Incandescence

August 11, 2008
Hugo-winner Egan (Schild’s Ladder
), champion of ultra-hard SF, devotes most of this slim novel to the efforts of the Arkmakers, who live in a neutron star’s accretion disk at the center of the galaxy, to develop orbital physics from first principles and save the artificial world created by their more sophisticated ancestors. Meanwhile, Rakesh, a more or less human member of a distant posthuman society, sets off on an unrelated quest to find the Arkmakers and is soon trying to save them from their current danger. Whole chapters are devoted to physics problems and include a variety of diagrams and cited sources. Egan’s briefly sketched characters and cultures are interesting, but this one is all about the science and won’t have much interest for those without at least some understanding of celestial mechanics.

October 15, 2008
Though the many races of the Amalgam are spread throughout the galaxy, one place they do not visit lies at the brilliantly hot galactic center, known as the "bulge." One race, called the Aloof, dwells there in polite but firm isolation. But when Rakesh is asked to travel to the Aloof's realm in search of a lost race, he and a few trusted companions accept the opportunity. Meanwhile, Roi, one of the members of that unknown race, turns away from her life of constant toil and joins with a group of pioneering "thinkers" to solve an intriguing mystery fundamental to their world's existence and that may portend its destruction. Hugo Award winner Egan ("Permutation City; Quarantine; Diaspora") writes clearly and vividly about the cutting edge of science yet doesn't forget that characters are the windows through which the world is viewed. His latest novel, a whirlwind foray into the world of science theory coupled with the urgency of a doomsday scenario, belongs in all sf collections.

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2008
The Milky Way has been thoroughly explored and cataloged, and journeying among its networked worlds, called the Amalgam, is a simple matter of digital transmission. People in the Amalgam exist indefinitely in digital form, able to assume any race when they are embodied, millennia passing as if only hours. The only unknown is the bulge, home to the Aloof, who resist all communications. Rakesh, who has fruitlessly searched for something new, cannot pass up the opportunity to enter the bulge when a stranger asks him to locate a lost race. Paralleling Rakeshs investigation is the story of that lost race, a collective of drones with no knowledge of themselves and their world. That changes when two citizens wake from dormancy, sparking an epidemic of scientific discovery that ultimately will save their world. The driving forces of this novel are a pure scientific puzzle and the intellectual joy of finding answers; Egan wastes little effort on character and conflict. Those who like their science hard will appreciate his thorough research and intricate speculations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)