Greg Egan: Incandescence

[J-Sun]

Incandescence is an ultra-hard SF novel told in two concise threads whose information density make them as creatively packed as any 800 page book, and packed far more rigorously. The first deals with Rakesh (a sort of post-human) and Parantham (basically a sentient and sometimes embodied program) leaving the Amalgam (a galactic-disk-spanning civilization of multiple races and entities) for the Aloof (a galactic-center-spanning civilization of mystery) in order to find the secrets of a rock the Aloof found which contains evidence of DNA-based life. The second deals with Roi (a multi-legged translucent almost-microscopic lifeform) being "recruited" by Zak (ditto) to learn math and physics so they can discover the nature of their world (called the Splinter) and deal with dangers to it. Since everything about the book is written as a journey from ignorance to enlightenment, much like science itself, most anything one could say about the novel would spoil it in this sense, even if it didn't spoil the ending. So all I can say is that, if a far-future high-tech exploration of the galaxy and a world-in-peril scenario of aliens at a lower level of tech trying to rise to the level necessary to save it has any interest for you, you probably want to try this book. I say this even though, for me, the answer to whether I'd be interested was a resounding "yes" but the novel, as fiction, didn't fully satisfy. It certainly was fascinating enough to make me glad I read it, regardless.

Anybody else read this? Jump in and liven up the thread!

And let's get one of the most important SF writers of the last quarter-century an author forum! More Egan threads to liven up:

Greg Egan
Greg Egan: Adam Roberts' Schizoid Review of Orthogonal

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I read this a few days ago and was hoping a sort of review might congeal but it hasn't - so I'll just note some random thoughts.

(NB: Everything that follows spoils things in the sense of the conceptual journey and some of it is spoils things in the usual "give away who does and doesn't die and how it ends" sense.)

• The threats facing the Splinter folks and the way they face it are deeply relevant to our own issues with climate change (not to mention the random asteroid strike that may cause us to join the dinosaurs). If one is looking for "social relevance", this would be it. This is probably the single-most important perspective for our species to assimilate and the more books that address it, the better.
  
• Rakesh's and Parantham's journey reminded me of Foundation and Earth, in an odd way. The "2-3 people in a small craft hopping from place to place pursuing a mystery" structure is quite similar. There's also a trace of "Nightfall" or, maybe more pertinently, Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, when the people of the Splinter go outside and see space for the first time in their lives, much like the Nightfall people seeing stars or Vinge's spiders unnaturally forging their way through the long winter they ordinarily hibernate through. Or any number of other stories involving such unusual perspective shifts.
  
• The Zak/Roi storyline was kind of frustrating for half of its half of the book. I felt like I knew more or less what was going on but didn't get confirmation from the story that I was actually right until I finally lost my patience approaching the halfway mark. Right after that, the story finally did give me confirmation up to that point. The storyline includes Zak going from Newton to Einstein in 60 seconds. It was interesting in that much of what was covered in terms of the math and physics was familiar but it was covered from an unusual angle with different terminology so that it felt new, sort of like poetry is supposed to do for familiar experiences at times.
  
• Throughout the course of the book, Egan displays such a thorough-going materialism that many of the philosophical quandaries about software "souls" and the "identity" of egos across transformations were basically disregarded. It's just presented as a given - Rakesh is disintegrated and reintegrated as sometimes embodied information and so what? Yet there is always an awareness of the actual zest that embodiment adds and a sense that a model of the universe would have to be as big as the universe and then collapse back into that indiscernability but, given that we don't do that, the "thusness" of the actual physical universe counts for a little bit extra, too. In other words, it's a consistent viewpoint despite seeming to take a different attitude towards simulating people and simulating the universe.
  
• This book is 250 pages in hardcover (298 in a paperback edition) though it took about 375 usual pages worth of time. Either way, it is precisely what I mean when I express my dislike of really long books and how long books waste time in repetition and excessive explanation and in crawling narration without jumps and provide no additional ideas or impact for their length. Egan describes his Splinter folk obliquely, showing their social presumptions and their mental transformation and expects you to get it. (He does commit some repetition when Rakesh is experiencing things but this is from his point of view and isn't the same as spelling it out to start with.) He drops you into an unfamiliar milieu that even its inhabitants don't really understand and they and the reader figure it out more or less together. (As I say, there is a slight problem with this where Egan underdoes the cues to let the reader know they're on the right track regarding what all "rarb" and "sharq" are and which way "garm" points and what the Hub really is and so on, but the usual method is to spell it all out from the start.) It also has no problem eliding what isn't useful to describe. We've seen people get recruited to this new-fangled job so when the protagonists realize they need to recruit a bunch of folks, the chapter ends and the next chapter of that story-line picks up with the team already assembled. Similarly, when a character will need to go outside the next day to take the place of another after having briefly made the journey once, the chapter ends and the next chapter of that story-line picks up with that character on the outside. Many writers these days would describe what they did that night and how they made the climb a second time and finally get the character out on the surface after a couple dozen uninterrupted pages.
  
• There is at least one logical problem, though this is generally one of the logically tighter books around. The Splinter Folk are almost physically incapable of walking in the dark (though they eventually work around it a little) yet they fly their entire world blind through the void and, later, a third of them are blinded. Now, they had no choice in these last two events but no parallel is drawn and no point made about this must be many orders of magnitude harder than it would otherwise be.