Rating: 
Summary: Intriguing science & futures
Review: When a physics experiment goes horribly wrong, scientists are confronted with something like a big bang--a universe expanding within our own universe. As it expands at half light speed, the new universe snuffs out sun after sun, human-supporting planet after human-supporting planet. Not that this means that billions of people die--all are evacuated. At least for now. Aboard the research ship Rindler, two parties have emerged. One wishes to destroy the new universe before it destroys our own. The other calls for more research and wonders whether this new universe might not hold something unique and wonderful. Author Greg Egan combines an ecological tale with an intriguing look into speculative physics and an examination of the sociology of people who never need die, yet who can only travel across the distances of space by permanently cutting the social ties that bind them in place. Each of these is interesting in its own right and the three together make for a truly fascinating read. Egan attempts to personalize the tale by reuniting two lovers--who last met four thousand years in the past. One is now dedicated to the destruction of the new universe--the other hopes to study and learn from it. To a certain extent, the attempt is successful. Certainly having point of view characters adds a great deal to the novel. Still, the story is not one of people (or even of the post-human beings that populate the novel), instead it is one of ideas. Fans of hard speculative fiction will find SCHILD'S LADDER an essential addition to their libraries.
Rating: 
Summary: So hard it will hurt when you knock your head against it
Review: Woosh. That was the sound of this book going right over my head.
I love hard sci-fi, don't get me wrong. I've read plenty of layman's books on quantum physics and consider myself reasonably well-informed on science in general. Still, large chunks of "Schild's Ladder" were basically gibberish to me, and the book was actually somewhat of a chore to get through. I haven't had that experience in a long time.
The basic plot of "Schild's Ladder" is certainly engaging: 20,000 years in the future, an experiment gone awry creates a new universe that is expanding inside our own at half the speed of light, gobbling up worlds and forcing evacuations of whole planets. The key outpost to study the phenomenon is occupied by two opposing factions: the Yielders, who want to study and even protect the new universe, and the Preservationists, who want to stop or destroy it. The main character arrives at the station as part of the former clique, only to discover his childhood love has thrown in her lot with the other side.
Sadly, neither person really gets fleshed out, and I was puzzled by the main character's emotional obsession with his former love. She never seemed like anything special to me. Interactions with other characters come off as flat. We are told at one point that violent crime has basically been unheard of for 19,000 years, yet a brutal act of sabotage is taken in stride by people for whom a more natural reaction would surely be sheer bafflement or shock-inducing horror. The characters like to make trite quips one instant and in the next display thin-skinned petulance.
The story drags through the middle of the book as the factions solidify their positions, the main character engages in some flashback reminiscing, and the technicalities of quantum weirdness are explored in mind-boggling detail. The last quarter of the book is actually pretty gripping as the researchers make progress in understanding the new universe. Egan does a commendable job of describing what is on the other side of the boundary, and I found his technical descriptions easier to follow as they focused more on technology and engineering rather than quantum theory. He also deserves kudos for employing the etaphor from which the book gets it title. Schild's Ladder is apparently an actual mathematical proof and it's an impressive feat to take that and turn it into a metaphor for human change.
I picked up this book because I like hard sci-fi and had heard good things about Egan. I can say pretty confidently that Egan writes harder than anyone I've read. I felt like I needed to have a graduate degree in physics to fully appreciate the book. This definitely isn't a light read for a general audience.
Rating:
Summary: Physics and Philosophy
Review: You live forever, you can manipulate every aspect of your mind and experience, you travel light-years from home and are separated from every person and every place you ever knew by the time dilation effects of relativity and the accumulated changes of the millenia. How do you remain true to yourself? How do you even maintain an identity?
At one point, Egan's characters dismiss "transcendence" as an empty term, a fossil left over from long-dead religions. The irony is delightful, as the entire novel is a portrait of the quest for transcendence - in the life of each character, in the fate of the species, in the history of intelligence itself. The characters struggle to transcend stagnation, guilt, fear of change, loneliness, the limitations of biology and above all ignorance.
Physics drives the plot and provides the two most powerful metaphors in the book. Firstly there is the concept of decoherence (thankfully explained in depth at the author's web site...) which implies the universe we live in, the one Newton described, is the way it is only because of our limited viewpoint. If we could get access to more information, a more complete truth, our universe would be infinitely richer, stranger and more promising.
This leads to the big problem with living in an infinitely richer, stranger universe - how do you relate to it without being overwhelmed and annihilated by it? Do you run and hide, create an illusion to live in, or do you embrace it and change enough to be enhanced by its infinite potential?
Various characters in the novel choose different answers. Perhaps the author's own response may be divined in the central metaphor, Schild's Ladder itself. I won't explain it here - read the novel.
The author obviously loves the intellectual challenges of modern physics, and the book does not pull any punches when it comes to theory. Most readers will be left behind sometimes, and that can make the novel seem rather dry. I recommend not to give up if you can't follow all of the science. There is so much food for thought on scientific and philosophical levels that anyone with an enquiring mind and some patience will have a worthwhile experience, and the pace does pick up considerably in the last third of the novel.
| 
