Schild's Ladder

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful mind expanding stuff - but not his best work
Review: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," wrote Arthur C. Clarke. The fiction of Greg Egan embodies this claim. His stories are breathtaking, not just for their scientific rigour, but for their enormous scope and an audacious willingness to boldly go where no one has gone before. Schlid's Ladder, his latest novel, is no exception.

After the painful hyping of the latest myopic journey through Mr. Lucas's Star Wars Universe, it is comforting to know that there are individuals who are interested in brave speculations on the fundamental nature of the universe and the nature of our own existence in it. From somewhere in Perth, Australia, this reclusive and intellectually brilliant author has extrapolated his way from the latest cutting edge theoretical physics to a theory of everything, not just for this universe, but for an entirely new one as well.

Set some 20,000 years into the novel opens with an experiment designed to probe the origin of the universe, however an accident sees an entirely new universe created, which proceeds to expand uncontrollably, gobbling up nearby stars and planets at the half the speed of light

To the rescue, or at least to the research front, come thousands of quantum-computer-people. They are scientists mainly (like seemingly all of Egan's characters), and while many feel threatened by the wholesale destruction wrecked upon their home-worlds, others want to study the new universe. The main character, Tchicaya, is one such scientist, fascinated by the rich physics and signs of life in the new universe, he works to save it when terrorists attempt to squash the new world.

In many ways, Schild's Ladder is a distillation of much of Egan's pervious work sharing both their strengths and their flaws. Egan's international reputation as one of the most admired and respected writers in the genre is based upon his hard science and big ideas. Some idea of just how big can be gauged by the fact that Egan is now working with some notable US physicists in the computer modelling of some of the theories set forth in his book. Not bad for a work of fiction - but not always easy to understand either. The long horizons are equally daunting: the book is set 20,000 years in the future.

In this utopian future, death has been eliminated, or at least relegated to the level of a small inconvenience. Everyone in the 220th Century keeps a safe backup of themselves somewhere handy, so any lethal misfortune means merely restoring your consciousness from the last available backup. Evidently, operating systems have improved considerably since the time of Bill Gates.

Gender has also been banished from this future and is merely an archaic remnant of language rather than a state of being. Some of humanity's distant descendants have given up flesh altogether and have taken on the form of sentient quantum computers. Of course there are still a few backward souls, the Anachronauts, who refuse to make the great leap and instead crawl across the universe in sputtering craft making quixotic jousts at defending what they see as the last remnants of true humanity.

Here Egan does casually what so much science fiction struggles to do, address the fundamental questions of what it is to be human and the forces that shape our society. It is ironic that Egan's social commentary is some of his most poignant and accessible writing, when his characters return to their scientific explorations as they inevitably do; his writing becomes orders of magnitude more difficult.

Consequently, the book is rather lumpy - a strange hybrid between Kubrik's 2001 and Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time'. This makes for some mind-expanding descriptions of astrophysics, but rather poor dialogue. Nor is the book helped by a relatively weak ending.

Schild's Ladder repeats many of the characteristic themes and obsessions of this extraordinary author: the future of human consciousness, the problems of gender, the elegance and beauty of the mathematical world. The "hardest" of hard science fiction, the novel comes complete with scientific diagrams and a bibliography. No wonder the phrase "ideas man" pops up constantly in reviews of his work.

A heady brew of astounding ideas - quantum physics, cosmology, advanced mathematics - Schild's Ladder makes a wonderful primer in contemporary "theories of everything." But it also sets out to be read as a novel, and here it is far less successful. Part of the reason is that Egan appears more interested in his amazing theories than in the craft of language. His characters - perhaps appropriately for computer intelligences - are artificial and affect-less, and he is no J.G. Ballard when it comes to his prose.

But to judge Egan for his skill as a wordsmith rather misses the point. Like much of the very best literature, Egan's work makes bold statements about our universe and the nature of humanity itself. Egan offers his readers glimpses of strange new universes; the chance to luxuriate in a poetry of brilliant ideas.

While it falls short of his best work, Distress and Diaspora,
fans of Egan will find Schild's Ladder at least as satisfying and intelligent as Terranesia or Permutation City. More literary-minded readers will find the effort involved in getting to grips with his concepts well worth the reward as even his weaker novels ar more worthwhile than 95% of other books in the genre. Finally, for anyone interested in physics or mathematics, Schild's Ladder is an absolute delight.

Rating:
Summary: Plots dwarf vision
Review: Egan's far-future story of posthumanity is a tale of many world's colliding: old universe and new, antiquated attitudes with enlightened ones, and one man's (and couple's) past with his (their) future. Unfortunately, all these colliding worlds and subplots are bit much to take in, especially with such high-level theoretical physics weaved into it all.

I did find myself caring more about these characters than Egan's past heros, and I think the author's plot development is getting better with each book. (The subplot of the cleverly-named anachronauts was brilliant.) But perhaps this was at the expense of vision: this book's picture of the future generally left me less in awe than that of Diaspora. (I mean, come on: Diaspora's vision had it's own pronouns and a glossary!) I guess Egan has spoiled me.

Rating:
Summary: Great speculations, somewhat weak plot
Review: Egan's imaginative ideas about physics, and to a lesser extent human societies, make this book well worth reading, and more thought-provoking than most science fiction.
The characters in the story aren't all that exciting. The ending was particularly disappointing, as the conflict builds to a crisis that looks like it requires a fairly sudden and decisive ending, but then fizzles out slowly with inadequate explanation of why the good guys get more time than expected to stop the final dangers.

Rating:
Summary: more quantum gibberish
Review: Ever since the photon/two slit experiment and hugh everetts'
many world's theory,science fiction writers have had a field
day with speculation. But Egan's looped nodes of Quantum
Graph Theory present gibberish as plausible fact. I can see
the possiblity of thorne's quantum foam and the delectable
nonsense of schrodingers cat, but overlapping nodal quantum
gaphs as a foundation of all reality? Come on! Egan should concentrate more on fiction and less on quantum speculation
or people will start drying puddles in their basements by standing over the puddle and reading this book alound.
The whole book was a chore to read.

Rating:
Summary: Kind of a drag. Well, not "kind of" - it's just a drag.
Review: Get out your Stephen Hawking books and grad-level astrophysics and quantum physics tomes, it's time to read Greg Egan's latest.

I loved Diaspora, thought Teranesia was kinda weak, and Schild's Ladder, well, just an epic snoozer.

There's not much in the way of a plot, just a lot of dialogue about arcane yet-to-be invented physics, and to some degree, debates as to the ethics of a halting or yielding to a change/cataclysm of a glactic scale.

Even though I'm pretty well-versed in the physics, I just didn't really get the point of this book. All the chracters are completely paper-thin (even the protagonist), and you won't care about any of them. The future as imagined here is a sterile place, devoid of any "dirt," which makes it apparent that it's a scientist writing it. The book leads you down a path, and at the end, the characters embark on a quest that's beyond comprehension a) in how they were able to even accomplish it, b) what in the world was happening, c) what was to be achieved by doing so, and d) bottom-line, what was the result.

I almost just put the book down a number of times out of sheer boredom/frustration. The ideas Egan posits are refreshingly interesting at times, but it's just not a story - it seems more like an excuse to get the ideas down on paper. There are a numer of open-ended events that never seem to get answers, too, which frustrated me. And a number of ideas that don't get enough elaboration for you to understand them

Even if you're an Egan fan, you'll have a hard time with this book - it's just, well, not very good. Weak premise, no plot, non-existent character development, and seemingly endless, go-nowhere dialogue. And an ending that just kind of stops at a seemingly random place, with no clue as to what the outcoms are for the main characters. Not that you really care, at that point. If you're a big Egan fan, give it a shot. If you'v enever read Egan, go for Diaspora first.

Rating:
Summary: Quantum Universe Runs Amok!
Review: Greg Egan has been on my reading list since the publication of "Quarantine" and "Permutation City" in the early 90s, and is one of the few contemporary authors who writes under the mantle of "hard" science fiction. I enjoy Egan's writing, but, even though I consider myself to be a technologist, some of the science discussed in his books is way over my head (I guess I just never quite "got" quantum mechanics). Or perhaps Egan's science is fantasy? You decide.

"Schild's Ladder: A Novel" is a story of the future, where humanity has escaped the shackles of flesh and people can live disembodied as data and software or can inhabit special-purpose organic and mechanical bodies. Human consciousness can be backed up and downloaded, virtual reality is a part of everyday life, and quantum computers are pervasive. At the start of the book, humanity has a theory of the universe embodied by the so-called Sarumpaet rules, which describe the universe using "quantum graph theory." The book's plot hinges on an experiment to test the validity of these centuries-old rules, with disastrous consequences.

Egan keeps the reader interested in his characters and their relationships, telling a story that spans 4000 years in the life of the protagonist, Tchicaya, and his childhood sweetheart, Mariama. Egan is at his best, however, when describing the alien ecology of the celestial object created as the result of the disastrous experiment. The ending is satisfying, but bittersweet.

All in all, "Schild's Ladder" was an enjoyable read, but I must confess that my attention wavered slightly during the discussions of various inscrutable scientific ideas that were scattered lightly about.

Rating:
Summary: This Book is Extremely Difficult to Understand
Review: I agree 100% with the review below by D.R. Yonkin. I have three graduate degrees (although not in science) and could not understand what was going on in this book. I realize that Greg Egan is considered a major sci-fi writer, but I cannot understand why. I was extremely glad I bought the book as a closeout for [the price], and say that without sarcasm. Nothing seems to happen in the book- the characters engage in long unintelligible conversations. No background is setup and nothing is ever explained. I still do not know what the "Qusp" is. I do not understand how the other reviewers below know the the facts they are using to describe the book. The really great authors explain their ideas and the universe the book is set in, so that the reader is reading the book in context. Here , I kept turning pages backward, thinking that I must have missed something that would explain what is going on. This is NOT the type of book where you cannot wait to get to the next chapter.

Rating:
Summary: The richness of ideas makes up for the mind-numbing physics
Review: I consider it a fair trade that Egan is allowed by his editors to insert so much uninteresting deep physics into his novels, in exchange for his extremely well thought out premises on the future evolution of humanity and society. I have a science degree and am extremely science minded, but theoretical physics is quite beyond me. I would gladly see Egan lose the hard physics and concentrate on purely social and ethical issues. To my mind, he is one of the most interesting thinkers on the morality of trans-humanist ideas.

What does it mean to be human? Is there an allegiance to flesh and blood that should be adhered to? Is a perfect society possible? What would it mean to have immortality?

Egans answers more or less just scratch the surface. Still, they did what good science fiction is supposed to do- make you think. Having all of the answers set out before you and having all the threads neatly wrapped up at the end is wonderful in a regular space opera. But there is a difference between an adventure set in space and true science fiction. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of grand epic sci-fi, but it's the search for answers to new and old questions that is the heart of SF. Egan is looking into the far future at how humanity and current society might evolve and how we might solve some of our looming issues, like genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, WMD proliferation, etc.
Ultimately the characters and the story are a little flat, and the physics is remote, but it's the ideas that make it a very worthwhile read. If you're looking for regular good SF, go to Vernor Vinge or Kim Stanley Robinson. If you're looking for something to make you really think, then try Schild's Ladder.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointment
Review: I like Egan's work and don't generally mind it when he gets technical (e.g., as he did, ferquently, in Diaspora), but this books often seems to be little more than characters talking physics and mathematics to each other.

To be sure, there's a lot of intruiging asides about the culture and the technology of his universe, and the main character does have a *bit* of a backstory, but the sheer amount amount of technical detail that gets thrown around (often with minimal explaination for us mere mortals) has the unfortunate effect of muting a story with an absolutely intruiging premise.

Egan clearly knows his science and his math, but he can get carried away. I wish that he had toned these aspects down a bit and had focused more on the characters and the plot, especially since I know that he's quite capable of telling a good story on those terms, as well.

Rating:
Summary: Another wonderfully dizzying quantum novel from Egan
Review: I'm years behind in my reading, so I may have missed half a dozen, but to my knowledge Egan is the only SF writer who can turn the dizzying ideas of quantum theory into excellent novels. And he's gotten progressively better at it; I don't think I'll ever recover the first-time euphoria of *Quarantine*, but *Diaspora*, *Teranesia*, and now *Schild's Ladder* are all at least as good in their ways.
This is certainly not the best introduction to his work, though. If you don't have at least a *Scientific American*-level grasp of quantum physics (which is all I have), the ideas that fascinate me will be snore-inducing gibberish to you. If you are repulsed by the idea of non-meat humans, you won't like this future where all but a few deranged relics have their minds in quantum-computer 'Qusps', with a flesh body as a peripheral that many forgo, and regard death as a minor annoyance.
My problem with this novel is the inevitable consequence of any far-future scenario: everybody's too twentieth-century. Some of this can be explained away, some can be ignored. But (e.g.) when one character makes a conceptual breakthrough that's key to the plot, and that breakthrough would certainly have been made 20,000 years previously (after all, Greg Egan came up with it), my suspension of belief is strained.
In sum, a qualified recommendation. If you've read and enjoyed *Quarantine* or *Diaspora*, you will should read this book. If not, you may have to work your way up to it.