- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Eos; First Edition edition (May 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0061050938
- ISBN-13: 978-0061050930
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16.1 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,289,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Schild's Ladder
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Greg Egan's ability to imagine wonders of cosmic scale is shown again in his SF novel Schild's Ladder, with future galactic society confronting a disaster of almost unimaginable vastness--or is it a springboard to new hope?
The fatal experiment was right at the edge of theoretical physics. Could there be an alternative structure for vacuum itself, the void underlying our cosmos? Unfortunately, yes. Once created, this artificial "novo-vacuum" successfully competes with normal space, expanding at half the speed of light in an all-consuming sphere. Inside, physics is radically, incomprehensibly different...
Six centuries later, thousands of inhabited solar systems have been gobbled. Scientists investigating the novo-vacuum from starship Rindler are split between trying to destroy it with tailored spatial viruses ("Planck worms") and hoping to understand the teeming richness beyond that deadly interface.
In a lonely galaxy where only humans are intelligent, whole planets have been evacuated to give microscopic alien organisms their chance to evolve. The novo-vacuum may be bursting with new orders of life, so that killing it would be a monstrous act of genocide. But frightened people dare dreadful things. Violence erupts on the Rindler.
Building up from ideas of human intelligence in disembodied storage or artificial bodies, Egan finally takes his lead characters on a mind-boggling joyride through novo-vacuum, mapping them into a space where a tense eight-hour flight from deadly predators covers just one millimetre. There's a lot of room in there.
Schild's Ladder makes easy reading out of terrifying physics, generating a real sense of wonder even as your jaw drops at the immensity of its implications. --David Langford --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
In the deep future mankind is barely distinguishable from machine intelligences, rarely embodied outside of virtual environments. It is time, using the very building blocks of time and space, to engineer the universe itself. Time to enter a new quantum realm of marvels and terrors. The new novel from one of the worlds most respected and acclaimed writers marks a dramatic move into a new arena - that of the wide screen SF epic ala Baxter, Banks, Hamilton and Macleod. Novels such as this have proved to be the engine house for both the major sales and the best ideas of modern SF. That the genre's primary ideas man and one of its finest prose stylists should direct his energies to this sort of canvas promises much. This will be Greg Egan's breakout book.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
After a slightly disappointing venture into biology with Teranesia, Egan is back to his favoured territory of fundamental physics -- and back on form -- with Schild's ladder.
Taking as his starting point an experiment-gone-all-too-right, he creates, in effect, the story of a new-born universe with its own radically different physics. Expanding at half the speed of light, it spreads out across our own universe, devouring everything in its path. Against it he pits two competing groups of researchers, one trying to halt its progress, the other trying to destroy it.
This provides the backdrop for the classic Egan combination -- human emotions and mind-bending physics playing out an epic story for the highest stakes. The themes are familiar from Egan's other novels and short stories -- a threat to humanity's very existence, an impenetrable boundary, an epic journey into a vividly realised alternate universe -- but more boldly executed than before.
This will probably be viewed by many as Egan's best novel. I don't think it is -- it's just that the physics is harder in this one. The feat is superficially more impressive but ultimately it lacks some of the depth of Diaspora.
As ever with Egan, it's a good read and hard to put down. And it's packed with more new ideas than some SF writers manage in a career. But it has some flaws. The characterisation is less complete than in some of his other books and there are a few annoying flaws: his exotic physics, once you get inside it, is slightly less exotic than it might be; and in scenes where his characters venture outside their spaceship he doesn't seem to account for relativity -- despite the fact that the barrier is moving at half light speed.
But it's still a decent read, and one I'd recommend if you like your science hard but tempered with a little humanity.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
After the fairly human-scale Teranesia, Greg Egan is back to his usual stomping grounds - mind-blowing physics.
The idea of a more stable vacuum than the one making up much of our universe has been around for a while. Egan takes this idea, mixes it with his other (seemingly) favourite topic - humans as software able to move between bodies or inhabit virtual environments - and comes up with a truly stunning story.
I always look forward to a new Egan book, and I've yet to be disappointed.
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is an excellent book. Egan manages to sustain a gripping and surprising plot without a single identifiable villain; instead we have sympathetic characters with opposing views on how to deal with the threat of the novo-vacuum. Yes, there ARE characters - they're just different to the standard SF stand-ins. Egan's prose is as efficient and polished as ever, and there are some lovely images. The science is at times formidable - this particular full-time scientist struggled with the "big idea" behing the quantum nature of the novo-vacuum, despite reading countless books on QM and Theories of Everything. But it doesn't really matter; the basic flow of the story carries the reader on anyway. In short, this has the mind-blowing ideas of Diaspora, but they're harnessed to a proper plot, and the characters are as engaging as those in Teranesia. Jolly good!
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
More textbook than novel
I realise it's unfair to criticise a book for being what it says it is. Nothing about this novel suggests it's a light read: I've never read any of this author's other work, but... Read more
Published 6 days ago by Tiro
!!!Concept Vertigo!!!
Firstly; watch out for plot spoiler reviews!!
(it's not a mystery tour if you know where your heading)
Egan's work is 'Hard' Sci-Fi of the highest order. Read more
(it's not a mystery tour if you know where your heading)
Egan's work is 'Hard' Sci-Fi of the highest order. Read more
Published on 11 Jan 2010 by numpty
Too much of the hard stuff
I've long been a fan of Greg Egan because of his ability to mix hard scientific speculation with credible personalities and motivations. Read more
Published on 3 Jun 2008 by Mr. Jan Tari
Tedious and uninvolving
Egan has some interesting ideas, the unusual physics he describes is what attracted me to this book. Sadly, he doesn't create a compelling story to go with the physics. Read more
Published on 26 Nov 2002 by Heliomphalodon Incarnadine
Too heavy on the physics
If you love SF based on *hard* science then this might be the book for you. There is a *lot* of physics in this book. Read more
Published on 19 July 2002 by Leo
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
