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Orthogonal #1-3
The Orthogonal Trilogy
The complete Orthogonal Trilogy by Greg Egan. Containing The Clockwork Rocket, The Eternal Flame, and The Arrows of Time.
- GenresScience FictionFiction
804 pages, ebook
Published October 18, 2016
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 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 9, 2024
Oh boy, this one’s a doozy. The trilogy consists of the books “The Clockwork Rocket”, “The Eternal Flame”, and “The Arrows of Time”. Egan writes stupidly hard, scientific science fiction. How scientifically plausible this whole thing is I won’t even dare to venture a guess; the basic math necessary to understand the even the simplest version of how this world is different from ours is beyond me.
It’s an incredibly fun read from a wordbuilding perspective, and I was able to take most of the in-depth physics and mathematics discussions in stride, understanding just enough that I was able to venture a guess occasionally regarding where the narrative was heading. Unfortunately it’s not only a world with entirely different physical laws, it’s also a world of people just now discovering these laws and being uncertain about them. What was identical to our world and what was different, and in which ways, went way over my head.
And there are very long sections where nothing much happens except some scientists excitedly chatting with each other about this or that theory and how it does or doesn’t explain experimental results.
The third book goes into time travel and that’s where it really lost me. It seems to subscribe to some sort of inevitability / the universe finds a way version of time travel (and most of the time travel save a bit at the end is very much of the “sending information backwards in time” variety). There was a lot of head scratching and “I guess so”, as I was now so thoroughly out of my depths that I could only shrug and take Egan’s word for it.
That said, I still had a great time with the books. Never read anything quite like them.
It’s an incredibly fun read from a wordbuilding perspective, and I was able to take most of the in-depth physics and mathematics discussions in stride, understanding just enough that I was able to venture a guess occasionally regarding where the narrative was heading. Unfortunately it’s not only a world with entirely different physical laws, it’s also a world of people just now discovering these laws and being uncertain about them. What was identical to our world and what was different, and in which ways, went way over my head.
And there are very long sections where nothing much happens except some scientists excitedly chatting with each other about this or that theory and how it does or doesn’t explain experimental results.
The third book goes into time travel and that’s where it really lost me. It seems to subscribe to some sort of inevitability / the universe finds a way version of time travel (and most of the time travel save a bit at the end is very much of the “sending information backwards in time” variety). There was a lot of head scratching and “I guess so”, as I was now so thoroughly out of my depths that I could only shrug and take Egan’s word for it.
That said, I still had a great time with the books. Never read anything quite like them.
June 22, 2017
Still well worth a read if you like Egan, but this has some especially weird tangents. First book in the trilogy is probably the best and could be read as a standalone.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews