Scale

Hard boiled detective novel combined with an old school sci-fi hook? This is like if Indiana Jones had a baby with Neutron Star, but the writing is good, the characters reasonably well-fleshed out, and a tight plot. Very much a worthwhile read!

The best part of Egan's work is he knows when to put it down. This book is a "complete thought": the world building is really solid, and he doesn't try to have "omniscient answers": we're given enough to settle into the world, but not so much that it feels like bare exposition.

I think Egan easily stands up to the old masters, but adds levels of scientific verisimilitude & writing prowess that they'd always wanted.

Scale is an easy read, flowing smoothly from chapter to chapter. Almost too smooth. The characters have day-to-day lives that are sort of uninteresting. I’d like some more depth in that department. The premise of different scales of humanity ties to the reality of different races of our human race. That we may have different skin colors and locations, histories and cultures, but are essentially the same inside. As with his book “Diaspora,” the scientific background of the story is curiously plausible, and for a SciFi fan, makes it all the more interesting.