« Listening to Music (stub) | Main | American Doll Possee - Tori Amos »
September 18, 2007
Schild's Ladder - Greg Egan
This science fiction novel is definitely the most complex I've ever attempted. Some might say it's one of the 'hardest' SF novels ever, and I'm tempted to think that this was one of Egan's aims when he wrote it. This occasionally works for me here; I like mind expanding hypotheses about quantum physics and cosmology, but near the end this book stretches the bounds of believability way past breaking point and lost me completely.
There is a lot of good stuff here which I enjoyed. People live forever, and if they by accident suffer a 'local' death, the most recent backup of their mind is used to create a new body, or even just an acorporeal personality. Distances are travelled at light speed across the galaxy, as you just transmit yourself as electromagnetic waves; whole planets can be evacuated in this way with no loss of life. Personalities can be duplicated (though the ethics and consequences of this aren't explored), they can be shrunk to the femtoparticle level, they can have their time perception altered so that a microsecond becomes months or years of subjective time. All good stuff.
But there is a huge amount of fairly tedious theoretical maths, which is treated as real. This is quite right of course within the frame of a novel, but Egan goes even further, expanding the ideas to a level which starts to seem absurd, rather than enlightening. A new type of vacuum is described, and as it gets more and more bizarre, you realise that the story can go anywhere Egan likes, the internal consistency required of SF is gone as he just makes up another amazing phenomenon to take his characters whereever he wants.
So it's good, but it's also bad, I hesitate to use the phrase 'too clever by half', but a bit less cleverness might have made a better story. I'm not going to go into the plot in detail at all, either you like the sound of it by now, or you don't.
But I still think everyone should buy it, in the brand spanking feel good edition - the tactile cover is brilliant. You can see it here, but go to a shop and look at the others in the series too, and touch them.
Posted by se71 at September 18, 2007 10:06 AM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)