Incandescence
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4.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The long-awaited new novel from Greg Egan! Hugo Award-winning author Egan returns to the field with Incandescence, a new novel of hard SF.
The Amalgam spans nearly the entire galaxy, and is composed of innumerable beings from a wild variety of races, some human or near it, some entirely other. The one place that they cannot go is the bulge, the bright, hot center of the galaxy. There dwell the Aloof, who for millions of years have deflected any and all attempts to communicate with or visit them. So when Rakesh is offered an opportunity to travel within their sphere, in search of a lost race, he cannot turn it down.
Roi is a member of that lost race, which is not only lost to the Amalgam, but lost to itself. In their world, there is but toil, and history and science are luxuries that they can ill afford.
Rakesh's journey will take him across millennia and light years. Roi's will take her across vistas of learning and discovery just as vast.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hugo-winner Egan (Schild's Ladder), champion of ultra-hard SF, devotes most of this slim novel to the efforts of the Arkmakers, who live in a neutron star's accretion disk at the center of the galaxy, to develop orbital physics from first principles and save the artificial world created by their more sophisticated ancestors. Meanwhile, Rakesh, a more or less human member of a distant posthuman society, sets off on an unrelated quest to find the Arkmakers and is soon trying to save them from their current danger. Whole chapters are devoted to physics problems and include a variety of diagrams and cited sources. Egan's briefly sketched characters and cultures are interesting, but this one is all about the science and won't have much interest for those without at least some understanding of celestial mechanics.
Customer Reviews
Among Egan’s best
This is one of Egan's best works. The ending IS really good, but easy to miss on a first reading. I actually listened to this as an audio book. The math parts were made quite interesting by the emotion and excitement with which they were read.
Wait, that's it?
This isn't one novel; it's two, interleaved by chapters. Normally you expect two threads in this situation to come together at some point, but they never do. That's a disappointment. Even more so, a lot of threads are left dangling at the end; we never learn what happens to the main character in novel A, for example. And novel B is spent mostly describing crude physics experiments using and math. I enjoyed most of the read (thought he mathy parts get dull), but found the end deeply unsatisfying. I wouldn't recommend this book; there is much better hard SF out there.