Schild's Ladder (2001)

Science fiction (is that what you kids still call it these days?) has a tough time keeping itself out there ahead of where real science is already treading. I suppose that is why fantasy fiction so dominates the market.

Egan posits a far future galaxy where Earth is the sole source of evolved life and where the pace of discovery and knowledge has not slackened one jot from the 20th century. Our knowledge of quantum particles, effects and theory has moved on in a, well, quantum leap. Faced with a cataclysmic quantum event that is slowly swallowing the known universe humanity has split into two factions, big-endian/little-endian style if you ask me, bent on destroying the phenomenon or forcing mankind to adapt and thus re-energize a stagnating culture.

Most of this book was incomprehensible to me, dealing with technical arcana I could not possibly follow and social intercourseI was not sure if I was supposed to gasp at or accept as just another cultural evolution. Perhaps this was the point - putting the reader into a world so advanced that much of what passes as normal is incomprehensible to us.

The characters and their inner worlds are there to guide us through this strange land, but in this case I found none of them attractive, none of them really worthy of support and none of them that I cared about at all, let alone enough.

Maybe this book is for the hard-core genre reader rather than the casual dipper like me, but I found myself glad not to live in that universe and have to read books like this about it. ( )

Brilliant, just brilliant.............................very original, stimulating, well-written........................loved it! ( )

Nice transhuman world, but an average story. ( )

To quote some country singer or other "baby did a bad, bad, thing". This is bad in the Sister Alice bad sense of the word.

As in screw up, destroy large chunks of galaxies.

The posthumans here have awesome technological capabilities at their fingertips, the ability to back up, live outside bodies, and all that stuff, but they still have to relate to each other.

They also have to come up with a way to stop this much greater than minor problem they have.

This one is mind melter taggable.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/04/schilds-ladder-greg-egan.html ( )

The ending left me hanging and reading was a bit slow. It was OK, but I've read better. ( )