Related Subjects: Author Index Reviews Page 1 2
Book reviews for "Egan,_Greg" sorted by average review score:

Axiomatic
Published in Unknown Binding by Millennium ()
Author: Greg Egan
Amazon base price: $
Used price: $175.00
Collectible price: $158.82
Buy one from zShops for: $13.95
Average review score:

Speculative fiction the way it should be
Axiomatic was the first of Greg Egan's books I read. Halfway through the first story it grabbed me the way my first Bradbury, Niven or Brin did - and refused to let go. Be prepared to suspend your sense of disbelief, for Egan puts some pretty strange worlds together.

Not all the stories are on target but those that are score bullseyes. If you like speculative fiction where the story can come second to the idea or the world in which it takes places, then Egan is for you. Also highly recommended (give it some time, it will reward you): Permutation City - cyberspace used as never before!

A Mind
This is my first Egan book, so I will not compare it to his other books.

Egan's short stories - almost all of them close to 20 pages long - are all very different, and all based on a unique idea that Egan spins out as the story progresses. This, together with an affinity in the choice of themes, reminds me of Jorge L. Borges. In particular, it reminds me of those aspects of Borges that fascinates and captivates me.

Like Borges, Egan has a tidy mind and a tidy writing style. Not too many characters, and no strays to "spice up" the story. Rather, he invents quirks to the main storyline itself. My favourite in this book is "Learning to be me"; though the theme is familiar, the twist isn't.

Great ideas, great stories, a bit much to take in one lump
Utterly fascinating and mind-blowing. So much so, that halfway through it, I felt in danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer force of new ideas and had to stop to let what I'd already read sink in. If you read a story in this collection and it *doesn't* blow your mind, you are experiencing cognitive saturation and should take a short break to allow your mind to return to something resembling its normal size and shape before continuing -- that is, if you want the full effect. It's quite interesting picking out the themes and tropes Egan is most fond of exploring -- even more fun if you've read his longer work, since some of the ideas in his novels can be found here in their distilled essence. The only thing I found somewhat wearying is his constant use of first-person narration, which isn't a problem in small doses (and is actually quite engaging much of the time), but which by repeated use gives the unintentional impression that most of Egan's protagonists have very similar personalities, or are even, impossibly and insupportably, in some way the same person, a vaguely disorienting effect that causes the stories to blur together in the reader's memory. This is unfortunate because the stories are well worth recalling as distinct entities.


An Unusual Angle
Published in Paperback by Norstrilia Pr (1985)
Author: Greg Egan
Amazon base price: $9.50
Average review score:

A funny debut about Australian school-life
Greg Egan wrote this book in the summer holiday at the end of school. It is light-hearted, satiric, and nostalgic. Sort of a Catch-22 about high school, and Egan's affection for The Catcher In The Rye is also evident.

A must for Egan fans -- his first published novel.
This was Greg Egan's first published novel, and the early promise of the younger Egan is evident. Unlike his more recent work, it isn't science fiction (although it would be possible to read it as SF if you really wanted to). The work is less hard-hitting and a little less polished than his more recent writing, but it shows a character more sympathetic and believable than many (in fact most) of his more recent characters.

The plotline effectively shows the daydreaming of a suburban schoolboy (but it's better than that makes it sound).

This book changed my life!
Seriously! As an impressionable young teenager I read and reread this book, and I'm quite certain that it did something (good) to my brain. The protagonist is a high school student with the ability to film through his eyes. Unfortunately, he is unable to get the film out of his head to show anyone. I noted with interest that Egan has re-used the notion of being able to film through the eys in "Distress".

The book is not exactly a conventional narrative, rather it is a series of episodes that allow Egan to make witty, thought provoking and at times poignant observations about (the Australian) school system, and life in general.

In short -- I recommend this book for anyone, but _especially_ for younger readers (say 12 - 16). I am now 26, and have never forgotten the brain-twisting joy this book brought me.


Diaspora
Published in Mass Market Paperback by Harper Prism (1999)
Author: Greg Egan
Amazon base price: $6.99
Used price: $2.25
Collectible price: $6.34
Buy one from zShops for: $4.61
Average review score:

An epic that spans time and space to the INFINITE degree
Once again, Egan has struck a chord across many disciplines--the non-fiction studies of AI, multidimensional geometry, mathematics, astrophysics, and others are woven into a novel of pure, hard, sf.

Have you ever read a sf book and thought, "That was a great concept... but the author could have gone farther"? You can NOT do that with Egan's work. He explores and pushes back the outer boundaries of the comprehensible with his stories. Diaspora, particularly, spans as far as one can go--at least, as far as its own concept of the future can be pushed.

The book develops from extremely small beginnings--the "womb" of one of Earth's virtual-reality cities called "polises"--where Yatima (the artificial-intelligence protagonist) is born. From there, Yatima grows in a quest for understanding of the world around ver (neuter for "his" or "her"). From ver polis, to the realms of the other lifeforms inhabiting Earth, to the questions of "Who is out there? Who came before us? Why are we HERE?" Yatima struggles and discovers, traveling faster and faster through space (and time). The urgency of the pitch accelerates as ve nears ver goal. Without spoiling the ending, I'll say this: have you ever hiked a "strenuous" trail to reach a peak, and then stood by yourself at the very top and listened to the wind whistle around you? It's amazing how deeply you can look into yourself when you know you're at the pinnacle of experience.

For those who hate Egan's copious (and admittedly rigorous) studies within the text: maybe adapting your style of reading would help. I'm not telling you to do anything difficult or that would detract from the story; just learn to skim over the heavy details the first time you read the story. I guarantee you'll come back again for them ... for in Diaspora, as in Quarantine and others, Egan uses high-technology magic to restate our own questions: "Who is out there? Who came before us? Why are we HERE?"

Inwards and Upwards
Diaspora has rapidly become one of my favourite books: here's why.

A fabulous book, Diaspora is simply so dense, filled with invention, with mind-expanding discovery. At his worst, as in his disappointing recent mainstream sci-fi novel, Terranesia, Greg Egan can be overly didactic, dull and sluggish. But here, at his best, he can do what no other contemporary 'hard' science fiction writer can do: he can turn scientific speculation into sheer wonder. When he concentrates on letting loose this amazing flow of ideas, an almost stream-of-consciousness expanding of whole universes out of the tiniest and most unexpected cracks like endless fractal flowers, his writing can be an almost mystical experience, a celebration of what the human mind can conceive.

Yet it does not rely simply on this stunning and fertile scientific speculation: Egan's characters are real; despite being virtual people, citizens of a computer polis, they are human, they grow, change and develop in comprehensible ways, even if their abilities and situation are beyond us. I have never come across another writer who can convincingly describe what it is like to see in five dimensions, and then equally comprehensibly portray the sheer emotional and physical shock of being restricted to three again. It is this combination of emotional maturity and ever unfolding wonder that makes Diaspora more like Attanasio's baroque masterpiece, Last Legends of Earth (another favourite of mine), than any other conventional hard sci-fi.

Diaspora's only disappointment is that it has to end.

Welcome To Cosmological Mind-stretching Wonderland
With his latest novel, Greg Egan has created a cosmo-anthropological adventure that will take you till the limits of 'humanness' in a constant fulfilling of space-time searching urges. In Diaspora you will find human beings in the most strange, natural, peculiar and logical 'disguises'; organic or inorganic, software or brain, Egan manages to fill his characters with generous doses of what we call the human condition, and by doing it he always makes us feel close to them. Whether they are fleshers (homo sapiens), Gleisner robots, freakish exuberants or solipsist Ashton-Laval polis citizens, Egan's characters always question and analyze their world and their human (or whatever) condition, their being a part of this universe. This almost obsessive questioning of the 'world around us' and the search for an invariant of consciousness are some of the trademarks of this intellectually awesome writer. As in previous novels, as for instance in Distress, Egan seems to flow his ideas (and he has plenty) into the text with unusual ease, allowing you to swallow all this knowledge without effort. There are some parts of the book, though, that are a little bit hard to get through (another Egan trademark) but these parts are filled with mind-stretchers so incredible that it becomes almost impossible to convey them in an easier way. It's worth the effort, believe me. Diaspora seems to establish the Australian genius at the front line of the hard SF field, leaving his namesakes far behind. Now that critics complain about a lack of ideas in the genre which was born to create them, proclaiming that mainstream offers more SF ideas than SF itself, and with 'SF is dead' as the most employed slogan in the highbrow circuits, Greg Egan seems to be closing some mouths and demonstrating that the important thing is writers and not the field they seem to fit into. In a way, Diaspora, thanks to his adventure-like structure, is more accessible than Egan's previous works, and if readers are bright out there, it will earn him the definitive recognition as the most interesting SF writer working today. My qualification? Read the book and judge by yourself.


Tales from the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood
Published in VHS Tape by Universal Studios (05 January, 1999)
Amazon base price: $9.98
Used price: $3.61
Collectible price: $9.07
Buy one from zShops for: $18.95
Average review score:

issues to think about

Greg Egan's Permutation City is a novel centered around computer "copies" of human beings. Egan takes these characters on quite an interesting journey. The characters in this book are brought face-to-face with their own possible immortality. When a person is scanned, their very being becomes a type of computer program, which can simply run multiple copies of the same person on the computer. I was honestly frightened to read about the sad potential one has in living forever. While life extension is something our society is constantly striving for, I am bothered to read about these characters, who repeatedly "wake up" into a new round of the same old life. Each time another copy is created, the copy wakes up to the same life as that of the original and all of the copies combined. Even though each copy is a "new creation", there is no new life - it is like a recycled life. This process can be used over and over again. One of the main characters (Paul Durham) lives for over 7,000 years! It seems to me that it would be more like a never-ending nightmare than a dream come true!

In the actual storyline of the book, the main character (Paul Durham) makes a copy of himself, but removes the emergency "bail-out" option, which is required by law to provide the copy with the choice of becoming a flesh-and-blood person. The copy (Paul) works against his original in attempt to free himself from his "trapped" computer existence.

Unfortunately, for readers who are new to or not very familiar with the fast paced cyberpunk style, this book is rather confusing. The line between virtual reality and flesh-and-blood is quite thin. However, if you are able to keep up with what is real and what isn't, you may be able to enjoy and appreciate Greg Egan's Permutation City. I cannot say that I enjoyed the book as a whole, but I do believe that a shorter, simplified version would be slightly more appealing to readers like me, who are not "hard" cyberpunk fans.

Fascinating, but let down by the ending
Set in the mid 21st century, this sci-fi novel, like Egan's later novel Diaspora, ties together many fascinating scientific and metaphysical ideas in a single book (The emphasis is very definitely on the "sci"). However, unlike Diaspora, there is a strong central theme underlying the story, a baffling idea called the "Dust theory". Any attempt to describe that theory here would be pointless, but I can say that it compels the reader to ponder some fundamental questions about the nature of reality. The theory is completely absurd yet not all that easy to refute. It has certainly caused me a few headaches... The dust theory is motivated and explained via another key theme in both this book and Diaspora - the concept of having a human "download" his mind onto a computer. Aside from the suspension of disbelief required in order to accept that such a thing is possible, Egan presents us with a well-thought-out and plausible scenario regarding these downloaded humans or "copies". There are several other themes, of lesser importance, but fascinating in their own right, notably the "Autoverse": A piece of software that allows you to have complete control over your own virtual mini-universe - a world capable of modelling objects as complex as bacteria, down to the level of individual atoms.

Well that's the sci part. The human story behind all this doesn't have much intrinsic interest - the characters are vehicles for the ideas, and often one gets the impression that it is Egan who is speaking, not the character (they all seem to be uncannily good at making detached, intelligent comments on whatever is happening). This aspect didn't really bother me, as I think the ideas deserved some detached, intelligent commentary anyway.

The biggest flaw, I found, was the contrived ending. I won't go into details here, but needless to say, the dust theory turns out to be correct (in the story, at least). Once this is established, the author needs some kind of crisis with which to sustain the reader's interest, and it is this crisis, and the circumstances that brought it about, that I found to be rather contrived.

All in all though, I would definitely recommend Permutation City to any fan of "hard" sci-fi, or anyone interested in metaphysics or the philosophy of mind.

Mind Boggling
I'd have to rate this book as one of my all-time favorite SF books. I still freak out a bit if I think too hard about his dust hypothesis.

The best thing about this book is that I read it soon after I had read "The Minds I", a collection of essays about AI and human consciousnes. I suspect that Egan has read the same book, since many of the concepts of Permutation City are based on the thought experiements in The Minds I. This is not to say that Egan's book is not original, as the title suggests, the book is a riff or fugue on a number of concepts related to identity and consciousness.

Most of his wild extrapolations follow perfect logic if you accept the basic premise that a conscious software entity can be created. The idea that, if such an entity exists, maintaining the software state while shutting down the program, then restarting it later from the same state would be experienced by the entity as instantaneous, then following that a succession of these saved states in any chronological order should be perceived as the same experience is mind bending.

Amazon should bundle Permutation City and The Mind's I (and maybe Goedel, Escher, Bach) -- they make a great matched set.


Office XP Development with VBA
Published in Paperback by Prentice Hall PTR (06 September, 2001)
Author: Peter G. Aitken
Amazon base price: $49.99
Used price: $4.24
Collectible price: $5.00
Buy one from zShops for: $4.29
Average review score:

Bioengineering, cosmological physics, murder. Top notch.
(I read the UK paperback.) Greg Egan is currently the best hard sf writer I know of. He writes science fiction the way it SHOULD be: imaginative yet plausible, stuff that makes you think, stuff that draws on real science rather than warp-space hyper-rubbish.

Egan's novels are pretty good but his short stories are really excellent. It's interesting that, although "Distress" is a novel, it opens with a series of interviews (the protagonist is a journalist), each one of which is like a mini-short story about some aspect of biotechnology. This plays to Egan's strength: idea, idea, idea. However, after a while the story settles down to the central plot, about a theoretical physicist whose life is endangered by a lunatic group with some strange ideas about cosmology.

I strongly recommend this book. It deserves a 10 for ideas; I am downgrading it to a 9 because other aspects of Egan's writing could still be improved.

A science fiction gem.
Distress is not only the best of Egan's novels that I've yet read, but one of the most inventive and accomplished sf novels I've read in many years. Andrew Worth is a science journalist in a world populated with ignorance cultists, voluntary autists, and gender migrants. Having finished the 'frankenscience' series Junk DNA, he turns down an offer to tape a show on the newly endemic Acute Clinical Anxiety Syndrome (a.k.a Distress), to compile a profile of quantum physicist Violet Mosala, currently at work on a Theory of Everything, or TOE. Worth leaves Sydney and his marriage (both in ruins), and travels to Stateless, a utopian anarchy on an island constructed with pirated biotech. Plots against both Mosala and Stateless escalate as the novel heads towards an astonishing climax. While Egan is best known for his ideas - and there are more ideas in the first chapter of this book than in many sf novels - his characterization in this book is excellent: Worth is a well-rounded character with his own opinions and motivation, Mosala is a welcome example of a fictional sane scientist, and the asex Akili Kuwale is a masterpiece of sf characterization.

Perhaps Egans best so far.
Distress is aptly named, and should, perhaps, be the subtitle of all his novels. This is because you WILL find your mental faculties in considerable distress while you read. Thought provoking is an understatement in this, as well as all his works. The author sometimes gets carried away in his explanations, as if he has to hammer home the point that he KNOWS what he is talking about, but in my opinion the stories would be just as good without. However, for those of us who love Hard Sci-Fi, the explanations are part of the fun!

I came away liking this book quite a bit, I found the end satisfying. As for those who have existential/religious problems with the book, I too noted some of the "attitude" there, but I just didn't take it personally, and took it as one man's opinion. That allowed me to enjoy the book.

One problem I do have with this and another of his books (Diaspora), is his use of asexual characters (although their use in Diaspora is more understandable), and the "V" pronouns that he uses for them. It seems to me to be an uneccessary convolution to an already complicated story. I "get" the point he is trying to make about relationships, etc, but I found it dehumanizing nonetheless. I don't think people would ever choose such a path in the forseeable future. Now that I've read it in two of his books, I think the idea is getting silly.

That said, this is my favorite book by this author, and now that I have read 5 of his works, I feel my brain has grown in at least another 3 or 4 dimensions.


Laugh and Learn: 95 Ways to Use Humor for More Effective Teaching and Training
Published in Hardcover by AMACOM (2002)
Author: Doni Tamblyn
Amazon base price: $17.50
List price: $25.00 (that's 30% off!)
Average review score:

Learn Quantum Theory the Greg Egan Way!
Quarantine is a brilliant page turner. I love the science fiction private-eye sub-genre but what surprised me was Mr. Egan's intuitive grasp of quantum theory. I would recommend this book for the enjoyable story but also to anyone who is about to embark on learning quantum mechanics. People who study it always complain that QM is all mathematics with very little intuitive grasp. A few authors have quantum insight like Feynman but even he said that no one truly understands the quantum world (siding with Neils Bohr). Well, Egan manages to make the implicit manifest in the "normal" world for us. At the same time he gave me a mystery that kept me guessing. A great read! I am now primed to read all of his books especially his short stories. Check out Greg's home page for a real treat! Greg, you are brilliant!

"Stop collapsing those wave-functions!"
Quarantine begins as a high tech future thriller, with a private detective being hired to find a missing woman in a late 21st century Australia where, among other things, one can download software into one's brain, something has sealed the solar system within an impenetrable Bubble, and New Hong Kong has been built on top of Arnhem land. But these glimpses of an exciting future are never really developed or explored in detail, as the book's focus quickly shifts to the metaphysics of quantum mechanics. This is a science fiction oldie, and one that is usually dealt with rather poorly. (Giving humans conscious control over fundamental physics is all too often used as a deus ex machina to solve the plot problems at the end of a novel. Orson Scott Card's Xenocide is a recent example of this.) Egan makes one big (massively implausible?) assumption - that wave function collapse is the responsibility of a particular part of the brain and that with the right neural modification people can learn to avoid doing it, producing a "smeared out" universe - but otherwise his scenario is internally consistent. Even more importantly, Quarantine actually tries to "follow through" on the consequences of its assumptions, and manages to bring something of their full metaphysical immensity home to the reader. If you are interested in this kind of exploration of quantum mechanics then Quarantine is worth a look; if not then you will probably find it rather frustrating

Sense of wonder SF at its finest
Some people have criticized Quarantine for its lack of characterization. Frankly, if you're looking for that kind of book, you're in the wrong place. Don't get me wrong: I love a good character-oriented book--but Quarantine is much more about drowning the reader in a profound sense of wonder.

Be forewarned, this is not light reading material: Egan demands full intellectual participation from his reader, and a reader without a basic understanding of quantum mechanics and the many-worlds theory might not enjoy Quarantine as thoroughly as someone with that background. But if you're willing to put in the effort, this is a richly rewarding book to read.

(One more warning: I strongly suggest that you not read the description on the back of this book. Not only does it spoil the plot, but it is also very misleading and it ruins a great deal of the story's suspense.)


Teranesia
Published in Paperback by Orion Publishing Co (10 August, 2000)
Author: Greg Egan
Amazon base price: $
Average review score:

Horribly abrupt ending
Egan develops great characters, and, as always, an interesting premise based in science. I've always enjoyed his forays into AI & physics.

The last two chapters, however, destroy this book. He takes the interesting biogenetic monster virus he's developed so well, and has it attack the main character. The book ends immediately, and rather than explain the mystery and leave you thoughtful about science and the future, no conclusions are drawn at all.

Finish the book next time, Greg.

Disappointing Ending
Teranesia is the name given to a small, uninhabited island in Indonesia by young Prabir Suresh. His parents are there studying the unprecedented genetic mutations of a breed of butterflies found only on the island. It seems like paradise for Prabir and his two-year old sister Madhusree -- until war breaks out and shatters their world and takes the lives of their parents. Prabir manages to escape with Madhusree and they eventually end up living with their mother's sister in Canada.

Jump ahead twenty years. Prabir believes he's saved his sister from Teranesia, but the phenomenon that began with the butterflies has now spread to higher life forms. Madhusree is now a grad student in biology attempting to carry on her parent's work. Much to Prabir's dismay, she manages to get in with an expedition heading back to Indonesia to study the mutations. Prabir knows it will eventually lead back to Teranesia so he follows her blindly. Much has changed in the twenty years since they fled, and not for the better. What is causing the mutations and are they beneficial or a deadly danger?

Most of the book takes place in a chillingly realistic near future. Egan's characters are very well drawn with tangled emotions that run deep. I especially appreciated how the fact that Prabir is gay plays such a small role in the story. It wasn't made to be a huge issue; it was just a part of who he is. It was a little disappointing that Egan didn't foresee a more positive world for his gay character. It seems 40 years won't make much difference in attitudes toward GLBT people.

I wish the rest of the book had been as well thought out as the characters. I highly enjoyed the first three-quarters of the book, but he lost me at the end. The deeper he tried to go into the technobabble of genetics and mutations the more and more he lost me. There are long, boring speeches by characters sharing their theories about the mutations, which was largely unnecessary and just served to break up the flow of the story. The ending felt rushed and really failed to resolve any of the major story lines. If Egan had maintained the same level of excellence throughout, it would have easily received five stars from me, but I felt so disappointed by the end that it ruined the whole book.

Hard Science + Good Characterization = Great Story
Make no mistake, this is a character driven novel. Some of Egan's fans have apparently been put off by this. Don't be. This is a hard SF book, through and through, and it goes a long way towards dispelling the myth that hard science in SF means shallow plotting and characterizations. The central biological mystery, in particular, has a very satisfying and imaginative resolution.

Egan says that he'll be returning to dense physics in his next book, but that he's going to continue striving to make plot and character central elements of his works. I find this a refreshing attitude and wish him luck in doing so.


Schild's Ladder
Published in Paperback by Eos (14 May, 2002)
Author: Greg Egan
Amazon base price: $18.17
List price: $25.95 (that's 30% off!)
Used price: $3.89
Collectible price: $52.94
Buy one from zShops for: $4.89
Average review score:

Too Much Science, Not Enough Fiction
One of the great pleasures of being a reader is in the anticipation of a new book. The disappointment of expectations is perhaps the greatest pain. Greg Egan has always been one of those writers whose new work excites intense anticipation. However recently I have been feeling the pain of disappointment more and more often.

Schild's Ladder has all the ingredients of an Egan classic: speculations on quantum physics, universe-spanning disaster, and characters to whom race, age, size and gender have become meaningless but who nevertheless maintain emotional lives.

Unfortunately this mixture is just too generous with the 'scientific' ingredients, and too sparing with the 'fictional' elements. In fact, except for an all too short flight beyond the border of the 'novo-vacuum', the artifically created and rapidly expanding new universe which threatens the survival of our own, and a few episodes of personal backstory and momentary action, the book appears to consist entirely of characters talking about scientific theory. And whilst the speculation is interesting it simply does not engage emotionally with the reader.

There are some superb moments within the book though: as usual Egan is adept at describing the dislocation brought about by altered dimension - at the start the scientist Cass is reduced (rather grumpily) to a few milimetres in height in order to save space at the Mimosa experimental station; there are also some sparklingly clever angles shown on the problems of movement within the Novo Vacuum whose natural laws are entirely alien to our own.

In addition one of the most engaging sequences concerns the infiltration and sabotage of the project to study the Novo-vacuum by 'anachronauts', reactionary humans who refuse the benefits of articifially-enhanced intelligence and so on. The sequence is particularly effective as it involves a fight in spacesuits outside the research station, a scene that could have been taken from the Golden Age of SF, and now itself anachronistic within contemporary science fiction - making the anachronauts appear doubly out-of-place. The explosives disguised as pot-plants only add to the effective combination of farce and menace in this section of the book.

However the moments of great writing only highlight the steady, even dull, temper of the majority of the book. Schild's Ladder is simply too much science and not enough fiction.

Mediation, Quantum Theory and a whole new universe ...
In Greg Egan's inventive new novel Schild's Ladder, the diverse range of characters utilise a number of different languages and communication techniques, but manage to find a common ground of meaning through the use of Mediator programs. For the scientific layperson (like myself) trying to comprehend the depths of physics and quantum theory which drive Schild's Ladder, a Mediator program would be most welcome. At times, this hard SF is just a little too hard as the narrative is intersected with lengthy, heavily detailed descriptions of theoretical physics that are beyond my capacity to comprehend. On the other hand, the epic struggle that unfolds encompassing the fate of not one but two unique universes, combined with a vibrancy of characterisation, more than compensate for the sporadic opacity of scientific jargon.
In the opening section, the scientist Cass travels to the Mimosan's station in order to use their unique equipment to momentarily create a 'novo-vacuum', a microscopic universe with a completely new set of physics. The novo-vacuum is only expected to exist for a fraction of a second, but in that time Cass hopes that what is discovered about the alternative universe will enrich the understanding of her own. Of course, the experiment goes horribly wrong and the physics of the novo-vacuum turn out to be more stable than those of the outside world, with the result that the alternative universe begins expanding, engulfing the old, wiping out all in its path.
Six hundred years later former lovers Tichicaya and Mariama both find themselves onboard the Rindler, the foremost research centre focused on the novo-vacuum. Significantly, the Rindler is also a spacecraft maintaining the velocity which keeps the ship the closest possible distance from the expanding boundary of the mysterious, new universe. Despite their past together, Mariama and Tichicaya find themselves on opposite sides of the philosophical rift that divides the ship's occupants. Mariama is in the Preservationist camp, desperate to destroy the novo-vacuum and stop the destruction of the planets in its wake. At the other extreme, Tichicaya's group have been labelled Yielders, those who believe the novo-vacuum is the greatest scientific discovery of all time and that is should be studied, understood and if possible adapted to rather than eradicating it. As the experiments on board the Rindler reach a point where the novo-vacuum's exterior might finally be breached, the philosophic divide becomes a material battle for the fate of both universes.
To readers of Egan's past novels, much of Schild's Ladder will seem distantly familiar. Although Egan never writes sequels, his stories reveal an almost evolutionary development of ideas and theories. As with his novel Diaspora, for example, there is a dichotomy between those characters who choose to remain embodied and those who exist as acorporeals, living only as informatic patterns in virtual worlds. However, unlike Diaspora, even the embodied make their choice at a philosophic level; every individual's identity is stored on a Qusp-Quantum Singularity Processor-and the choice to be embodied or otherwise is the choice as to whether the Qusp exists as part of a digital network or embedded in a flesh body. Similarly, the idea of opposing worlds (or universes) clashing against each other has appeared in Egan's short stories and in Permutation City. In Permutation City, however, the conflict was on an ontological level when the Lambertians developed an Autoverse ontology without the need for a creator and somehow this act started to unravel their progenitors' digital world. In Schild's Ladder, the struggle is far more scientifically based detailing the collision of two unique physical universes, but the development of ideas from Permutation City are apparent.
The most significant development in Egan's recent work, though, is his vastly improved characterisation beginning with Teranesia and continuing in Schild's Ladder. The plight of Tichicaya and Mariama in human terms-their love, their motivation, and their similarities even when philosophically opposed-is what drove Schild's Ladder for me. If the scientific theories are as credible and intriguing as the human story in Schild's Ladder, then this book will be impossible to put down for a scientifically literate reader. For me, I learnt a little about science, glimpsed an intriguing future, and revelled in the complications of an all too human story.

Plots dwarf vision
Egan's far-future story of posthumanity is a tale of many world's colliding: old universe and new, antiquated attitudes with enlightened ones, and one man's (and couple's) past with his (their) future. Unfortunately, all these colliding worlds and subplots are bit much to take in, especially with such high-level theoretical physics weaved into it all.

I did find myself caring more about these characters than Egan's past heros, and I think the author's plot development is getting better with each book. (The subplot of the cleverly-named anachronauts was brilliant.) But perhaps this was at the expense of vision: this book's picture of the future generally left me less in awe than that of Diaspora. (I mean, come on: Diaspora's vision had it's own pronouns and a glossary!) I guess Egan has spoiled me.


Blood Sisters
Published in Audio Cassette by Audiotext (1998)
Authors: Greg Egan and Amy Bruce
Amazon base price: $8.79
List price: $10.99 (that's 20% off!)
Used price: $10.95
Collectible price: $15.88
Buy one from zShops for: $11.25
Average review score:
No reviews found.

Ciudad Permutacion
Published in Hardcover by Ediciones B (1999)
Author: Greg Egan
Amazon base price: $11.70
Average review score:
No reviews found.

Related Subjects: Author Index Reviews Page 1 2

Reviews are from readers at Amazon.com. To add a review, follow the Amazon buy link above.