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.

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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.

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