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

Classic Egan as far as engaging writing and solid, hard-sf goes. Egan is one of my favorite SF authors. Great to revisit the Amalgam and the Aloof. But...
The alternating twin storylines (that will eventually converge) is, at this point, gimmicky. The fact that the eventual convergence is less than direct, with farewells in one thread and new characters in the other leaves the feeling of having been shanghaied into reading the start of a series-to-be (if this book does well enough). In fact there's little that's satisfying about the 'conclusion'. New stories set in an already laid out universe are fine with me. Some series can be good if the books stand alone. This one seems to be hobbling on at least one crutch.

An excellent example of "Hard" science fiction. Egan takes the premise: "How can a nonindustrial society living within a rock embedded in the plasma disc surrounding a large black hole discover General Relativity?" and uses it to explain the nature of gravity and how our view of the universe is limited by our preconceptions and common-sense view from inside a gravity well. It's also an intriguing tale told skillfully enough to be enjoyed by those skipping the science part.

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.

Me ha parecido más descompensado que otros libros del autor. Tiene una estructura bastante paralela a Schild's Ladder pero no resulta tan absorbente. Como ciencia ficción "hard" es extremadamente duro, como mínimo para mí. A partir de un momento me he visto obligado a dejar de intentar entender el razonamiento matemático o físico de una parte de la historia, y eso me ha permitido disfrutar muchísimo más de la historia. A mi me ha gustado, pero sólo se lo recomendaría a incondicionales de Greg Egan como yo mismo. Imprescindible consultar su web para captar algo de la parte científica. Lo que no se puede negar es que como visión "ciencia ficcionera" la de Egan es impresionante.[Crítica ampliada a show more target="_top">http://membrillu.blogspot.com/2008/07/incandescence-de-greg-egan-una-crtica.html ] show less