Schild's Ladder

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Summary: Mediation, Quantum Theory and a whole new universe ...
Review: In Greg Egan's inventive new novel Schild's Ladder, the diverse range of characters utilise a number of different languages and communication techniques, but manage to find a common ground of meaning through the use of Mediator programs. For the scientific layperson (like myself) trying to comprehend the depths of physics and quantum theory which drive Schild's Ladder, a Mediator program would be most welcome. At times, this hard SF is just a little too hard as the narrative is intersected with lengthy, heavily detailed descriptions of theoretical physics that are beyond my capacity to comprehend. On the other hand, the epic struggle that unfolds encompassing the fate of not one but two unique universes, combined with a vibrancy of characterisation, more than compensate for the sporadic opacity of scientific jargon.
In the opening section, the scientist Cass travels to the Mimosan's station in order to use their unique equipment to momentarily create a 'novo-vacuum', a microscopic universe with a completely new set of physics. The novo-vacuum is only expected to exist for a fraction of a second, but in that time Cass hopes that what is discovered about the alternative universe will enrich the understanding of her own. Of course, the experiment goes horribly wrong and the physics of the novo-vacuum turn out to be more stable than those of the outside world, with the result that the alternative universe begins expanding, engulfing the old, wiping out all in its path.
Six hundred years later former lovers Tichicaya and Mariama both find themselves onboard the Rindler, the foremost research centre focused on the novo-vacuum. Significantly, the Rindler is also a spacecraft maintaining the velocity which keeps the ship the closest possible distance from the expanding boundary of the mysterious, new universe. Despite their past together, Mariama and Tichicaya find themselves on opposite sides of the philosophical rift that divides the ship's occupants. Mariama is in the Preservationist camp, desperate to destroy the novo-vacuum and stop the destruction of the planets in its wake. At the other extreme, Tichicaya's group have been labelled Yielders, those who believe the novo-vacuum is the greatest scientific discovery of all time and that is should be studied, understood and if possible adapted to rather than eradicating it. As the experiments on board the Rindler reach a point where the novo-vacuum's exterior might finally be breached, the philosophic divide becomes a material battle for the fate of both universes.
To readers of Egan's past novels, much of Schild's Ladder will seem distantly familiar. Although Egan never writes sequels, his stories reveal an almost evolutionary development of ideas and theories. As with his novel Diaspora, for example, there is a dichotomy between those characters who choose to remain embodied and those who exist as acorporeals, living only as informatic patterns in virtual worlds. However, unlike Diaspora, even the embodied make their choice at a philosophic level; every individual's identity is stored on a Qusp-Quantum Singularity Processor-and the choice to be embodied or otherwise is the choice as to whether the Qusp exists as part of a digital network or embedded in a flesh body. Similarly, the idea of opposing worlds (or universes) clashing against each other has appeared in Egan's short stories and in Permutation City. In Permutation City, however, the conflict was on an ontological level when the Lambertians developed an Autoverse ontology without the need for a creator and somehow this act started to unravel their progenitors' digital world. In Schild's Ladder, the struggle is far more scientifically based detailing the collision of two unique physical universes, but the development of ideas from Permutation City are apparent.
The most significant development in Egan's recent work, though, is his vastly improved characterisation beginning with Teranesia and continuing in Schild's Ladder. The plight of Tichicaya and Mariama in human terms-their love, their motivation, and their similarities even when philosophically opposed-is what drove Schild's Ladder for me. If the scientific theories are as credible and intriguing as the human story in Schild's Ladder, then this book will be impossible to put down for a scientifically literate reader. For me, I learnt a little about science, glimpsed an intriguing future, and revelled in the complications of an all too human story.

Rating:
Summary: How Weird is Too Weird?
Review: Instead of going into an exhaustive recap of the book's plot, I'll try to stick to the points that made me decide "three stars."

First, I love Egan's work. Part of the reason I do is his utter willingness to completely rework our "universe-view"--things turn out to be much, MUCH different than our comfortable hopes for the future. Sometimes they're good, and sometimes not, but either way the reader is in for a ride. This is usually a lot of fun--the "what-if" quality of alternate futures is what attracted me to hard SF in the first place. For this, I say "five stars."

However, this book paints a picture that BY DEFINITION is too weird to explain. <Beware: spoiler is on its way!> By removing ALL physics with which we are familiar, and wrapping the experience of his heroes in layers of abstraction and VR-type interpretation, Egan pretty much says to the reader: "Don't even bother trying to understand this, because I've told you that you can't. Just take my word for it. Let's make-believe." This is fun in lighter SF ("She'll do Point Five past lightspeed"--Han Solo), but one of the definitions of hard SF (IMO) is that it is based on REAL cutting-edge science. And whereas a "volume" (you can't even call it "space") with no permanent physics may be "science," it's inherently unprovable. (Egan's disclaimer after the novel is telling.) And this comes from ME, who thought the quadrillion-dimension resolution of "Diaspora" ROCKED. For this I give it one star.

Five stars, and one star. I've averaged the two criteria for my final judgment of three stars.

Here's a final concern: how do you follow this novel up? After you throw away all the rules, it would seem hard to fall back to "oh, yeah, we'll stick to conventional physics again for my next novel." Maybe not hard, per se, but surely a step backwards.

Rating:
Summary: "Hard" science fiction of high quality
Review: It's very difficult to write a science fiction novel that's both good fiction and good science, especially for us social sciences and humanities types. Physicists usually don't make good novelists, and vice versa. But there are exceptions and Egan is one of them. His latest is set some 20,000 years in our future, a universe in which death is only "local" because everyone backs themselves up regularly, in which you might or might not choose to have a body, in which gender has ceased to have any meaningful role in human affairs. Most people still prefer to remain on whatever planet they were born on, but some become travelers, and Tchicaya is one of those -- 4,000+ years old, rootless, a generalist. Six hundred years before, a "quantum graph" experiment went awry and a region of peculiar vacuum was created that has been expanding at half-light-speed ever since, swallowing up solar systems whose inhabitants have had to evacuate. But there's a ship filled with scientists staying just a little ahead of the expanding front, studying the novo-vacuum's effect and looking for a way to control it. Tchicaya joins the company on the ship, who have divided into two political-philosophical groups; he's part of the group called Yielders, who want to continue to study the novo-vacuum, as opposed to the Preservationists, who want to destroy it to prevent it from continuing to destroy them. And then a small radical faction takes action on its own. You'd think choosing sides in such a dichotomy would be a no-brainer, but Egan makes an excellent case for a truly civilized approach to the universe. The science and math is thick and sometimes heavy, but he manages not only to make it palatable but also enthralling.

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Summary: Mind numbing ideas, characters suffer..
Review: Not much that I can add to the other reviews. Egan sure likes to twist reality around, and in this book, completely break it! Egans books are always a fun ride, even though you are bound to get a bit of motion sickness. A hint to readers, you dont need to actually UNDERSTAND everything he writes, just get a feel for what he means.

In far future novels like this, the changes in Humanity are bound to make it difficult for us to empathize and feel for the characters. For example, how sorry can you feel for a "person" who has a recent "back-up" of himself ready in case you "die"? Perhaps Egan is just TOO into the physics of things to really be able to "flesh out" his characters (an inside joke for those who have read Egan before). Another thing, this is the third book of his where human sexual dimorphism is dispensed with. The concept of male and female are pretty much done away with. But hey, its the future, and who knows what will happen, I simply think he is wrong here, and I think it hurts the characters in his books. In general, his characters are usually a bit on the thin side, but I still enjoy his books anyway.


Rating:
Summary: Too Much Science, Not Enough Fiction
Review: One of the great pleasures of being a reader is in the anticipation of a new book. The disappointment of expectations is perhaps the greatest pain. Greg Egan has always been one of those writers whose new work excites intense anticipation. However recently I have been feeling the pain of disappointment more and more often.

Schild's Ladder has all the ingredients of an Egan classic: speculations on quantum physics, universe-spanning disaster, and characters to whom race, age, size and gender have become meaningless but who nevertheless maintain emotional lives.

Unfortunately this mixture is just too generous with the 'scientific' ingredients, and too sparing with the 'fictional' elements. In fact, except for an all too short flight beyond the border of the 'novo-vacuum', the artifically created and rapidly expanding new universe which threatens the survival of our own, and a few episodes of personal backstory and momentary action, the book appears to consist entirely of characters talking about scientific theory. And whilst the speculation is interesting it simply does not engage emotionally with the reader.

There are some superb moments within the book though: as usual Egan is adept at describing the dislocation brought about by altered dimension - at the start the scientist Cass is reduced (rather grumpily) to a few milimetres in height in order to save space at the Mimosa experimental station; there are also some sparklingly clever angles shown on the problems of movement within the Novo Vacuum whose natural laws are entirely alien to our own.

In addition one of the most engaging sequences concerns the infiltration and sabotage of the project to study the Novo-vacuum by 'anachronauts', reactionary humans who refuse the benefits of articifially-enhanced intelligence and so on. The sequence is particularly effective as it involves a fight in spacesuits outside the research station, a scene that could have been taken from the Golden Age of SF, and now itself anachronistic within contemporary science fiction - making the anachronauts appear doubly out-of-place. The explosives disguised as pot-plants only add to the effective combination of farce and menace in this section of the book.

However the moments of great writing only highlight the steady, even dull, temper of the majority of the book. Schild's Ladder is simply too much science and not enough fiction.

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Summary: Ambitious hard SF about a new universe
Review: Perhaps the most radically "hard" of current SF writers is Greg Egan. His stories and novels turn on challenging and highly speculative ideas, usually related to one or more of physics, computer science, and biology. His newest novel, Schild's Ladder, builds on a rather loopy theory of the deep physical structure of the universe: Quantum Graph Theory. In essence, the entire universe is math. A researcher staging a test of some of the basic elements of this theory inadvertently creates a new universe from scratch. And this universe begins to expand, at half the speed of light, destroying the old universe as it goes.

Hundreds of years later, our protagonist, Tchicaya, arrives at Rindler Station, a research platform hovering close to the still expanding boundary of the new universe. He is an advocate of a position called "Yielding": he feels the new construct is too unique, too valuable an artifact, to destroy. This despite the fact that dozens of inhabited worlds have already been swallowed by it, and many more are threatened. His opponents, the "Preservationists", are trying to create mathematical entities which will destroy the new universe. The main action of the novel concerns this dispute, which eventually spirals up to murder and sabotage, and an attempt to journey inside the other universe. As such the novel at times reminded me of pulp SF, with its journeys to solar systems inside of atoms. And Egan's attempt, though brave, to describe another supposedly wholly different universe founders, perhaps inevitably, on the sheer difficulty of imagining the radical quantum effects he attempts to show us. In the end, the other universe simply doesn't come off as sufficiently strange.

But that isn't all that's going on. Egan also shows us an intriguing future interstellar civilization. Central to this civilization is the idea of hosting brains on computers. This allows practical immortality. It allows light speed travel. It allows the option of living either "embodied", with the Qusp hosted in a cloned body; or "acorporeal": running purely on a computer. It allows the use of instant translation programs, and "Mediator" programs that decode other people's cultural preferences. Egan uses this to portray a future human interstellar civilization composed of some embodied cultures, some acorporeal cultures, and even some "anachronauts": humans who still run their brain on flesh. His portrayal of this civilization has a number of clever extrapolations

Thus Schild's Ladder does three essentially science-fictional things, and does them all with some success, but not complete success. It explores a radically different universe. As I have said this is bravely attempted, with some success, but some failure too. It explores a different way for humans to live in this universe. This is intriguingly worked out as well - though again not wholly successfully. The failure to empathize even remotely with those who choose to remain wholly "flesh" is a shortcoming. And the characters portrayed seem to regard physics and math as almost the only worthwhile endeavours: the civilization as portrayed seems quite free of art. And finally, the book addresses the morality of destroying or preserving the newly created universe. This is a central and fascinating moral question, and the book is thought-provoking. Unfortunately, once again the deck is stacked: the "bad guys" aren't given much chance to present their arguments, and they are portrayed as acting thuggishly as well as stupidly, while the "good guys" are uniformly virtuous. So: a fascinating and ambitious SF book, but also a somewhat disappointing one.

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Summary: If You Can Understand This Book, You're No Longer Standing.
Review: Please tell me you're buying this used! If you enjoyed Gurdjieffe's Tales to His Grandson, you'll probably have an indeterminate vector of space-time or so of witless pleasure with Schild's Ladder. Otherwise, plan on spending the rest of your life trying to comprehend one-eighth of what the characters are talking about, who are sooo immortal and long-lived that they can now communicate in a cocky and rad quantum-speak that probably only Steven Hawking would be willing to give this woeful tale a go -- but I bet not. This book is about as entertaining as watching a version of South Park where the boys all trade impassioned barbs in mathematical concepts while trying to save a new species of vacuum-living, potentially dangerious, uh, "community", no, "creatures", well, "hypothetical potentialities" . . they spend a lot of time trying to theorize what the new life forms might be. Whatever they are, I'll never know, because I finally tossed the book on the "sad but true" pile, unable to tolerate one more pico-second of Egan's elaborate and colourless ascensions into quantum mechanics so far beyond my usually adequate brain, I got a nosebleed. Hey wait, what's that I see sticking out from the bottom? Cool, my copy of Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine! Thank god, some light reading to take my mind of Egan's venture into a West Side Story of "romance" that could only exist light-years away in his mind and the most advanced quanta-theory brains on this planet (five at last count). Rather than naming the group of nova eggheads the "Mimosas", I'd suggest Citizen Egan have a few and chill out. I kept hoping that after all the opening theory was introduced and hashed out while establishing characters and alliances, the story would progress to really cool neo-futuristic lifestyles, religions, languages. There was so much opportunity for some very interesting ideas that tried to find expression, such as the evolution of people into a genderless, omnisexual, often acorporeal race, but other than a couple false starts, such endeavours were, I theorize, eaten by the novo-vacuum, which is what will happen to your brain if you try to act as if you can understand this one. After 3 days of trying to not admit I didn't have the equivalent of several abstract-science degrees, I'm settling for some good old-fashioned, 8-Legged Freaks, see you guys, I'm going over nyah!

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Summary: Science is fictional and a body-snatchers universe is great?
Review: The concept is interesting in principle. But this book gave me that feeling I get when I am grasping hard for the principle when studying some new physics - but it didn't satisfy because it couldn't, since there is no such physics in reality. It has one bit of fairly straightforward geometry, Schild's ladder, used as a metaphor for making one's way through life, which was a sort of interesting bit of philosophical metaphor.

This concept about having implanted quantum computers in our brains that take over our identities, and using bodies as throw-aways reminded me of "Altered Carbon". But the author just sort of jumps over it into a brave new world. He doesn't deal with an obvious implicit horribleness to the idea. For this future to take place, at some point these quantum computing implants would have to take over the bodies they were implanted in. The servants becoming the masters in other words. Clearly, by the time the story opens, the biological beings that we are had become the throw-away clothing of this pseudo life technology with little more value than a slave under King Ludwig of Belgium. What, may I ask is so damn wonderful about that?!! It's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" except the body snatchers won millenia ago, and humanity is absolutely nothing.

How could an author fail to deal with such an obvious and central matter to this kind of technology idea? Altered Carbon did no better. Is this really what anyone thinks they want?

As someone who has worked with "AI" so-called, neural nets, etcetera, and is very familiar with its theory and limitations, it's an indication to me of an author who doesn't really understand this stuff, just uses light reading as a jumping off point. Sure, quantum computing - clearly the author has read some layman's stuff. I guess that my suspension of disbelief needs more to go on.

In addition, too much, "there be a miracle" in this book. From the quantum computer implants, to "scribing" a new multi-dimensional string graph in the quantum vacuum, to the "scribing" of new graphs on the boundary of a new universe in the midst of our own - it's too easy, too pat, and complete baloney without a trace of foundation anywhere.

Egan has quite an imagination though, have to give him that. There are some interesting social prognostications based on the implantable quantum computer technology, and the vendeks have their moments. But maybe this author should be using his wonderful imagination to write novels more like the Xanth series, that don't pretend to base themselves on anything but magic. Takes itself a little too seriously also.

Rating:
Summary: too much to take in
Review: There always seems to be one too many ideas in an Egan novel. For me there always seems to be a point when things just get too strange or too unbelievable and I mentally pop out of the story like a penguin popping out of the sea onto an ice floe. This happens even in the Egan novels that I like, like Teranesia with the madcap biotech being done in a dinghy out on the open sea. Or in Permutation City with the "dust theory". In this novel the vendeks and their universe with its strange physics eventually became too strange and tedious to keep me engaged. And it all was a bit too easy. If it is so simple to create a new universe teeming with life, then such life is too cheap to be worth the weighty discussions and agonizing that filled half this book. If it's them or us, then I choose us. Kill them all, and redo the experiment with better controls. The fact that the characters couldn't make this simple decision made the novel a very tough read.

Rating:
Summary: brilliant science fiction
Review: Twenty thousand years into the future, humanity has conquered everything in its path including death yet so far at least no other sentient life form has been found that did not originate from earth. Science rules, as knowledge is everything. However, a quantum physics experiment inadvertently creates a vacuum effect that forms a new universe with physical laws different from the current one. This universe is growing rapidly and eats anything in its path though nanotechnology has kept humanity safe by instant evacuation.

However, what is to be done about the ever-expanding new universe that threatens life as we know it becomes the subject of great debate. The Preservationists want to destroy the new universe before it consumes humanity. The Yielders prefer to allow the growth of the new universe in order to study the phenomena. In that void, star crossed lovers Tchicaya and Mariama join separate and opposing hostile camps.

SCHILD'S LADDER is brilliant science fiction as it entertains the reader with an action-packed plot yet requires the audience to think about the ethical clashes that make up the science community as part of the larger society. The story line is cleverly designed to run faster than the speed of light yet maintains a cerebral moral fiber to the plot. Characters are fully developed so that the audience understands for instance the split between Tchicaya and Mariama. Fans of science fiction will want to read Greg Egan's distant future intelligent thriller that leaves the audience hungering for more novels like this one while debating current scientific moral dilemmas confronting society today.

Harriet Klausner