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.
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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.
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Summary: Science is fictional and a body-snatchers universe is great?
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: 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.
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: 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.
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.
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