Incandescence - Greg Egan

Not nearly exotic enough

Greg Egan is the Martin Gardner of science fiction storytelling, weaving mathematical and physical puzzles into entertaining howdunnits about encounters with novel forms of sentience, usually at vastly smaller scales than ours. Many of his stories, like Incandescence, are set in a post-human galaxy-spanning culture, the Amalgam, based on the idea of consciousness as an algorithm that can run on different hardware as it suits - so interstellar travel, for instance, is a simple matter of flinging your mental template (or a copy of your mind) as data to a far off receiving station where you can be re-embodied or just incorporated into any computational substrate that will let your unique OS run.

At his best (e.g. Schild's Ladder) the reader is often gripped by a plot involving a race against time to comprehend new forms of intelligent life that might be threatening the old through some inadvertent side-effect of their expansionism into the Amalgam's reality-space. At the same time, Egan has an amazing gift for explaining, Flatland fashion, the physics of extreme environments; working through the consequences of Planck scale realities or multi-dimensional spaces to render them almost as intuitively as we accept the everyday physics of our world.

In Incandescence, the story alternates between two investigators from the Amalgam trying to comprehend the possibly tragic fate of just such a new form of sentience and the struggle of that life form to comprehend its environment before the volatile conditions which exist in the star-packed inner core of our galaxy makes them extinct.

Although entertaining - I found myself rooting for the little sextupeds turning themselves on to the joys of physics - perhaps the maths that Egan describes here -- of huge gravitational forces and plasma dynamics -- aren't quite as exotic as in his other books. One half of the chapters are really just an exercise in the re-invention of Newton's Laws, Keplerian orbits, the differential calculus, special and general relativity and so on, familiar I suspect to any reader with a New Scientist-level physics education. Something is missing from the story as pure sci-fi because the reader isn't so much being stimulated by new physical concepts as being forced to try to remember the way, say, physicists solved the problem of orbits or the curvature of spacetime, etc.

It was tempting to see this tale as an allegory of a civilization at threat of extinction from vast environmental change (i.e. global warming) but even that is spoiled by a deus ex machina -- Egan's six-footed Einstein's are universally prone to collaboration and consensus! The only threat they face is lack of time, not their own foibles as a species.

Still, Incandescence is a wonderful antidote to space opera and many of Egan's descriptions of physics experiments inside extreme gravity wells are ingenious and elegant. Buy this book if you enjoy mental exercise and mathematical puzzles, but only if your scientific education is pre-college. Otherwise it might just feel like a history lesson.

Go to college if you want to read this stuff

It's painful, but I'm going to have to take a deep breath and be low-brow. Yes, Incandescence was too darn clever for me. It's hard space-fi in the traditional style, with aliens and uploaded consciousnesses. All that side of it - especially the rather stylised alien community - had a bit of a quaint 1970s feel to it, as though the characters were not quite there. But overpowering any chance of a sense of urgency or action is a huge dose of physics - ranging from simple Newtonian stuff with pendulums and weights, right up to cosmology and atomic structure. A splendid romp through the structure of our universe... or at least an opportunity for one. Sadly, the story is so far down the list that it's quite swamped with all this science, which has to be downloaded to the reader in huge blocks of detailed dialogue which might serve as a text-book, if the folly of a fictional alien civilisation did not oblige the author to use silly names for everything - I might have stood a chance if I'd known for sure whether 'garm' and 'sard' really were 'up' and ''down' or maybe 'north and 'south'. Or something. Perhaps things might have been a bit more balanced at least if Egan had given similar scientific attention to the biology of the alien community, which was a tantalising sketch.

Any work of fiction that needs to include labelled diagrams had better have a pretty good excuse, and Egan doesn't. This isn't so say that all space opera should be free of high-concept. Far from it. It's possible to do some really big science and make it good reading - Niven's Ringworld was perhaps the most obvious example. If you've already got a background in the science of Incandescence, you might enjoy it. But otherwise, you'd better be prepared to make notes and do some preparatory reading.

Typical Egan, although not his best

A good book if you like Egan, as usual a little hard on the maths but some great ideas. Your enjoyment of the story will be enhanced with some background knowledge of neutron stars (like I said, Typical egan!)

Recommended, but I didn't feel as if this was as good as Diaspora. It kind of peters out and the connection you think is going to be made at the end between the two threads never is.