Do you have questions about the site? Write to bruce at perens.com .
List of all articles we've ever published.
Source Code
Developer's Documentation
RSS
XML Sitemap
XML News Sitemap
![[Valid RSS]](/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
Book Review. Greg Egan's Incandescence
After a 6-odd year break from writing, Greg Egan comes out with Incandescence where he probes the nature of existence and realisation of self. With two parallel story lines, it's an engaging, challenging and interesting read, there's no doubt about that. No stranger to asking deep questions, and creating worlds where he is then free to experiment to his heart's content and draw, often unexpected, yet entirely logical conclusions from seemingly simple initial starting conditions.
If you like your science-fiction to be the hard variety, then this is as hard as it gets. No galaxy-spanning meta-civilisations with abundant faster-than-light travel, personal starships and hot space chicks - this story is very firmly rooted in maths and physics and you'll need a passing familiarity with these two sometimes strange companions in order to get the most out of this book.
Split into two parallel story lines that converge towards the end, they alternate between examining your environment and examining yourself in more and more detail.
One story line features our descendants more than a million years down the track, living the majority of their essentially endless lives either as sentient software or in transit as data, at the speed of light, between nodes on the interstellar communications network that spans the Milky Way galaxy.
The second story line features sentient creatures living in an enclosed splinter of rock who, one day, begin to question the nature of their environment - gravity, relativity, stationary and rotating frames of reference and the speed of light. With primitive instruments they devise and enact experiments designed to observe the otherwise unintuitive truth that underlies their world.
There's a writeup by Egan himself here that goes into more detail, yet doesn't spoil the thrill of wrapping your head around the often complex non-Newtonian physics presented in the alternate chapters.
http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=1064
There's also a lot more ancillary information on Greg Egan's homepage, complete with a short story from 30k years before the events in the novel, a maths-free and illustrated explanation of the concepts described in the novel and an interactive Java applet for you to experiment with.
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/INCANDESCENCE/Incandescence.html
There's also some serious maths as well that goes into a lot more detail about the setting of the story - even just scrolling down the page makes my head hurt.
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/INCANDESCENCE/Orbits/OrbitsDetailed.html