Incandescence

Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and critique this book’s critics.

It's perfectly understandable that folks are finding it a difficult read. I'm sure there are undergraduate text books that are more accessible. However, I challenge the idea that this is a failing. I'm quite sure that Egan didn't write this expecting its appeal to be especially broad. He's aware he's writing for a niche audience. That in mind, he's untethered. He can unleash his arsenal with the assurance that anyone who's already reading is likely a hardened veteran who knew the score going in. If was writing for the Harry Potter crowd, I'd agree that he spends too much time on minutia. This, along with some of his other works, is something to read, but not necessarily to show more tell all your friends to read. My bias is that I loved the book, cover to cover. Its protagonists are post-biological life-forms. How cool is that? He did an admirable job distinguishing them from modern humanity in a more or less plausible way. Kinda breaks the Kardashev scale, too. It's no just a space opera, it's a transhumanist's wet-dream. Somewhere out there in the vastness of space life exists, it will have evolved as we have on Earth. I don't think it's much of a reach to assume that. Everywhere we look in our solar system we're finding water for instance, it's not the Earth exclusive asset some presume. Life IS out there. Much if it could be far more advanced than we are, thus when something doesn't fit any naturally known causes I don't see the harm in beginning to consider that something artificial may be in play that can explain it. Sure it most likely will be natural and just a new phenomenon that we've not seen before. But alien civilisations are not in the crazy spectrum of possibility. It’s only that Greg Egan fictionalises this like no other by using “plain” and “boring” Physics.

I love it. show less

This book was very, very difficult for anybody other than a scientist or mathematician to read. I persisted, however, because despite all the jargon, the basic plot was quite interesting. I don't know why I bothered. The book had two separate story-lines, giving the impression that these would eventually come together. This did not happen. The two stories were not properly combined, leaving the reader with the sense that the book just ended suddenly, as though the author just ran out of words. This would be disappointing at any time, but after wading through all the maths and science to get to this point, I feel as though I wasted my time. The first set of characters came into contact with a world like that on which the second set show more reside, but we are left wondering if this is a similar world, the same world in the past or the same world in the future. This book just wasn't worth the effort. show less

A society in a position where the first physics they must learn is general relativity and you the reader must learn to understand this society. You must also learn how a truly alien civilization deals with this situation. And no, I have not given away anything about the knottiest problems in this book. Oh, and yet, even with all the mind bending science and far from human characters, some of those folks are among the liveliest ever written about. Though I don't know if anyone will ever be able to do a n effective costume.

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 show more 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. show less

While there is still the most minimum of characterization necessary to move the plot, I would say that the author does manage to capture a little of the joy of discovery. He also does a wonderful job with the alien culture, as good as Asimov's "The Gods Themselves". The background science, as hard SF, is impeccable, but the combination of two alien cultures (the future DNA panspermia is sufficiently remote as to have very few cultural relations to our current society) that one has to make some effort to relate to may put off most readers, and dilutes any sense of emotional investment.

This book definitely falls under a hardcore sub-category of Hard-SF. Great for fans of [b:Dragon's Egg|263466|Dragon's Egg|Robert L. Forward|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403166825s/263466.jpg|2530528], [b:Flux|100681|Flux (Xeelee Sequence, #3)|Stephen Baxter|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1408926889s/100681.jpg|574446], [b:The Inverted World|142181|The Inverted World|Christopher Priest|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1245646253s/142181.jpg|2226603], or [b:The Integral Trees / The Smoke Ring|218460|The Integral Trees / The Smoke Ring|Larry Niven|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1392169628s/218460.jpg|211515] where we get a significant amount of time from the PoV's of the aliens as they discover the science and topography show more 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. :) show less

I know what the twist is. I get what the author was going for. I even read supplemental material on the author's blog. It seems safe to say I have experienced this book. No need to waste more time on the minutia of Splinter physics. I love slogging through science text-book-y passages in SF novels even though I don't always (usually (ever)) understand it. But this book has taught me that I have a limit, and that limit is realizing at page 100 that the only thing I know about Rakesh's personality or motivations is that he's bored. I need more than that from a story in order to get invested in untangling the science for myself.