Incandescence - Greg Egan

Good writing, but where is the plot?

Really, you keep waiting to get it and it never comes out. In the end you feel like it has been a waste of good writing, and your happy reading turns, so more, into a serious disappointment. As if Egan has got this gift with words and sentences but cannot bother to think of a story to tell... apart from popularising maths, maybe?
Incandescence

Eye opener

Incandescence is brilliantly structured, dense, immaculately clever and... lyrical! It's arguably the simplest Egan's novel so far, but its simplicity is what makes it so inspiring. Apart from long contemplations over complex geometry of numerous orbits of different space objects, all rotating and slanting, the idea of the novel is clear - intelligence is of greatest value in the universe. Why some people live as if they're zombies, experiencing no natural curiousity that could actually drive their lives, while others tend to explore the universe and seek the truth? People are not that different, they all have this natural curiosity in their genes. Maybe something might be done to awaken the zombies. But maybe its not worth it, because in 50 million years, when there's nothing more left to explore, no new ideas to contemplate, boredom will make these people deliberately restrain their intelligence and put them back to sleep, as just sleep will be able to bring joy in the world with no misteries left to reveal. The choice is not an easy one. To lead a conscious intelligent life is not an easy choice. But it's an improbable piece of luck if you're given the chance to choose, as your choice may become a real eye opener for you.

Uncompromising *science* fiction from its leading exponent

As those of us who scan bookshop shelves can testify, the category "science fiction" is often stretched way past its limits. Often you head for what looks like a generous SF section, only to find it mainly composed of Tolkien and his imitators, a mass of sword-sandals-and-sorcery epics, and (most recently) Buffy and her vampire-fighting (or vampire-loving, or both) pals.

Greg Egan is at the opposite extreme: mostly science, and just enough fiction to gain entry into the genre. He is in excellent company, of course: great predecessors who wrote the same sort of novels include Arthur C Clarke, Hal Clement, and Robert Forward. Gregory Benford is also primarily a "big ideas" writer. Egan's books remind me especially of Clement's famous "Mission of Gravity" and "Cycle of Fire" - which is the highest kind of praise. These authors relish the task of extrapolating what we know into the (sometimes very distant) future, and constructing scenarios that are consistent with what we understand about the universe. While often putting their characters in dramatic situations that challenge them to show heroism, they don't have much time for characterisation, sex, or the distinctively human forms of conflict. And that's fine, if you like your SF extremely "dry".

(Incidentally, my two other favourite contemporary SF authors - Charles Stross and Alastair Reynolds - are also qualified scientists, and their books include generous rations of hard SF. But they have both chosen to put more suspense, sex and violence into most of their books than Egan does. It's just a matter of style).

I found "Incandescence" extremely satisfying, because I accepted it for what it is. Egan has chosen the highly exacting task of imagining the far distant future, and he confronts it head-on. His "post-human" characters aren't really at all human, although I suppose they can adopt shapes that we would recognise. So advanced is their technology that they can spend millions of years abstracted as patterns of charge in tiny computing devices, while perceiving the most detailed and varied virtual worlds. They can transport themselves right across the Galaxy - although they are excluded from its central "bulge" by an apparently even more advanced civilisation called "the Aloof". Then suddenly, with no warning at all, two of them are invited to visit the bulge as guests of the Aloof, in order to research traces of DNA that may lead to a hitherto unknown sentient race. (Even though it is made clear on page 1 that by no means all citizens of the Amalgam are "children of DNA"). When they are depicted, for instance, eating rice, I couldn't help being reminded of the way 1950s writers such as A.E. van Vogt would describe 25th-century men as wearing hats, or using computers that were still the size of houses.

The post-humans contribute one strand - the slighter one - of the book. The greater part relates to the lost "genetic cousins" themselves, who inhabit one of the strangest environments ever conceived by an SF writer. In the course of their fantastically demanding (and perhaps not altogether credible) efforts to master the secrets of spacetime within a few short months, these creatures begin with experiments like Galileo's with falling weights, and rapidly chin themselves to the level of general relativity. Without at first having any clear idea of what kind of animals they are, we quickly start to empathise with their plight and admire their valiant efforts to save themselves. Indeed, it is easier to identify with them than with the post-humans, who are necessary to the plot but much more sketchily depicted.

I won't give any spoilers, because - as other reviewers have pointed out - the main interest of this novel lies, not in the intricacies of plot and characterisation, but in the fascinatingly depicted environment itself. I hope this review helps you to decide whether "Incandescence" is your kind of book. There is one more thing to add, in case you are still in doubt: it is a very good book indeed, of its kind.

Should have been a short story

Having taken transhumanism to it's limits in previous novels, where could Egan go next? The answer is back to first principles with an alien race who's mathematical skills don't even extend as far as multiplication. Their struggle to deduce the nature of the universe from observation in time to avert catastrophe is the central theme of this book. Running parallel to this is an attempt to locate them by a group of people so advanced they have got bored of the universe.

Whilst I enjoyed reading everything written herein, and thought it was up to Egan's usual standard, the book falls short of his previous novels in that it doesn't quite read like a novel - it is more of an extended short story. There is a hint at the end as to how the two plot lines might connect, but it somehow it left me wanting to know more in the way that a complted novel shouldn't.

Not nearly exotic enough

Greg Egan is the Martin Gardner of science fiction storytelling, weaving mathematical and physical puzzles into entertaining howdunnits about encounters with novel forms of sentience, usually at vastly smaller scales than ours. Many of his stories, like Incandescence, are set in a post-human galaxy-spanning culture, the Amalgam, based on the idea of consciousness as an algorithm that can run on different hardware as it suits - so interstellar travel, for instance, is a simple matter of flinging your mental template (or a copy of your mind) as data to a far off receiving station where you can be re-embodied or just incorporated into any computational substrate that will let your unique OS run.

At his best (e.g. Schild's Ladder) the reader is often gripped by a plot involving a race against time to comprehend new forms of intelligent life that might be threatening the old through some inadvertent side-effect of their expansionism into the Amalgam's reality-space. At the same time, Egan has an amazing gift for explaining, Flatland fashion, the physics of extreme environments; working through the consequences of Planck scale realities or multi-dimensional spaces to render them almost as intuitively as we accept the everyday physics of our world.

In Incandescence, the story alternates between two investigators from the Amalgam trying to comprehend the possibly tragic fate of just such a new form of sentience and the struggle of that life form to comprehend its environment before the volatile conditions which exist in the star-packed inner core of our galaxy makes them extinct.

Although entertaining - I found myself rooting for the little sextupeds turning themselves on to the joys of physics - perhaps the maths that Egan describes here -- of huge gravitational forces and plasma dynamics -- aren't quite as exotic as in his other books. One half of the chapters are really just an exercise in the re-invention of Newton's Laws, Keplerian orbits, the differential calculus, special and general relativity and so on, familiar I suspect to any reader with a New Scientist-level physics education. Something is missing from the story as pure sci-fi because the reader isn't so much being stimulated by new physical concepts as being forced to try to remember the way, say, physicists solved the problem of orbits or the curvature of spacetime, etc.

It was tempting to see this tale as an allegory of a civilization at threat of extinction from vast environmental change (i.e. global warming) but even that is spoiled by a deus ex machina -- Egan's six-footed Einstein's are universally prone to collaboration and consensus! The only threat they face is lack of time, not their own foibles as a species.

Still, Incandescence is a wonderful antidote to space opera and many of Egan's descriptions of physics experiments inside extreme gravity wells are ingenious and elegant. Buy this book if you enjoy mental exercise and mathematical puzzles, but only if your scientific education is pre-college. Otherwise it might just feel like a history lesson.

Good writing, but where is the plot?

Really, you keep waiting to get it and it never comes out. In the end you feel like it has been a waste of good writing, and your happy reading turns, so more, into a serious disappointment. As if Egan has got this gift with words and sentences but cannot bother to think of a story to tell... apart from popularising maths, maybe?
Incandescence

Eye opener

Incandescence is brilliantly structured, dense, immaculately clever and... lyrical! It's arguably the simplest Egan's novel so far, but its simplicity is what makes it so inspiring. Apart from long contemplations over complex geometry of numerous orbits of different space objects, all rotating and slanting, the idea of the novel is clear - intelligence is of greatest value in the universe. Why some people live as if they're zombies, experiencing no natural curiousity that could actually drive their lives, while others tend to explore the universe and seek the truth? People are not that different, they all have this natural curiosity in their genes. Maybe something might be done to awaken the zombies. But maybe its not worth it, because in 50 million years, when there's nothing more left to explore, no new ideas to contemplate, boredom will make these people deliberately restrain their intelligence and put them back to sleep, as just sleep will be able to bring joy in the world with no misteries left to reveal. The choice is not an easy one. To lead a conscious intelligent life is not an easy choice. But it's an improbable piece of luck if you're given the chance to choose, as your choice may become a real eye opener for you.

Uncompromising *science* fiction from its leading exponent

As those of us who scan bookshop shelves can testify, the category "science fiction" is often stretched way past its limits. Often you head for what looks like a generous SF section, only to find it mainly composed of Tolkien and his imitators, a mass of sword-sandals-and-sorcery epics, and (most recently) Buffy and her vampire-fighting (or vampire-loving, or both) pals.

Greg Egan is at the opposite extreme: mostly science, and just enough fiction to gain entry into the genre. He is in excellent company, of course: great predecessors who wrote the same sort of novels include Arthur C Clarke, Hal Clement, and Robert Forward. Gregory Benford is also primarily a "big ideas" writer. Egan's books remind me especially of Clement's famous "Mission of Gravity" and "Cycle of Fire" - which is the highest kind of praise. These authors relish the task of extrapolating what we know into the (sometimes very distant) future, and constructing scenarios that are consistent with what we understand about the universe. While often putting their characters in dramatic situations that challenge them to show heroism, they don't have much time for characterisation, sex, or the distinctively human forms of conflict. And that's fine, if you like your SF extremely "dry".

(Incidentally, my two other favourite contemporary SF authors - Charles Stross and Alastair Reynolds - are also qualified scientists, and their books include generous rations of hard SF. But they have both chosen to put more suspense, sex and violence into most of their books than Egan does. It's just a matter of style).

I found "Incandescence" extremely satisfying, because I accepted it for what it is. Egan has chosen the highly exacting task of imagining the far distant future, and he confronts it head-on. His "post-human" characters aren't really at all human, although I suppose they can adopt shapes that we would recognise. So advanced is their technology that they can spend millions of years abstracted as patterns of charge in tiny computing devices, while perceiving the most detailed and varied virtual worlds. They can transport themselves right across the Galaxy - although they are excluded from its central "bulge" by an apparently even more advanced civilisation called "the Aloof". Then suddenly, with no warning at all, two of them are invited to visit the bulge as guests of the Aloof, in order to research traces of DNA that may lead to a hitherto unknown sentient race. (Even though it is made clear on page 1 that by no means all citizens of the Amalgam are "children of DNA"). When they are depicted, for instance, eating rice, I couldn't help being reminded of the way 1950s writers such as A.E. van Vogt would describe 25th-century men as wearing hats, or using computers that were still the size of houses.

The post-humans contribute one strand - the slighter one - of the book. The greater part relates to the lost "genetic cousins" themselves, who inhabit one of the strangest environments ever conceived by an SF writer. In the course of their fantastically demanding (and perhaps not altogether credible) efforts to master the secrets of spacetime within a few short months, these creatures begin with experiments like Galileo's with falling weights, and rapidly chin themselves to the level of general relativity. Without at first having any clear idea of what kind of animals they are, we quickly start to empathise with their plight and admire their valiant efforts to save themselves. Indeed, it is easier to identify with them than with the post-humans, who are necessary to the plot but much more sketchily depicted.

I won't give any spoilers, because - as other reviewers have pointed out - the main interest of this novel lies, not in the intricacies of plot and characterisation, but in the fascinatingly depicted environment itself. I hope this review helps you to decide whether "Incandescence" is your kind of book. There is one more thing to add, in case you are still in doubt: it is a very good book indeed, of its kind.

Should have been a short story

Having taken transhumanism to it's limits in previous novels, where could Egan go next? The answer is back to first principles with an alien race who's mathematical skills don't even extend as far as multiplication. Their struggle to deduce the nature of the universe from observation in time to avert catastrophe is the central theme of this book. Running parallel to this is an attempt to locate them by a group of people so advanced they have got bored of the universe.

Whilst I enjoyed reading everything written herein, and thought it was up to Egan's usual standard, the book falls short of his previous novels in that it doesn't quite read like a novel - it is more of an extended short story. There is a hint at the end as to how the two plot lines might connect, but it somehow it left me wanting to know more in the way that a complted novel shouldn't.

Not nearly exotic enough

Greg Egan is the Martin Gardner of science fiction storytelling, weaving mathematical and physical puzzles into entertaining howdunnits about encounters with novel forms of sentience, usually at vastly smaller scales than ours. Many of his stories, like Incandescence, are set in a post-human galaxy-spanning culture, the Amalgam, based on the idea of consciousness as an algorithm that can run on different hardware as it suits - so interstellar travel, for instance, is a simple matter of flinging your mental template (or a copy of your mind) as data to a far off receiving station where you can be re-embodied or just incorporated into any computational substrate that will let your unique OS run.

At his best (e.g. Schild's Ladder) the reader is often gripped by a plot involving a race against time to comprehend new forms of intelligent life that might be threatening the old through some inadvertent side-effect of their expansionism into the Amalgam's reality-space. At the same time, Egan has an amazing gift for explaining, Flatland fashion, the physics of extreme environments; working through the consequences of Planck scale realities or multi-dimensional spaces to render them almost as intuitively as we accept the everyday physics of our world.

In Incandescence, the story alternates between two investigators from the Amalgam trying to comprehend the possibly tragic fate of just such a new form of sentience and the struggle of that life form to comprehend its environment before the volatile conditions which exist in the star-packed inner core of our galaxy makes them extinct.

Although entertaining - I found myself rooting for the little sextupeds turning themselves on to the joys of physics - perhaps the maths that Egan describes here -- of huge gravitational forces and plasma dynamics -- aren't quite as exotic as in his other books. One half of the chapters are really just an exercise in the re-invention of Newton's Laws, Keplerian orbits, the differential calculus, special and general relativity and so on, familiar I suspect to any reader with a New Scientist-level physics education. Something is missing from the story as pure sci-fi because the reader isn't so much being stimulated by new physical concepts as being forced to try to remember the way, say, physicists solved the problem of orbits or the curvature of spacetime, etc.

It was tempting to see this tale as an allegory of a civilization at threat of extinction from vast environmental change (i.e. global warming) but even that is spoiled by a deus ex machina -- Egan's six-footed Einstein's are universally prone to collaboration and consensus! The only threat they face is lack of time, not their own foibles as a species.

Still, Incandescence is a wonderful antidote to space opera and many of Egan's descriptions of physics experiments inside extreme gravity wells are ingenious and elegant. Buy this book if you enjoy mental exercise and mathematical puzzles, but only if your scientific education is pre-college. Otherwise it might just feel like a history lesson.