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I was amazed as the story progressed how everything I thought was going to happen was completely wrong. A really great book! ( )

review of
Greg Egan's Incandescence
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 5, 2018

For my complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1078864-egan

I 1st learned about Greg Egan when he was recommended to me by Pope Fred when I was in Australia in 2000. I then read Quarantine, Permutation City, Diaspora, & Terenesia — probably in faiirly quick succession, definitely before I started reviewing on Goodreads in the fall of 2007. I remember thinking that the 1st 2 were excellent & associating them w/ Greg Bear's Blood Music & lumping him together w/ Bear as a 'Hard Science' SciFi writer (Bear, it turns out, is much more diverse than just 'Hard Science'). I must not've run across his bks very often used or I'm sure I wd've read much more by him by now.

Incandescence is from 2008 & a near-the-front page lists 8 other bks by him, 4 of wch are the ones I've listed above. Perhaps he's not prolific. There's quite alot listed by him on Wikipedia including 10 novels & then other bks that're presumably also novels that're listed under "series" & a slew of short story collections, etc. I'm glad that there's more for me to read.

I have a friend who berates me for reading & reviewing SF here. She has a brother who's a scientist & seems to've taken a fancy to science in connection w/ that. I pointed out to her that SF is often written by scientists. Egan's wikipedia entry states that:

"Egan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from the University of Western Australia.

"He published his first work in 1983. He specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind uploading, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism to religion. He often deals with complex technical material, like new physics and epistemology."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan

As such, he's an example of what I'm talking about even if a Bachelor's degree is worth little more than toilet paper in the US these days in this era of you-must-spend-a-life's-worth-of-income-on-your-higher-education-or-you-will-be-beneath-our-notice. Maybe Joan Slonczewski is a better example:

"Joan Lyn Slonczewski is an American microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Her books have twice earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel: A Door into Ocean (1987) and The Highest Frontier (2011). With John W. Foster she coauthors the textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science (W. W. Norton). She explores her ideas of biology, politics, and artificial intelligence at her blog Ultraphyte."

[..]

"She earned an A.B. in biology, magna cum laude, from Bryn Mawr College in 1977. She completed a PhD in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 1982 and post-doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania studying calcium flux in leukocyte chemotaxis. Since 1984 she has taught at Kenyon College, taking sabbatical leaves at Princeton University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Slonczewski's research focuses on the pH (environmental) stress response in Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis using genetic techniques.

"Slonczewski teaches both biology and science fiction courses."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Slonczewski

At any rate, what I'm leading up to here is that Egan's Incandescence struck me as such hard hard science science fiction, despite elements of extreme fancifulness, that I have to wonder who wd read such a thing?! I did.

Sometimes I'm somewhat dismissive of visual artists whose scale is what seems to impress the rubes: 'Hey! I don't have any deep ideas at all so I'll just make the object BIG! That'll do the trick!' — & it usually does. But SF writers who write on a large scale have to back it up w/ detail that makes it something more than just splash. Egan works on a large scale:

"Lahl explained that she belonged to a synchronization clan. Its members roamed the galaxy, traveling alone, but had agreed to remain in contact by meeting regularly at prearranged locations, and doing their best to experience similar periods of subjective time between these reunions. She was on her way to the next such event, in a planetary system twelve hundred light years out from this node. Given that the meetings took place just once every hundred millennia, travel plans could be made well in advance, and there was no excuse for tardiness." - p 3

Egan's imagination gets into details that establish the 'otherness', from the human POV, of one of the main species that populate the story:

"At the edge of the flow of bodies a group of wretched males clung to the rock, begging to be relieved of their ripeness. Roi approached them to inspect their offerings. Each male had separated the two hard plates that met along the side of his body, to expose a long, soft cavity where five or six swollen globes sat dangling from heavy cords. Not all of the seed packets were plump and healthy, but Roi made a conscious effort not to be too finicky. With her own carapace split open along her left side, she used her mating claw to reach into the males' bodies, snip the globes free, and deposit them inside herself." - p 12

Blue balls? I guess the males don't have mating claws or they'd be able to jerk off those unwanted appendages.

The beginning of the novel sets a scene reminiscent enough of contemporary urban slacker culture to have the reader poetntially feel comfortable — but 2 of the characters decide to pursue a potential scientific breakthrough that Lahl has pointed them toward & decide to leave their existence in favor something that might never return them to the familiar. Given that this is partially all happening in a malleable cyber-space their friends give them a farewell that dramatically stresses the seriousness of the decision they're making:

"Two robust, seasoned-looking planks lay on the deck, neatly slotted through a convenient gap below the guard rail to protrude over the edge, Rakesh supposed they might be carried on ships like this for the sake of repairs. That prospect struck him as somewhat cheerier than if they'd been brought along with only their present purpose in mind." - p 22

They cyberwalk the cyberplanks.

The novel follows a fairly standard structure that alternates between 2 disparate stories that eventually merge. There's Rakesh in one narrative & Roi in the other:

"Upon waking, Roi's first thought was that she didn't understand the wind. In the garmside, it blew in from the Incandescence at the sharq edge and battered its way through the porous rock of the Splinter, finally escaping at the opposite edge. In the sardside, the flow was reversed. Between these opposing winds lay the Calm. The pattern of the wind was something related to the pattern of weights, but the nature of the connection was far from obvious: the wind certainly didn't blow the way things fell. The Null Line lay in the middle of the Calm, but the Calm extended far beyond it, encompassing a whole plane that stretched out in the shomal and junub directions, as well as the Null Line's rarb and sharq." - p 32

Five pages earlier there's a diagram of an octagon w/ rounded corners that has shomal as north, sard as east, junub as south, garm as west, & null as the middle. Curved lines seem to depict lines of force, presumably wind lines. Understanding these directions becomes key to following the plot.

Rakesh & Parantham, his partner in their exploratory endeavor, exist in a state of extremely advanced flexibility. In contrast, Roi & her fellows are on a very narrow evolutionary path. As R & P seek their goal, they have the option of changing shape to fit in better w/ whatever worlds they pass thru:

"When he met up with Parantham outside the town's guest shelter, he found that she'd gone one step further.

""I see you've made yourself at home," he teased her.

""Flesh is flesh," she hissed through her quad mouth. "The shape makes no difference to me."

"Rakesh had perceived her as human-shaped back at the node, but her précis had always made it clear that she possessed no innate somatic self-perception. Born in a scape, descended from a software that had ultimately been authored—rather than translated from any kind of organic intelligence—she seemed to relate to bodies the way Rakesh did to vehicles." - p 40

This bk cd be sd to be 'about' the incredible capacity of the mind to puzzle out just about anything — including its environment.

""The center of the Splinter must be following its natural path—otherwise objects at the Null Line would not be weightless. On the garmside, though, the circle will be slightly smaller, and on the sardside, slightly larger. The natural motion that corresponds to these circles must involve slightly different orbital periods, but the Splinter is a solid object, it has to move as a whole. Because every part of it must complete an orbit in the same time, there's a mismatch between the speed at which things are moving and the speed of a naturally circular orbit. Wherever there's a mismatch like that, the natural path can't be circular any more.["]" - p 54

Got that? If you're an astronomer &/or a mathematician, the central struggles for knowledge may click w/ you. If you're a reader looking for an adventure story you'll still be able to find something to grasp but you'll be missing alot. Personally, I think it's well worth the effort to read Incandescence regardless.

Roi's culture is in a rut, a rut that its inquiring minds are about to break it out of.

"Zak had set them a wildly ambitious target: to create something small enough for a traveler to carry anywhere in the Splinter, oblivious to the varying weights and accurate enough to be trusted for thirty-six shifts without recalibration. After trying out many unwieldy designs, they had devised a system in which two spiral coils of metal ribbon were joined at their centers to small shafts. The first and larger of the coils was tightened by turning its shaft with a lever, and then the force as it unwound was eked out slowly and employed to feed a gentle, to-and-fro rocking of the other coil's shaft." - p 91

Some people reinvent the wheel, others reinvent the watch. The importance of accurate measuring comes to the fore. Roi's people have a very limited conception of what their environment is. They mostly exist to keep on keepin' on. What if they're inside a spacecraft after having since lost the knowledge of what a spacecraft is or what's outside it?

""We cut a tunnel," Bard replied, "through the sardside. Maybe two or three tunnels. If the Splinter now feels roughly the same force from the wind on the garmside as it does on the sardside, we can shift the balance by letting some of the sardside wind pass right through, delivering no force."" - p 97

Tunneling in a spaceship, if that's what it is, mining the metal, might turn out to be a bad idea. Meanwhile, the 2 plotlines grow closer.

""So this is their graveyard," he said.

""We don't know that," Parantham replied. "We know that the Steelmakers built at least one interplanetary probe. At some point they might have built star ships, or engineering spores. They might have left this world behind long before it was broken up."" - p 103

Much of the more grandiose visionary SF imagines a time when astronomical events are poised to annihilate the puny lifeforms that occupy planets. These stories take an enormous imagination to conceive of & to somehow resolve.

"He could easily picture his own village on Shab-e-Noor with a dark pinprick crossing the sky, the ground rumbling, an ominous lightness. Of course, that couldn't happen in the Age of the Amalgam; there was no conceivable cosmic threat out in the disc that could not be detected and neutralized. Such vulnerability had been relegated to history." - p 104

Imagine. People on Earth in the 21st century have worries like whether they'll be sextorted — we haven't had to face the imminent doom of the planet.. or the solar system.. or the galaxy. Now imagine that problems on that scale are solved. You've come a long way, baby. What if there are creatures as large in relation to us as we are in relation to atoms? What if they're about to split a proton off to see what happens? It cd get messy.. — but that's not what this bk is about. Parantham & Rakesh are looking for something that Lahl has led them to believe in. The big find.

"A few hours later they had the answer, from their telescopes rather than from their probes. Near the edge of their belt, an object some six hundred meters across with a highly atypical spectrum had been found orbiting among the rocks. The telescope's image showed a gray ellipsoid, pitted and corroded, but clearly too regular to be an asteroid itself. Spectroscopy revealed that its surface contained molecular filaments, carbon nanotubes with elaborate chemical modifications that both strengthened them and protected them against the stellar wind." - p 107

Not only is Roi's culture (re)inventing the clock they're trying to square the circle (similar to the early days of trying to find Pi).

"When Tan analyzed a path on a curved surface, he broke it up into a multitude of tiny, straight line segments of equal length." - p 115

"["]the best way to think about curved geometry is to imagine it as lots of little flat pieces stuck together. I mean, a cube is just six flat pieces, but it's not that far from the shape of a sphere. And if you use more pieces, you can get closer."" - p 219

Meanwhile, R & P are navigating difficulties at a much more astronomical level but at the same time a much easier one thanks to the knowledge & tools that their civilization provides them.

"Toward the center of the Nuclear Stellar Disk the density of stars began a precipitous climb. Within a cluster two hundred light years wide a billion stars sped along a complex tangle of orbits, and the deeper into this swarm you dived the more crowded and violent it became. To Rakesh, it brought to mind the image of a nest of furious ants caught in a steep subsidence, kept from falling into the depths only by the sheer energy of their motion." - p 124

Yes, Nuclear Stellar Disks are a thing outside of Egan's considerable imagination. If I understand correctly, they're the cores of spiral galaxies. You can read about them in general here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002ApJ...573..131P .

Roi's society is changing as more of her people become compelled by the anomolous scientific research that's growing.

"Roi said, "So you've left your old teams now? You've formed a new one, and you're looking for recruits?"

""Not exactly," Cot replied, working briskly to ensure that the spring was fully wound before the darkness returned. "We still don't know what's the best thing to do. We'll form a team if that's necessary, but we're willing to join an existing one if they can make a good case that they know what's going on and that they're doing something useful about it."

"Every time Roi thought she could no longer be shocked, these people outdid themselves. It had taken a great struggle for her to tear herself free of her work team to join Zak." - pp 143-144

The plotlines get even closer.

"Rakesh woke. He had not imagined the claim about the Ark; the telescope's report had entered his skull and the discovery had seeped into the dream's scenario." - p 148

& Roi & co's science quickly becomes more visionary & sophisticated. This is a time of a paradigm shift.

"Ruz pondered this. "If they're very distant from us," he said, "then the natural paths of the light that's reaching us from them might be affected by the geometry. This isn't like seeing something that's right in front of us, when we can reach out and confirm by touch that what we're seeing is what's really there. If the geometry can bend the Splinter's natural path to wrap it around the Hub, why shouldn't it bend light as well?"

""Ah." Roi couldn't see how this could explain the whole strange vision that the void presented, but it did make some sense. They'd been used to thinking of light as traveling in straight lines, like a rapidly flung stone crossing the Null Chamber before anything could divert it. It seemed the void was too big, and even light was too slow, for the comparison to be sustained." - p 164

Yes, at some point we have to consider that 'light might be too slow' for something.

"She chose a bright light that would be easy to follow, and aimed the tracker toward it. It was only halfway through the measurement, when the times for the successive occultations were beginning to diverge from those she'd seen before for this part of the band, that it struck her that she should have noticed this bright object before. She recognized the pattern of lights around it, and she was sure that in the past they had not included this luminous interloper.

"Which meant what?

"Perhaps this object was not as distant as the others. It could be orbiting the Hub closely enough for its own independent motion to show up against the synchronized rotation of the background.

"Could this be their lost half, the other Splinter?" - p 165

Maybe it's their soul-mate.

Roi's people develop a long-distance communication system based on light reflected off of pieces of metal in their tunnels.

"Roi was bemused. "Words need drumming or writing. Where are the words?"

""We agree on a list of simple words," Jos said. "Then we divide the list in half, in half again, and so on, until the last half is a single word. Tilting the metal once can tell us which half of the list the word is in, twice which half of that half-list, and so on."" - p 180

Ingenious.

Roi begins to intuit the possibility that there are genetically inherited traits.

"The simple truth was, she wanted the two of them to have children together. As many as possible.

"She turned the baffling notion over in her mind. Why? He was a good teacher, but he didn't have to be the father of a hatchling, she didn't have to be the mother, in order for him to teach it. Did she imagine, absurdly, that their individual skills had somehow seeped into their seed and eggs, and would collide within their children with a preternatural ability to endure the struggles ahead?" - p 183

Rakesh finally infilitrates the target 'ark' in an avatar body chosen to blend in w/ the existing life-forms & attempts to communicate.

"Zey said, "Forgive me, but I couldn't help noticing the differences inside you."

""There's nothing to forgive. I know how strange my appearance must be."

"Saf said, "Ra tells us he was hatched 'outside the world'. This is not his real body, he just wears it to get along with us." Rakesh still couldn't quite gauge the intent behind her tone of amusement; he didn't know if she was inviting Zey to mock him, or imploring her to deal gently with his delusions.

""Are you our cousin, then?" Zey asked.

"Rakesh felt goose bumps rise on the back of his arms, back in the control room; there were some things he simply wasn't equipped to feel viscerally through the avatar itself." - p 191

For my complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1078864-egan ( )

Parallel stories, one of which is interesting. The other… well, if you’d like to read in great detail about some insects discovering Newton’s and Einstein’s theories of gravity have I got the book for you! Sample paragraph:

Zak had been forced to give up his beloved three, and the simple assumption that the shomal-junub weight would be equal to the hidden rarb-sharq weight, which the spin cancelled out exactly. Since the shomal-junub cycle was faster than the spin, the shomal-junub weight was stronger than both the spin weight and it’s equal, the rarb-sharq weight. Call the shomal-junub weight one. The rarb-sharq and spin weights could be quantified now: they were sixteen parts in twenty-five (the square of the ratio of the shomal-junub period to the spin period.) The total garm-sard weight was two and a quarter, according to the weight measurements… ( )

(...)

While the blurb isn’t wrong, it does undersell one crucial thing about Incandescence: the nature of Roi and Zak’s deciphering of subtle clues. The book alternates every other chapter between Rakesh point of view, and the Splinter’s. Each viewpoint takes up about 50% of page time, so nearly half of the book deals with the deciphering.

This deciphering half embodies the novel’s main idea: on Scalzi’s blog Egan wrote that the book “grew out of the notion that the theory of general relativity — widely regarded as one of the pinnacles of human intellectual achievement — could be discovered by a pre-industrial civilization with no steam engines, no electric lights, no radio transmitters, and absolutely no tradition of astronomy.”

Big parts of Roi and Zak’s chapters are descriptions of and dialogue about physics experiments concerning gravity, motion and orbits, and your mileage may vary. That is to say: at times it was a bit too dry, long-winded and detailed for my tastes. Not that I don’t like science or non-fiction (on the contrary), but the subject matter and the way it was presented wasn’t fully for me. This is not to say I didn’t like the book, but it did alter my reading experience, and ultimately knocked off a star or 2 should I have to rate that reading experience – mind you, not the book per se. More on that later.

(...)

Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It ( )