More than any modern writer I can think of Egan's books have always relied almost exclusively on the Big Idea. This is a very precarious position, however. For one, Big Ideas are hard to come by. For another, they cannot always carry a novel by themselves. It is a testament to Egan's creativity that he's managed to write as many entertaining books as he has under these conditions. His early books, I think, did many things that had never been done before. However, for me, Egan hit the wall with _Diaspora_. The ideas were uninteresting, and the book had little else to recommend it. _Teranesia_ had more of an attempt at characterization than is usual for Egan, but he remains pretty bad at it. Unfortunately, _Schild's Ladder_ doesn't represent an improvement.
The plot of _Schild's Ladder_ is very thin. A physics experiment sets off an explosion of something, a new sort of vacuum, that expands at half the speed of light. The rest of the novel is an exploration of this region, your basic Big Dumb Object really. As scaffolding for this scenario, Egan describes in a remarkable amount of detail a view of future physics, quantum graph theory, loosely based on loop quantum gravity. As with any story of this ilk, there are revelations about the nature of the BDO and what it tells the characters about their universe. Unfortunately, these revelations tend to involve things like decoherence and superselection rules. Now, I happen to think decoherence is a rather cool thing, but even as it's applied here, it does not make a particularly exciting revelation. I can't imagine how this would play to someone who hasn't taken a course or two in quantum mechanics. Perhaps it would evoke more of a sense of wonder than it did in me. Ultimately, I found none of the physical explorations here particularly interesting or enough to fuel the book by themselves.
Having dispensed with the plot, the question becomes whether the society or the characters can drive the book. To his credit, Egan has significant ambition here, if one that he's attempted before. As in _Diaspora_ and earlier books, he portrays a society where humanity can and is run on computers. He has abandoned some of the idealism of his earlier books, however, and portrays characters who act irrationally and even, gasp, have an attachment to a physical body. Still, while it's possible that our future selves might have dialogue like
or give theorems (lovingly described in the text) as gifts, it doesn't make it interesting to read about them. Besides, I've spent a decent amount of time with CP^4 and it'd be a really dull place to spend any time. One can admire Egan's construction of a society from afar, but it completely fails to be engaging. Also, for much of the exposition, it feeels as if Egan is showing off his knowledge, but failing to add anything to the narrative."My earliest memories are of CP^4 -- that's a Kaehler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex dimensions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this" -- he motioned at the surrounding more-or-less-Euclidean space -- "for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even Newtonian mchanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate, visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in single, three-dimensional space."
I should mention at this point, for those that don't know, I'm a physics graduate student. This may or may not be relevant; it's possible that I may only be finding certain things prosaic because I deal with them almost every day. Still, I think there's a skill to describing big physical relevations that Egan lacks. He concentrates too much on the details, on explaining rotating state vectors and superpositions, that he misses the big picture. The fact that Egan's physics is more grounded in real physics than most other science fiction cannot excuse the fact that he never graps that sense or awe of wonder that this sort of thing needs.
I find little to recommend in this book other than its ambition. It bored me and was somewhat of a chore to finish. I don't read much short fiction, but I hope that Egan is still writing it and producing short stories of the same quality as those in his collections. Until he can develop his characterization and overcome the sense of distance that his work evinces, I don't think that he can any longer sustain my interest for the length of a novel.
Back to reviews.
Back to my homepage.
Last updated 3/30/02