and at least in part using their own terminology, theorizing and testing the laws of physics. Many readers are likely to find this difficult.
The main characters of the two threads never meet. While Rakesh becomes friends with Zey at Splinter, Zey plays no role in Thread 2. At the end, Rakesh stays at Splinter planning to give knowledge to those who want it - but nothing makes clear whether this takes place at the same time as the events in Thread 2.
Readers are left with the impression of a highly advanced galactic civilization. However, this book doesn't seem to be a good choice for readers looking for a detailed portrayal of such a civilization. Most of the book either takes place at Splinter or is Rakesh's search to find it.
Splinter is portrayed as a world that has had periodic disasters which caused its people to lose their science and have to re-learn it. It is a world where the people have been genetically modified to be cooperative folks who don't seek knowledge or greater things except under special conditions. Thread 2 takes place at a time when a number of the people have taken to seeking knowledge and acting, and those are the characters focused on. In Thread 1, when Rakesh comes to Splinter, Zey is the only knowledge-seeker portrayed.
The chapters of the book alternate between two threads:
1) A galactic civilization has many species, but the center of the galaxy is controlled by one species, The Aloof, that heavily restricts access to it. Evidence has emerged suggesting there may be a place with DNA-based life there, and a human is allowed to investigate. However, the Aloof only provide limited information from which Rakesh must try to deduce where in the galactic core to search.
2) In Splinter, a world orbiting a neutron star, some inhabitants are trying to understand the events experienced and learn physics. The characters go on at great length, and at least in part using their own terminology, theorizing and testing the laws of physics. Many readers are likely to find this difficult.
The main characters of the two threads never meet. While Rakesh becomes friends with Zey at Splinter, Zey plays no role in Thread 2. At the end, Rakesh stays at Splinter planning to give knowledge to those who want it - but nothing makes clear whether this takes place at the same time as the events in Thread 2.
Readers are left with the impression of a highly advanced galactic civilization. However, this book doesn't seem to be a good choice for readers looking for a detailed portrayal of such a civilization. Most of the book either takes place at Splinter or is Rakesh's search to find it.
Splinter is portrayed as a world that has had periodic disasters which caused its people to lose their science and have to re-learn it. It is a world where the people have been genetically modified to be cooperative folks who don't seek knowledge or greater things except under special conditions. Thread 2 takes place at a time when a number of the people have taken to seeking knowledge and acting, and those are the characters focused on. In Thread 1, when Rakesh comes to Splinter, Zey is the only knowledge-seeker portrayed.
January 11, 2024
Although I’m used to be confused when it comes to Egan’s books, this one was more ideas-focused. Compared to his other works, I enjoyed this one a bit less.
November 7, 2018
review of
Greg Egan's Incandescence
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 5, 2018
For my complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
I 1st learned about Greg Egan when he was recommended to me by Pope Fred when I was in Australia in 2000. I then read Quarantine, Permutation City, Diaspora, & Terenesia — probably in faiirly quick succession, definitely before I started reviewing on Goodreads in the fall of 2007. I remember thinking that the 1st 2 were excellent & associating them w/ Greg Bear's Blood Music & lumping him together w/ Bear as a 'Hard Science' SciFi writer (Bear, it turns out, is much more diverse than just 'Hard Science'). I must not've run across his bks very often used or I'm sure I wd've read much more by him by now.
Incandescence is from 2008 & a near-the-front page lists 8 other bks by him, 4 of wch are the ones I've listed above. Perhaps he's not prolific. There's quite alot listed by him on Wikipedia including 10 novels & then other bks that're presumably also novels that're listed under "series" & a slew of short story collections, etc. I'm glad that there's more for me to read.
I have a friend who berates me for reading & reviewing SF here. She has a brother who's a scientist & seems to've taken a fancy to science in connection w/ that. I pointed out to her that SF is often written by scientists. Egan's wikipedia entry states that:
"Egan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Western Australia.
"He published his first work in 1983. He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind uploading, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism to religion. He often deals with complex technical material, like new physics and epistemology."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan
As such, he's an example of what I'm talking about even if a Bachelor's degree is worth little more than toilet paper in the US these days in this era of you-must-spend-a-life's-worth-of-income-on-your-higher-education-or-you-will-be-beneath-our-notice. Maybe Joan Slonczewski is a better example:
"Joan Lyn Slonczewski is an American microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Her books have twice earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel: A Door into Ocean (1987) and The Highest Frontier (2011). With John W. Foster she coauthors the textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science (W. W. Norton). She explores her ideas of biology, politics, and artificial intelligence at her blog Ultraphyte."
[..]
"She earned an A.B. in biology, magna cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1977. She completed a PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1982 and post-doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania studying calcium flux in leukocyte chemotaxis. Since 1984 she has taught at Kenyon College, taking sabbatical leaves at Princeton University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Slonczewski's research focuses on the pH (environmental) stress response in Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis using genetic techniques.
"Slonczewski teaches both biology and science fiction courses."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Sl...
At any rate, what I'm leading up to here is that Egan's Incandescence struck me as such hard hard science science fiction, despite elements of extreme fancifulness, that I have to wonder who wd read such a thing?! I did.
Sometimes I'm somewhat dismissive of visual artists whose scale is what seems to impress the rubes: 'Hey! I don't have any deep ideas at all so I'll just make the object BIG! That'll do the trick!' — & it usually does. But SF writers who write on a large scale have to back it up w/ detail that makes it something more than just splash. Egan works on a large scale:
"Lahl explained that she belonged to a synchronization clan. Its members roamed the galaxy, traveling alone, but had agreed to remain in contact by meeting regularly at prearranged locations, and doing their best to experience similar periods of subjective time between these reunions. She was on her way to the next such event, in a planetary system twelve hundred light years out from this node. Given that the meetings took place just once every hundred millennia, travel plans could be made well in advance, and there was no excuse for tardiness." - p 3
Egan's imagination gets into details that establish the 'otherness', from the human POV, of one of the main species that populate the story:
"At the edge of the flow of bodies a group of wretched males clung to the rock, begging to be relieved of their ripeness. Roi approached them to inspect their offerings. Each male had separated the two hard plates that met along the side of his body, to expose a long, soft cavity where five or six swollen globes sat dangling from heavy cords. Not all of the seed packets were plump and healthy, but Roi made a conscious effort not to be too finicky. With her own carapace split open along her left side, she used her mating claw to reach into the males' bodies, snip the globes free, and deposit them inside herself." - p 12
Blue balls? I guess the males don't have mating claws or they'd be able to jerk off those unwanted appendages.
The beginning of the novel sets a scene reminiscent enough of contemporary urban slacker culture to have the reader poetntially feel comfortable — but 2 of the characters decide to pursue a potential scientific breakthrough that Lahl has pointed them toward & decide to leave their existence in favor something that might never return them to the familiar. Given that this is partially all happening in a malleable cyber-space their friends give them a farewell that dramatically stresses the seriousness of the decision they're making:
"Two robust, seasoned-looking planks lay on the deck, neatly slotted through a convenient gap below the guard rail to protrude over the edge, Rakesh supposed they might be carried on ships like this for the sake of repairs. That prospect struck him as somewhat cheerier than if they'd been brought along with only their present purpose in mind." - p 22
They cyberwalk the cyberplanks.
The novel follows a fairly standard structure that alternates between 2 disparate stories that eventually merge. There's Rakesh in one narrative & Roi in the other:
"Upon waking, Roi's first thought was that she didn't understand the wind. In the garmside, it blew in from the Incandescence at the sharq edge and battered its way through the porous rock of the Splinter, finally escaping at the opposite edge. In the sardside, the flow was reversed. Between these opposing winds lay the Calm. The pattern of the wind was something related to the pattern of weights, but the nature of the connection was far from obvious: the wind certainly didn't blow the way things fell. The Null Line lay in the middle of the Calm, but the Calm extended far beyond it, encompassing a whole plane that stretched out in the shomal and junub directions, as well as the Null Line's rarb and sharq." - p 32
Five pages earlier there's a diagram of an octagon w/ rounded corners that has shomal as north, sard as east, junub as south, garm as west, & null as the middle. Curved lines seem to depict lines of force, presumably wind lines. Understanding these directions becomes key to following the plot.
Rakesh & Parantham, his partner in their exploratory endeavor, exist in a state of extremely advanced flexibility. In contrast, Roi & her fellows are on a very narrow evolutionary path. As R & P seek their goal, they have the option of changing shape to fit in better w/ whatever worlds they pass thru:
"When he met up with Parantham outside the town's guest shelter, he found that she'd gone one step further.
""I see you've made yourself at home," he teased her.
""Flesh is flesh," she hissed through her quad mouth. "The shape makes no difference to me."
"Rakesh had perceived her as human-shaped back at the node, but her précis had always made it clear that she possessed no innate somatic self-perception. Born in a scape, descended from a software that had ultimately been authored—rather than translated from any kind of organic intelligence—she seemed to relate to bodies the way Rakesh did to vehicles." - p 40
This bk cd be sd to be 'about' the incredible capacity of the mind to puzzle out just about anything — including its environment.
""The center of the Splinter must be following its natural path—otherwise objects at the Null Line would not be weightless. On the garmside, though, the circle will be slightly smaller, and on the sardside, slightly larger. The natural motion that corresponds to these circles must involve slightly different orbital periods, but the Splinter is a solid object, it has to move as a whole. Because every part of it must complete an orbit in the same time, there's a mismatch between the speed at which things are moving and the speed of a naturally circular orbit. Wherever there's a mismatch like that, the natural path can't be circular any more.["]" - p 54
Got that? If you're an astronomer &/or a mathematician, the central struggles for knowledge may click w/ you. If you're a reader looking for an adventure story you'll still be able to find something to grasp but you'll be missing alot. Personally, I think it's well worth the effort to read Incandescence regardless.
Roi's culture is in a rut, a rut that its inquiring minds are about to break it out of.
"Zak had set them a wildly ambitious target: to create something small enough for a traveler to carry anywhere in the Splinter, oblivious to the varying weights and accurate enough to be trusted for thirty-six shifts without recalibration. After trying out many unwieldy designs, they had devised a system in which two spiral coils of metal ribbon were joined at their centers to small shafts. The first and larger of the coils was tightened by turning its shaft with a lever, and then the force as it unwound was eked out slowly and employed to feed a gentle, to-and-fro rocking of the other coil's shaft." - p 91
Some people reinvent the wheel, others reinvent the watch. The importance of accurate measuring comes to the fore. Roi's people have a very limited conception of what their environment is. They mostly exist to keep on keepin' on. What if they're inside a spacecraft after having since lost the knowledge of what a spacecraft is or what's outside it?
""We cut a tunnel," Bard replied, "through the sardside. Maybe two or three tunnels. If the Splinter now feels roughly the same force from the wind on the garmside as it does on the sardside, we can shift the balance by letting some of the sardside wind pass right through, delivering no force."" - p 97
Tunneling in a spaceship, if that's what it is, mining the metal, might turn out to be a bad idea. Meanwhile, the 2 plotlines grow closer.
""So this is their graveyard," he said.
""We don't know that," Parantham replied. "We know that the Steelmakers built at least one interplanetary probe. At some point they might have built star ships, or engineering spores. They might have left this world behind long before it was broken up."" - p 103
Much of the more grandiose visionary SF imagines a time when astronomical events are poised to annihilate the puny lifeforms that occupy planets. These stories take an enormous imagination to conceive of & to somehow resolve.
"He could easily picture his own village on Shab-e-Noor with a dark pinprick crossing the sky, the ground rumbling, an ominous lightness. Of course, that couldn't happen in the Age of the Amalgam; there was no conceivable cosmic threat out in the disc that could not be detected and neutralized. Such vulnerability had been relegated to history." - p 104
Imagine. People on Earth in the 21st century have worries like whether they'll be sextorted — we haven't had to face the imminent doom of the planet.. or the solar system.. or the galaxy. Now imagine that problems on that scale are solved. You've come a long way, baby. What if there are creatures as large in relation to us as we are in relation to atoms? What if they're about to split a proton off to see what happens? It cd get messy.. — but that's not what this bk is about. Parantham & Rakesh are looking for something that Lahl has led them to believe in. The big find.
"A few hours later they had the answer, from their telescopes rather than from their probes. Near the edge of their belt, an object some six hundred meters across with a highly atypical spectrum had been found orbiting among the rocks. The telescope's image showed a gray ellipsoid, pitted and corroded, but clearly too regular to be an asteroid itself. Spectroscopy revealed that its surface contained molecular filaments, carbon nanotubes with elaborate chemical modifications that both strengthened them and protected them against the stellar wind." - p 107
Not only is Roi's culture (re)inventing the clock they're trying to square the circle (similar to the early days of trying to find Pi).
"When Tan analyzed a path on a curved surface, he broke it up into a multitude of tiny, straight line segments of equal length." - p 115
"["]the best way to think about curved geometry is to imagine it as lots of little flat pieces stuck together. I mean, a cube is just six flat pieces, but it's not that far from the shape of a sphere. And if you use more pieces, you can get closer."" - p 219
Meanwhile, R & P are navigating difficulties at a much more astronomical level but at the same time a much easier one thanks to the knowledge & tools that their civilization provides them.
"Toward the center of the Nuclear Stellar Disk the density of stars began a precipitous climb. Within a cluster two hundred light years wide a billion stars sped along a complex tangle of orbits, and the deeper into this swarm you dived the more crowded and violent it became. To Rakesh, it brought to mind the image of a nest of furious ants caught in a steep subsidence, kept from falling into the depths only by the sheer energy of their motion." - p 124
Yes, Nuclear Stellar Disks are a thing outside of Egan's considerable imagination. If I understand correctly, they're the cores of spiral galaxies. You can read about them in general here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002ApJ... .
Roi's society is changing as more of her people become compelled by the anomolous scientific research that's growing.
"Roi said, "So you've left your old teams now? You've formed a new one, and you're looking for recruits?"
""Not exactly," Cot replied, working briskly to ensure that the spring was fully wound before the darkness returned. "We still don't know what's the best thing to do. We'll form a team if that's necessary, but we're willing to join an existing one if they can make a good case that they know what's going on and that they're doing something useful about it."
"Every time Roi thought she could no longer be shocked, these people outdid themselves. It had taken a great struggle for her to tear herself free of her work team to join Zak." - pp 143-144
The plotlines get even closer.
"Rakesh woke. He had not imagined the claim about the Ark; the telescope's report had entered his skull and the discovery had seeped into the dream's scenario." - p 148
& Roi & co's science quickly becomes more visionary & sophisticated. This is a time of a paradigm shift.
"Ruz pondered this. "If they're very distant from us," he said, "then the natural paths of the light that's reaching us from them might be affected by the geometry. This isn't like seeing something that's right in front of us, when we can reach out and confirm by touch that what we're seeing is what's really there. If the geometry can bend the Splinter's natural path to wrap it around the Hub, why shouldn't it bend light as well?"
""Ah." Roi couldn't see how this could explain the whole strange vision that the void presented, but it did make some sense. They'd been used to thinking of light as traveling in straight lines, like a rapidly flung stone crossing the Null Chamber before anything could divert it. It seemed the void was too big, and even light was too slow, for the comparison to be sustained." - p 164
Yes, at some point we have to consider that 'light might be too slow' for something.
"She chose a bright light that would be easy to follow, and aimed the tracker toward it. It was only halfway through the measurement, when the times for the successive occultations were beginning to diverge from those she'd seen before for this part of the band, that it struck her that she should have noticed this bright object before. She recognized the pattern of lights around it, and she was sure that in the past they had not included this luminous interloper.
"Which meant what?
"Perhaps this object was not as distant as the others. It could be orbiting the Hub closely enough for its own independent motion to show up against the synchronized rotation of the background.
"Could this be their lost half, the other Splinter?" - p 165
Maybe it's their soul-mate.
Roi's people develop a long-distance communication system based on light reflected off of pieces of metal in their tunnels.
"Roi was bemused. "Words need drumming or writing. Where are the words?"
""We agree on a list of simple words," Jos said. "Then we divide the list in half, in half again, and so on, until the last half is a single word. Tilting the metal once can tell us which half of the list the word is in, twice which half of that half-list, and so on."" - p 180
Ingenious.
Roi begins to intuit the possibility that there are genetically inherited traits.
"The simple truth was, she wanted the two of them to have children together. As many as possible.
"She turned the baffling notion over in her mind. Why? He was a good teacher, but he didn't have to be the father of a hatchling, she didn't have to be the mother, in order for him to teach it. Did she imagine, absurdly, that their individual skills had somehow seeped into their seed and eggs, and would collide within their children with a preternatural ability to endure the struggles ahead?" - p 183
Rakesh finally infilitrates the target 'ark' in an avatar body chosen to blend in w/ the existing life-forms & attempts to communicate.
"Zey said, "Forgive me, but I couldn't help noticing the differences inside you."
""There's nothing to forgive. I know how strange my appearance must be."
"Saf said, "Ra tells us he was hatched 'outside the world'. This is not his real body, he just wears it to get along with us." Rakesh still couldn't quite gauge the intent behind her tone of amusement; he didn't know if she was inviting Zey to mock him, or imploring her to deal gently with his delusions.
""Are you our cousin, then?" Zey asked.
"Rakesh felt goose bumps rise on the back of his arms, back in the control room; there were some things he simply wasn't equipped to feel viscerally through the avatar itself." - p 191
For my complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
Greg Egan's Incandescence
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 5, 2018
For my complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
I 1st learned about Greg Egan when he was recommended to me by Pope Fred when I was in Australia in 2000. I then read Quarantine, Permutation City, Diaspora, & Terenesia — probably in faiirly quick succession, definitely before I started reviewing on Goodreads in the fall of 2007. I remember thinking that the 1st 2 were excellent & associating them w/ Greg Bear's Blood Music & lumping him together w/ Bear as a 'Hard Science' SciFi writer (Bear, it turns out, is much more diverse than just 'Hard Science'). I must not've run across his bks very often used or I'm sure I wd've read much more by him by now.
Incandescence is from 2008 & a near-the-front page lists 8 other bks by him, 4 of wch are the ones I've listed above. Perhaps he's not prolific. There's quite alot listed by him on Wikipedia including 10 novels & then other bks that're presumably also novels that're listed under "series" & a slew of short story collections, etc. I'm glad that there's more for me to read.
I have a friend who berates me for reading & reviewing SF here. She has a brother who's a scientist & seems to've taken a fancy to science in connection w/ that. I pointed out to her that SF is often written by scientists. Egan's wikipedia entry states that:
"Egan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Western Australia.
"He published his first work in 1983. He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind uploading, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism to religion. He often deals with complex technical material, like new physics and epistemology."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan
As such, he's an example of what I'm talking about even if a Bachelor's degree is worth little more than toilet paper in the US these days in this era of you-must-spend-a-life's-worth-of-income-on-your-higher-education-or-you-will-be-beneath-our-notice. Maybe Joan Slonczewski is a better example:
"Joan Lyn Slonczewski is an American microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Her books have twice earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel: A Door into Ocean (1987) and The Highest Frontier (2011). With John W. Foster she coauthors the textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science (W. W. Norton). She explores her ideas of biology, politics, and artificial intelligence at her blog Ultraphyte."
[..]
"She earned an A.B. in biology, magna cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1977. She completed a PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1982 and post-doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania studying calcium flux in leukocyte chemotaxis. Since 1984 she has taught at Kenyon College, taking sabbatical leaves at Princeton University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Slonczewski's research focuses on the pH (environmental) stress response in Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis using genetic techniques.
"Slonczewski teaches both biology and science fiction courses."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Sl...
At any rate, what I'm leading up to here is that Egan's Incandescence struck me as such hard hard science science fiction, despite elements of extreme fancifulness, that I have to wonder who wd read such a thing?! I did.
Sometimes I'm somewhat dismissive of visual artists whose scale is what seems to impress the rubes: 'Hey! I don't have any deep ideas at all so I'll just make the object BIG! That'll do the trick!' — & it usually does. But SF writers who write on a large scale have to back it up w/ detail that makes it something more than just splash. Egan works on a large scale:
"Lahl explained that she belonged to a synchronization clan. Its members roamed the galaxy, traveling alone, but had agreed to remain in contact by meeting regularly at prearranged locations, and doing their best to experience similar periods of subjective time between these reunions. She was on her way to the next such event, in a planetary system twelve hundred light years out from this node. Given that the meetings took place just once every hundred millennia, travel plans could be made well in advance, and there was no excuse for tardiness." - p 3
Egan's imagination gets into details that establish the 'otherness', from the human POV, of one of the main species that populate the story:
"At the edge of the flow of bodies a group of wretched males clung to the rock, begging to be relieved of their ripeness. Roi approached them to inspect their offerings. Each male had separated the two hard plates that met along the side of his body, to expose a long, soft cavity where five or six swollen globes sat dangling from heavy cords. Not all of the seed packets were plump and healthy, but Roi made a conscious effort not to be too finicky. With her own carapace split open along her left side, she used her mating claw to reach into the males' bodies, snip the globes free, and deposit them inside herself." - p 12
Blue balls? I guess the males don't have mating claws or they'd be able to jerk off those unwanted appendages.
The beginning of the novel sets a scene reminiscent enough of contemporary urban slacker culture to have the reader poetntially feel comfortable — but 2 of the characters decide to pursue a potential scientific breakthrough that Lahl has pointed them toward & decide to leave their existence in favor something that might never return them to the familiar. Given that this is partially all happening in a malleable cyber-space their friends give them a farewell that dramatically stresses the seriousness of the decision they're making:
"Two robust, seasoned-looking planks lay on the deck, neatly slotted through a convenient gap below the guard rail to protrude over the edge, Rakesh supposed they might be carried on ships like this for the sake of repairs. That prospect struck him as somewhat cheerier than if they'd been brought along with only their present purpose in mind." - p 22
They cyberwalk the cyberplanks.
The novel follows a fairly standard structure that alternates between 2 disparate stories that eventually merge. There's Rakesh in one narrative & Roi in the other:
"Upon waking, Roi's first thought was that she didn't understand the wind. In the garmside, it blew in from the Incandescence at the sharq edge and battered its way through the porous rock of the Splinter, finally escaping at the opposite edge. In the sardside, the flow was reversed. Between these opposing winds lay the Calm. The pattern of the wind was something related to the pattern of weights, but the nature of the connection was far from obvious: the wind certainly didn't blow the way things fell. The Null Line lay in the middle of the Calm, but the Calm extended far beyond it, encompassing a whole plane that stretched out in the shomal and junub directions, as well as the Null Line's rarb and sharq." - p 32
Five pages earlier there's a diagram of an octagon w/ rounded corners that has shomal as north, sard as east, junub as south, garm as west, & null as the middle. Curved lines seem to depict lines of force, presumably wind lines. Understanding these directions becomes key to following the plot.
Rakesh & Parantham, his partner in their exploratory endeavor, exist in a state of extremely advanced flexibility. In contrast, Roi & her fellows are on a very narrow evolutionary path. As R & P seek their goal, they have the option of changing shape to fit in better w/ whatever worlds they pass thru:
"When he met up with Parantham outside the town's guest shelter, he found that she'd gone one step further.
""I see you've made yourself at home," he teased her.
""Flesh is flesh," she hissed through her quad mouth. "The shape makes no difference to me."
"Rakesh had perceived her as human-shaped back at the node, but her précis had always made it clear that she possessed no innate somatic self-perception. Born in a scape, descended from a software that had ultimately been authored—rather than translated from any kind of organic intelligence—she seemed to relate to bodies the way Rakesh did to vehicles." - p 40
This bk cd be sd to be 'about' the incredible capacity of the mind to puzzle out just about anything — including its environment.
""The center of the Splinter must be following its natural path—otherwise objects at the Null Line would not be weightless. On the garmside, though, the circle will be slightly smaller, and on the sardside, slightly larger. The natural motion that corresponds to these circles must involve slightly different orbital periods, but the Splinter is a solid object, it has to move as a whole. Because every part of it must complete an orbit in the same time, there's a mismatch between the speed at which things are moving and the speed of a naturally circular orbit. Wherever there's a mismatch like that, the natural path can't be circular any more.["]" - p 54
Got that? If you're an astronomer &/or a mathematician, the central struggles for knowledge may click w/ you. If you're a reader looking for an adventure story you'll still be able to find something to grasp but you'll be missing alot. Personally, I think it's well worth the effort to read Incandescence regardless.
Roi's culture is in a rut, a rut that its inquiring minds are about to break it out of.
"Zak had set them a wildly ambitious target: to create something small enough for a traveler to carry anywhere in the Splinter, oblivious to the varying weights and accurate enough to be trusted for thirty-six shifts without recalibration. After trying out many unwieldy designs, they had devised a system in which two spiral coils of metal ribbon were joined at their centers to small shafts. The first and larger of the coils was tightened by turning its shaft with a lever, and then the force as it unwound was eked out slowly and employed to feed a gentle, to-and-fro rocking of the other coil's shaft." - p 91
Some people reinvent the wheel, others reinvent the watch. The importance of accurate measuring comes to the fore. Roi's people have a very limited conception of what their environment is. They mostly exist to keep on keepin' on. What if they're inside a spacecraft after having since lost the knowledge of what a spacecraft is or what's outside it?
""We cut a tunnel," Bard replied, "through the sardside. Maybe two or three tunnels. If the Splinter now feels roughly the same force from the wind on the garmside as it does on the sardside, we can shift the balance by letting some of the sardside wind pass right through, delivering no force."" - p 97
Tunneling in a spaceship, if that's what it is, mining the metal, might turn out to be a bad idea. Meanwhile, the 2 plotlines grow closer.
""So this is their graveyard," he said.
""We don't know that," Parantham replied. "We know that the Steelmakers built at least one interplanetary probe. At some point they might have built star ships, or engineering spores. They might have left this world behind long before it was broken up."" - p 103
Much of the more grandiose visionary SF imagines a time when astronomical events are poised to annihilate the puny lifeforms that occupy planets. These stories take an enormous imagination to conceive of & to somehow resolve.
"He could easily picture his own village on Shab-e-Noor with a dark pinprick crossing the sky, the ground rumbling, an ominous lightness. Of course, that couldn't happen in the Age of the Amalgam; there was no conceivable cosmic threat out in the disc that could not be detected and neutralized. Such vulnerability had been relegated to history." - p 104
Imagine. People on Earth in the 21st century have worries like whether they'll be sextorted — we haven't had to face the imminent doom of the planet.. or the solar system.. or the galaxy. Now imagine that problems on that scale are solved. You've come a long way, baby. What if there are creatures as large in relation to us as we are in relation to atoms? What if they're about to split a proton off to see what happens? It cd get messy.. — but that's not what this bk is about. Parantham & Rakesh are looking for something that Lahl has led them to believe in. The big find.
"A few hours later they had the answer, from their telescopes rather than from their probes. Near the edge of their belt, an object some six hundred meters across with a highly atypical spectrum had been found orbiting among the rocks. The telescope's image showed a gray ellipsoid, pitted and corroded, but clearly too regular to be an asteroid itself. Spectroscopy revealed that its surface contained molecular filaments, carbon nanotubes with elaborate chemical modifications that both strengthened them and protected them against the stellar wind." - p 107
Not only is Roi's culture (re)inventing the clock they're trying to square the circle (similar to the early days of trying to find Pi).
"When Tan analyzed a path on a curved surface, he broke it up into a multitude of tiny, straight line segments of equal length." - p 115
"["]the best way to think about curved geometry is to imagine it as lots of little flat pieces stuck together. I mean, a cube is just six flat pieces, but it's not that far from the shape of a sphere. And if you use more pieces, you can get closer."" - p 219
Meanwhile, R & P are navigating difficulties at a much more astronomical level but at the same time a much easier one thanks to the knowledge & tools that their civilization provides them.
"Toward the center of the Nuclear Stellar Disk the density of stars began a precipitous climb. Within a cluster two hundred light years wide a billion stars sped along a complex tangle of orbits, and the deeper into this swarm you dived the more crowded and violent it became. To Rakesh, it brought to mind the image of a nest of furious ants caught in a steep subsidence, kept from falling into the depths only by the sheer energy of their motion." - p 124
Yes, Nuclear Stellar Disks are a thing outside of Egan's considerable imagination. If I understand correctly, they're the cores of spiral galaxies. You can read about them in general here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002ApJ... .
Roi's society is changing as more of her people become compelled by the anomolous scientific research that's growing.
"Roi said, "So you've left your old teams now? You've formed a new one, and you're looking for recruits?"
""Not exactly," Cot replied, working briskly to ensure that the spring was fully wound before the darkness returned. "We still don't know what's the best thing to do. We'll form a team if that's necessary, but we're willing to join an existing one if they can make a good case that they know what's going on and that they're doing something useful about it."
"Every time Roi thought she could no longer be shocked, these people outdid themselves. It had taken a great struggle for her to tear herself free of her work team to join Zak." - pp 143-144
The plotlines get even closer.
"Rakesh woke. He had not imagined the claim about the Ark; the telescope's report had entered his skull and the discovery had seeped into the dream's scenario." - p 148
& Roi & co's science quickly becomes more visionary & sophisticated. This is a time of a paradigm shift.
"Ruz pondered this. "If they're very distant from us," he said, "then the natural paths of the light that's reaching us from them might be affected by the geometry. This isn't like seeing something that's right in front of us, when we can reach out and confirm by touch that what we're seeing is what's really there. If the geometry can bend the Splinter's natural path to wrap it around the Hub, why shouldn't it bend light as well?"
""Ah." Roi couldn't see how this could explain the whole strange vision that the void presented, but it did make some sense. They'd been used to thinking of light as traveling in straight lines, like a rapidly flung stone crossing the Null Chamber before anything could divert it. It seemed the void was too big, and even light was too slow, for the comparison to be sustained." - p 164
Yes, at some point we have to consider that 'light might be too slow' for something.
"She chose a bright light that would be easy to follow, and aimed the tracker toward it. It was only halfway through the measurement, when the times for the successive occultations were beginning to diverge from those she'd seen before for this part of the band, that it struck her that she should have noticed this bright object before. She recognized the pattern of lights around it, and she was sure that in the past they had not included this luminous interloper.
"Which meant what?
"Perhaps this object was not as distant as the others. It could be orbiting the Hub closely enough for its own independent motion to show up against the synchronized rotation of the background.
"Could this be their lost half, the other Splinter?" - p 165
Maybe it's their soul-mate.
Roi's people develop a long-distance communication system based on light reflected off of pieces of metal in their tunnels.
"Roi was bemused. "Words need drumming or writing. Where are the words?"
""We agree on a list of simple words," Jos said. "Then we divide the list in half, in half again, and so on, until the last half is a single word. Tilting the metal once can tell us which half of the list the word is in, twice which half of that half-list, and so on."" - p 180
Ingenious.
Roi begins to intuit the possibility that there are genetically inherited traits.
"The simple truth was, she wanted the two of them to have children together. As many as possible.
"She turned the baffling notion over in her mind. Why? He was a good teacher, but he didn't have to be the father of a hatchling, she didn't have to be the mother, in order for him to teach it. Did she imagine, absurdly, that their individual skills had somehow seeped into their seed and eggs, and would collide within their children with a preternatural ability to endure the struggles ahead?" - p 183
Rakesh finally infilitrates the target 'ark' in an avatar body chosen to blend in w/ the existing life-forms & attempts to communicate.
"Zey said, "Forgive me, but I couldn't help noticing the differences inside you."
""There's nothing to forgive. I know how strange my appearance must be."
"Saf said, "Ra tells us he was hatched 'outside the world'. This is not his real body, he just wears it to get along with us." Rakesh still couldn't quite gauge the intent behind her tone of amusement; he didn't know if she was inviting Zey to mock him, or imploring her to deal gently with his delusions.
""Are you our cousin, then?" Zey asked.
"Rakesh felt goose bumps rise on the back of his arms, back in the control room; there were some things he simply wasn't equipped to feel viscerally through the avatar itself." - p 191
For my complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
October 15, 2012
Da: http://www.webalice.it/michele.castel... .... Incandescence � indubbiamente un buon romanzo, anche se non certamente un capolavoro. Un romanzo di hard SF, con molta, forse troppa, scienza e una dose ragionevole di fantasia. La storia � flebile, con un finale che non � chiuso, come se ci potesse essere un seguito. Ma sicuramente non � la storia l'aspetto migliore di questo romanzo, bens� la descrizione delle diverse societ� che si vengono ad incontrare. La prima � la societ� dell'Amalgama, che si � creata nell'ampia zona dei bracci della Via Lattea, dove le stelle erano separate da anni luce, ma la panspermia di diversi replicatori biochimici, tra cui il DNA, avevano diffuso la vita ovunque. Una societ� che ha ormai superato il legame con uno specifico corpo fisico e pu� trasferirsi ovunque come informazione codificata, acquisendo ogni forma fisica a piacere. Una societ� di immortali senza ormai molti stimoli, perch� il limite relativistico della velocit� della luce li limita all'interno della Galassia, che ormai conoscono quasi completamente, nonostante i tempi necessari, misurati in millenni, necessari per spostarsi lungo la rete che ricopre tutta la parte esterna della Galassia stessa. La seconda � la civilt� dei Superbi, che occupano il Rigonfiamento, cio� la parte centrale della galassia, hanno una propria rete di comunicazione separata da quella dell'Amalgama e rifiutano sistematicamente ogni contatto diretto. Il passaggio attraverso il Rigonfiamento � normalmente possibile solo attraverso l'uso di chiavi di codifica quantistiche che garantiscono l'inviolabilit� dei dati personali. Il ritrovamento di un pezzo di meteora vecchio di 50 milioni di anni con tracce di DNA di tipo sconosciuto spinge i Superbi ad avvertire l'Amalgama ed invitare i "parenti" derivati da DNA a cercarne l'origine, permettendo l'ingresso nel rigonfiamento ad un individuo discendente dalla razza umana ed ad un suo compagno di origine "artificiale". Una civilt� basata sul DNA e sviluppatasi nella zona del Rigonfiamento, dove l'addensamento di stelle rende la vita delle stesse molto breve, � la terza societ�, e sicuramente la pi� interessante. Non avendo ancora sviluppato il volo interstellare, avevano visto il loro sistema solare stravolto dal passaggio di un buco nero. Si erano allora sviluppati in una razza capace di sopravvivere in un ciottolo di alta tecnologia capace di galleggiare nell'onda di particelle proveniente dall'orizzonte degli eventi del buco nero, traendo sostentamento da quello stesso flusso. Una societ� capace di vivere per 50 milioni di anni in quelle condizioni, ma anche capace di reagire ad eventuali situazioni critiche. La descrizione di come una parte di questi esseri riescono a sviluppare una conoscenza dell'universo in cui vivono, fortemente relativistico, dopo un incidente che ne mette in pericolo la sopravvivenza � la parte maggiore del romanzo, e scorre parallela alla "ricerca" da parte delle persone dell'Amalgama. Questa � contemporaneamente la parte pi� interessante e anche la parte pi� noiosa, dipendendo dalla capacit� del lettore di seguire gli "esperimenti" sul sasso in orbita al buco nero che portano a capire la sua dinamica spazio-temporale. Molti si sono lamentati dell'eccesso di descrizioni scientifiche, e della scarsezza della storia, che � in effetti tutta qui, perch� l'incontro tra le due civilt� � solo parziale, il finale � totalmente monco, presupponendo un seguito. Ma la mia opinione � che sia in ogni caso una lettura soddisfacente, un romanzo in cui la scienza � trattata in modo coerente, senza eccessive estrapolazioni, ed in cui � presentato un futuro molto remoto che � per� anche molto possibile, supponendo che l'umanit� possa sopravvivere tanto a lungo. Tutto sommato, niente di eccezionale, ma una buona lettura con diversi spunti scientifici estremamente interessanti.
May 7, 2016
OK, I pretty much love what Egan is doing... period... I've started with The Orthogonal trilogy which is basically about alternate universe and its intelligent inhabitants gradually discovering its somewhat different physical laws... I had to make quite a lot of notes and reread many parts just to get through it with some satisfying comprehension... and that one had quite a lot of drama and social conflict in it (so you probably can just skim through all the complicated stuff and still take quite a lot from it although I wouldn't really recommend this approach).
Then there are these books dealing with not so distant vision of the future (categorized here on Goodreads mostly under Subjective Cosmology) - these are probably the most approachable to simple reading... they can still be pretty difficult but the ideas gets through with minimal effort and there is A LOT of drama involved...
At last there are a few books and stories dealing with this far far away future through the eyes of citizens of this meta-civilization called Amalgam. These are mostly focused on speculating about some interesting theoretical models and sort of transcendent morality... usually in a vary interesting way, actually... and all that I have read till now had some drama happening that I had just no idea would be there... and it was pretty great.
Well, this Incandescence novel is pretty much half an Amalgam thing and half aliens struggling to figure out their geometry of space-time to survive some approaching threat. And just to warn any possible new readers: there's next to no social conflict happening at all. There's just no time for it in this novel's scale (300 pages). There is a whole lot of abstraction and drawing involved, though... Don't expect characters to run away from catastrophic scenarios like in movies - they will be just figuring it out most of the time... and don't really expect them to fight each other in the name of different approaches - you will rather gradually come to understand why such a behavior is unlikely...
Actually, you should read a short story called: "Riding The Crocodile" first (you can find it in the Oceanic collection (that I know of)) and probably some other books by Greg Egan to figure out if you can even enjoy such things (this was supposed to be encouragement).
Then there are these books dealing with not so distant vision of the future (categorized here on Goodreads mostly under Subjective Cosmology) - these are probably the most approachable to simple reading... they can still be pretty difficult but the ideas gets through with minimal effort and there is A LOT of drama involved...
At last there are a few books and stories dealing with this far far away future through the eyes of citizens of this meta-civilization called Amalgam. These are mostly focused on speculating about some interesting theoretical models and sort of transcendent morality... usually in a vary interesting way, actually... and all that I have read till now had some drama happening that I had just no idea would be there... and it was pretty great.
Well, this Incandescence novel is pretty much half an Amalgam thing and half aliens struggling to figure out their geometry of space-time to survive some approaching threat. And just to warn any possible new readers: there's next to no social conflict happening at all. There's just no time for it in this novel's scale (300 pages). There is a whole lot of abstraction and drawing involved, though... Don't expect characters to run away from catastrophic scenarios like in movies - they will be just figuring it out most of the time... and don't really expect them to fight each other in the name of different approaches - you will rather gradually come to understand why such a behavior is unlikely...
Actually, you should read a short story called: "Riding The Crocodile" first (you can find it in the Oceanic collection (that I know of)) and probably some other books by Greg Egan to figure out if you can even enjoy such things (this was supposed to be encouragement).
February 21, 2015
Greg Egan's Incandescence is a hard sci-fi novel about a large expanse of space called the Amalgam, filled with many different sentient species, and the center of it (the bulge) which is occupied by a group called the Aloof. The Aloof allow traveling through their territory, but don't really associate themselves with the rest of the species in the world. The story follows both Rakesh (a traveler set on confronting the Aloof about some information from a human DNA related new world) and Roi, an alien species beginning to question the physics of their world and embark on the mysteries of the universe.
At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of Roi’s part of the story, but I realized her purpose quickly. Despite the tone of Roi’s chapters (which are more about learning and discovering the physics of her world and how things work), I really found her quest for knowledge enjoyable to read. Roi and Zak work together in a harmonious way that is really a pleasure to read, at first.
I always found Rakesh’s chapters to be a little more exciting, maybe because he was setting out on a different type of adventure, rather than one that was completely dedicated to knowledge. He was looking for information, however, he was also traveling and meeting new people. I found the technology of the Amalgam to be interesting, especially the ability for the species to co-exist in virtual forms when stopped at certain locations.
However, about halfway through I realized I was really bored and trudging through this one so I had to put it down. I was skimming through all of Roi’s stuff because all it reminded me of was sitting in a physics classroom; there was no character development, nothing interesting to make me care about her or Zak. And, then Rakesh’s storyline was just about as slow moving. I wanted to finish, but for such a short book it was taking me way too long to do it.
At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of Roi’s part of the story, but I realized her purpose quickly. Despite the tone of Roi’s chapters (which are more about learning and discovering the physics of her world and how things work), I really found her quest for knowledge enjoyable to read. Roi and Zak work together in a harmonious way that is really a pleasure to read, at first.
I always found Rakesh’s chapters to be a little more exciting, maybe because he was setting out on a different type of adventure, rather than one that was completely dedicated to knowledge. He was looking for information, however, he was also traveling and meeting new people. I found the technology of the Amalgam to be interesting, especially the ability for the species to co-exist in virtual forms when stopped at certain locations.
However, about halfway through I realized I was really bored and trudging through this one so I had to put it down. I was skimming through all of Roi’s stuff because all it reminded me of was sitting in a physics classroom; there was no character development, nothing interesting to make me care about her or Zak. And, then Rakesh’s storyline was just about as slow moving. I wanted to finish, but for such a short book it was taking me way too long to do it.
May 26, 2015
I read Egan's Orthogonal trilogy before this, although this was written several years earlier. This book shares the main premise with those. Because of impending catastrophe to their home worlds, aliens who have a very different physiology from us, but implausibly similar emotional lives, figure out whole fields of physics from scratch in one generation. In Orthogonal, it was a universe with different physical laws than ours. Here, the physics is about more-or-less (I understand very little of it) hypothetical conditions near the center of the galaxy and close up to black holes and neutron stars. I am not a fan of books where the characters are little more than a device to explain the science in detail, but again with Egan, it was worth it. In fact, I liked this one better.
This book also has an advanced galactic civilization with a parallel story of a DNA-based (human-descended) member, which adds another welcome dimension. The book actually had me with the first couple of sentences:
"Are you a child of DNA?"
Rakesh was affronted; if he'd considered this to be information that any stranger wandering by had a right to know, it would have been included in his precis.
What a great opening!
This book also has an advanced galactic civilization with a parallel story of a DNA-based (human-descended) member, which adds another welcome dimension. The book actually had me with the first couple of sentences:
"Are you a child of DNA?"
Rakesh was affronted; if he'd considered this to be information that any stranger wandering by had a right to know, it would have been included in his precis.
What a great opening!
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