- Hardcover: 304 pages
- Publisher: Gollancz (15 May 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0575081627
- ISBN-13: 978-0575081628
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.2 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,006,814 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Incandescence
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
A million years from now, the galaxy is divided between the vast, cooperative meta-civilisation known as the Amalgam, and the silent occupiers of the galactic core known as the Aloof. The Aloof have long rejected all attempts by the Amalgam to enter their territory, but have occasionally permitted travellers to take a perilous ride as unencrypted data in their communications network, providing a short-cut across the galaxy's central bulge. When Rakesh encounters a traveller, Lahl, who claims she was woken by the Aloof on such a journey and shown a meteor full of traces of DNA, he accepts her challenge to try to find the uncharted world deep in the Aloof's territory from which the meteor originated. Roi and Zak live inside the Splinter, a world of rock that swims in a sea of light they call the Incandescence. Living on the margins of a rigidly organised society, they seek to decipher the subtle clues that might reveal the true nature of the Splinter. In fact, the Splinter is orbiting a black hole, which is about to capture a neighbouring star, wreaking havoc. As the signs of danger grow, Roi, Zak, and a growing band of recruits struggle to understand and take control of their fate. Meanwhile, Rakesh is gradually uncovering their remote history, and his search for the lost DNA world ultimately leads him to a civilisation trapped in cultural stagnation, and startling revelations about the true nature and motives of the Aloof.
About the Author
Greg Egan lives in Perth, Western Australia. He has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Novel and has been short-listed for the Hugo and Arthur C Clarke Awards.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Remaining Aloof,
By Mike Fazey (Perth, Western Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Incandescence (Hardcover)
Egan's first novel for 6 years is set in a very far future where an evolved humanity has spread out to inhabit the galaxy's spiral arms, where lifespans are measured in millennia and travel is possible almost anywhere in the galaxy. The exception is the central galactic bulge which is inhabited by the aptly named Aloof, who exist in splendid isolation and firmly but gently repel all attempts to go there.
Sounds pretty intriguing, doesn't it? The Aloof are a mystery. Obviously highly advanced, but unwilling to interact with humanity. Until two intrepid humans accept an invitation to travel to into Aloof territory to examine a strange rock world inhabited by sentient insect-like creatures. Still sounds intriguing, doesn't it? As always, Egan is concerned with hard science - mathematics, physics, genetics and astronomy - and indeed the nature of scientific discovery. And therein lies the problem. Incandescence suffers from the same shortcoming as did Schild's Ladder - too much science, not enough fiction. Both the human and insectoid characters are painted far too thinly to arouse any real emotion and the dialogue serves mainly as a vehicle for explaining the science rather than giving any insight into the characters themselves. As a reader I felt a kind if intellectual detachment from the events - like I was watching but not particularly engaged. Rather like the Aloof, in fact. Nonetheless, the science is intriguing, even for a non-scientific type like me, and the ideas are really big. So, if that's your thing, you'll probably enjoy it more than I did. For me, though, the biggest most intriguing mystery of all, the Aloof themselves, remained unsolved. Indeed, I gleaned little insight into their nature or their motives. For me they remained as aloof as ever. I still think Egan is one of the best SF writers around, but Incandescence is not his most engaging work.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not nearly exotic enough,
By map "Mark" (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Incandescence (Paperback)
Greg Egan is the Martin Gardner of science fiction storytelling, weaving mathematical and physical puzzles into entertaining howdunnits about encounters with novel forms of sentience, usually at vastly smaller scales than ours. Many of his stories, like Incandescence, are set in a post-human galaxy-spanning culture, the Amalgam, based on the idea of consciousness as an algorithm that can run on different hardware as it suits - so interstellar travel, for instance, is a simple matter of flinging your mental template (or a copy of your mind) as data to a far off receiving station where you can be re-embodied or just incorporated into any computational substrate that will let your unique OS run.
At his best (e.g. Schild's Ladder) the reader is often gripped by a plot involving a race against time to comprehend new forms of intelligent life that might be threatening the old through some inadvertent side-effect of their expansionism into the Amalgam's reality-space. At the same time, Egan has an amazing gift for explaining, Flatland fashion, the physics of extreme environments; working through the consequences of Planck scale realities or multi-dimensional spaces to render them almost as intuitively as we accept the everyday physics of our world. In Incandescence, the story alternates between two investigators from the Amalgam trying to comprehend the possibly tragic fate of just such a new form of sentience and the struggle of that life form to comprehend its environment before the volatile conditions which exist in the star-packed inner core of our galaxy makes them extinct. Although entertaining - I found myself rooting for the little sextupeds turning themselves on to the joys of physics - perhaps the maths that Egan describes here -- of huge gravitational forces and plasma dynamics -- aren't quite as exotic as in his other books. One half of the chapters are really just an exercise in the re-invention of Newton's Laws, Keplerian orbits, the differential calculus, special and general relativity and so on, familiar I suspect to any reader with a New Scientist-level physics education. Something is missing from the story as pure sci-fi because the reader isn't so much being stimulated by new physical concepts as being forced to try to remember the way, say, physicists solved the problem of orbits or the curvature of spacetime, etc. It was tempting to see this tale as an allegory of a civilization at threat of extinction from vast environmental change (i.e. global warming) but even that is spoiled by a deus ex machina -- Egan's six-footed Einstein's are universally prone to collaboration and consensus! The only threat they face is lack of time, not their own foibles as a species. Still, Incandescence is a wonderful antidote to space opera and many of Egan's descriptions of physics experiments inside extreme gravity wells are ingenious and elegant. Buy this book if you enjoy mental exercise and mathematical puzzles, but only if your scientific education is pre-college. Otherwise it might just feel like a history lesson.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eye opener,
By
This review is from: Incandescence (Paperback)
Incandescence is brilliantly structured, dense, immaculately clever and... lyrical! It's arguably the simplest Egan's novel so far, but its simplicity is what makes it so inspiring. Apart from long contemplations over complex geometry of numerous orbits of different space objects, all rotating and slanting, the idea of the novel is clear - intelligence is of greatest value in the universe. Why some people live as if they're zombies, experiencing no natural curiousity that could actually drive their lives, while others tend to explore the universe and seek the truth? People are not that different, they all have this natural curiosity in their genes. Maybe something might be done to awaken the zombies. But maybe its not worth it, because in 50 million years, when there's nothing more left to explore, no new ideas to contemplate, boredom will make these people deliberately restrain their intelligence and put them back to sleep, as just sleep will be able to bring joy in the world with no misteries left to reveal. The choice is not an easy one. To lead a conscious intelligent life is not an easy choice. But it's an improbable piece of luck if you're given the chance to choose, as your choice may become a real eye opener for you.
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