Dichronauts

June 26, 2017
Egan’s latest work of experimental science fiction (after the Orthogonal trilogy) is impressively bizarre. He takes some of the physics concepts explored in Christopher Priest’s The Inverted World and turns them up to 11, imagining a universe in which there are two dimensions each of time and space. Gravity works in wholly unfamiliar ways. Some people, called walkers, are born only able to look east and (if they bend backwards) west, but not north and south; they have a symbiotic relationship with siders, who live in walkers’ brains and can look north and south and relay what they detect. Seth is a walker who shares his brain with Theo, a sider. The two of them work as surveyors, searching for the properly habitable zones into which their city, Baharabad, can be moved as its current zone becomes inhabitable due to the planet’s rotation. (Baharabad is in constant motion, its forward edge being extended as its back edge is destroyed.) Egan provides copious and necessary papers on the math and physics of world (there’s less information on the staggeringly weird biology), but even with that help, much of the science will make the plotting borderline impenetrable for anyone not already immersed in the concepts. Nonphysicists hoping to stay afloat by clinging to the plot will find there’s little of it to hold onto. Egan may have out-Eganed himself with this one. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Chichak Galen Literary.

May 15, 2017
Egan (The Arrows of Time, 2014, etc.) specializes in inventing seriously strange worlds; this one might well be his weirdest yet.Seth, a Walker, like all his kind can only orient his body in an east-west direction and is blind to what lies north or south. Inside his skull lives Theo, a cylindrical symbiont called a Sider, who projects infrasound pulses north and south and observes the reflections. They can speak to each other and see what the other sees. Like all living things here, they and their fellows must migrate perpetually to follow their sun's bizarre orbit and the wobbling habitable zone it generates. What? Well, our universe consists of three space dimensions and one of time; this world has two space dimensions and two of time, so instead of a sphere they're on a hyperboloid. This isn't the half of it; water, for instance, runs up any slope of less than 45 degrees. The city where they live, Baharabad, must constantly be disassembled at one extreme and reassembled at the other (though we never get to see this happening). Seth and Theo are surveyors, scouting ahead to map a safe path for the migration. But then their expedition encounters a seemingly bottomless, boundless chasm. All this doesn't sound too bad in synopsis. The problem is, it's counterintuitive, so downright odd that it's impossible to visualize the inhabitants, their surroundings, or what's going on. Knowing what the mathematical justification is doesn't help. There are plenty of other issues too. How did Walkers and Siders survive independently, as it seems they did, before becoming symbionts? Why would Walkers have such convenient holes in their skulls? It's not even particularly original: back in 1974 Christopher Priest envisioned something similar (Inverted World) with much greater success. Hard to imagine much of an audience outside math brainiacs and Egan enthusiasts.

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