Incandescence
Ratings4
Average rating3.3
15
Ratings4
Average rating3.3
The long-awaited new novel from Greg Egan! Hugo Award-winning author Egan returns to the field with Incandescence, a new novel of hard SF. The Amalgam spans nearly the entire galaxy, and is composed of innumerable beings from a wild variety of races, some human or near it, some entirely other. The one place that they cannot go is the bulge, the bright, hot center of the galaxy. There dwell the Aloof, who for millions of years have deflected any and all attempts to communicate with or visit them. So when Rakesh is offered an opportunity to travel within their sphere, in search of a lost race, he cannot turn it down. Roi is a member of that lost race, which is not only lost to the Amalgam, but lost to itself. In their world, there is but toil, and history and science are luxuries that they can ill afford. Rakesh's journey will take him across millennia and light years. Roi's will take her across vistas of learning and discovery just as vast.
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I am very much a fan of Greg Egan's hard scifi. Here he presents us with two stages in the development of society and intelligence. One world that has reached, discovered and understood all there is, and struggles with finding balance and reason to live their eternal lifes. And one that is just in the process of awakening and developing a thirst for knowledge (or so it seems).
The story of the inhabitants of the splinter feels like a visit to a more substantial version of Abbott's Flatland. Even though not 2-dimensional, there are parallels in how the reader is transported into a world that is not understood. Egan let's the reader discover the world together with the protagonists by using for example foreign words to describe their geometry that only slowly start to make sense.
And even though Egan tackles some difficult physics when he lets his heroes discover orbital motion, gravity and the space-time continuum, the user is not necessarily required to follow it all. Because the main message of the book is not the physics, but the pretty universal dilemma that too much knowledge doesn't make you happy.
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