Schild's Ladder

by Greg Egan

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061050938
• ISBN13: 9780061050930
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Eos
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A grand story at Egan's usual pace

I'm learning to respect the way he does it, but one side of me worries that Egan just has too many ideas to even think about drawing them out in the style of epics like The Broken God. At the end of Chapter 1, I could not escape the feeling that that could have been another whole book. In part that was due to my own concurrent research into the idea that a graph-theoretic network is a good candidate to be the fundamental level of existence, so I don't fully accept Egan's disclaimer, ahead of some useful references to related science, that "Quantum Graph Theory is fictitious". Despite the, typically Egan and to me hasty, traversal of a many-leveled journey, he also uses his books to explore as back stories some very different scenarios for the nature of the galaxy and our future in it. In Schild's Ladder he posits that the only signs of life we find are so rare and so different that their host planets are automatically quarantined, as well as a humanity which has long dispensed with gender, but still finds political difference and space for destructive extremism. The central theme of the story is only one important step removed from alarmist speculation about particle accelerators destabilising spacetime. That opening chapter makes it clear that the work needed to seed a spreading disruption of space time might have to be incomparably more precise than any of the high-energy events which nature already provides. Schild's Ladder is also about preserving a sense of personal identity through transformations that make waking up in the morning look simple. If you enjoy nearly credible ideas rushing past make sure you read it.

Australian SF Reader

To quote some country singer or other "baby did a bad, bad, thing". This is bad in the Sister Alice bad sense of the word. As in screw up, destroy large chunks of galaxies. The posthumans here have awesome technological capabilities at their fingertips, the ability to back up, live outside bodies, and all that stuff, but they still have to relate to each other. They also have to come up with a way to stop this much greater than minor problem they have. This one is mind melter taggable.

Science a scientist will be thrilled by

Hello everybody,I am constantly arguing with my physics professors about how a science fiction book can sometimes provoke more understanding than a textbook. I will be well-equipt for my next debate with Schild's Ladder on my side, and relish in the new areas of speculation as I take Quantum Mechanics next semester. Sometimes the scientist has to imagine.

"Hard" science fiction of high quality

It's very difficult to write a science fiction novel that's both good fiction and good science, especially for us social sciences and humanities types. Physicists usually don't make good novelists, and vice versa. But there are exceptions and Egan is one of them. His latest is set some 20,000 years in our future, a universe in which death is only "local" because everyone backs themselves up regularly, in which you might or might not choose to have a body, in which gender has ceased to have any meaningful role in human affairs. Most people still prefer to remain on whatever planet they were born on, but some become travelers, and Tchicaya is one of those -- 4,000+ years old, rootless, a generalist. Six hundred years before, a "quantum graph" experiment went awry and a region of peculiar vacuum was created that has been expanding at half-light-speed ever since, swallowing up solar systems whose inhabitants have had to evacuate. But there's a ship filled with scientists staying just a little ahead of the expanding front, studying the novo-vacuum's effect and looking for a way to control it. Tchicaya joins the company on the ship, who have divided into two political-philosophical groups; he's part of the group called Yielders, who want to continue to study the novo-vacuum, as opposed to the Preservationists, who want to destroy it to prevent it from continuing to destroy them. And then a small radical faction takes action on its own. You'd think choosing sides in such a dichotomy would be a no-brainer, but Egan makes an excellent case for a truly civilized approach to the universe. The science and math is thick and sometimes heavy, but he manages not only to make it palatable but also enthralling.

brilliant science fiction

Twenty thousand years into the future, humanity has conquered everything in its path including death yet so far at least no other sentient life form has been found that did not originate from earth. Science rules, as knowledge is everything. However, a quantum physics experiment inadvertently creates a vacuum effect that forms a new universe with physical laws different from the current one. This universe is growing rapidly and eats anything in its path though nanotechnology has kept humanity safe by instant evacuation.However, what is to be done about the ever-expanding new universe that threatens life as we know it becomes the subject of great debate. The Preservationists want to destroy the new universe before it consumes humanity. The Yielders prefer to allow the growth of the new universe in order to study the phenomena. In that void, star crossed lovers Tchicaya and Mariama join separate and opposing hostile camps.SCHILD'S LADDER is brilliant science fiction as it entertains the reader with an action-packed plot yet requires the audience to think about the ethical clashes that make up the science community as part of the larger society. The story line is cleverly designed to run faster than the speed of light yet maintains a cerebral moral fiber to the plot. Characters are fully developed so that the audience understands for instance the split between Tchicaya and Mariama. Fans of science fiction will want to read Greg Egan's distant future intelligent thriller that leaves the audience hungering for more novels like this one while debating current scientific moral dilemmas confronting society today.Harriet Klausner