Incandescence – Greg Egan
Hachette Livre Orion Gollancz, 2008
300 pages
RRP: AU$35
ISBN: 978-0-575-08163-5

Reviewed by Mark Cooper

The thing you have to remember when you’re dealing with Greg Egan is that this is hard science fiction. Any review of his work has to start from that point. The science and the ideas that spring from the science are the most important things in his books. If you don’t like that, you don’t like Greg Egan. If you want more than that, you won’t find it here.

But if you are prepared to live with that kind of a novel, then you will find a wealth of colour and excitement within the confines of what might at first seem to be an arid approach to story telling. Egan has, by virtue of his sheer enthusiasm for his subject matter, found a way to show that science and mathematics are beautiful and worthy of a literature all their own.

Most science fiction consists of human stories set in the future but many of Egan’s stories are post-human. Virtual reality is a given in much of his work. His characters are freed from the confines of the body and they roam a universe made of ideas.

So what’s his latest offering like? If your idea of fun is thinking about what it would be like to formulate a theory of relativity if you were part of a pre-industrial civilization, this might be for you. If you like the idea of existing as part of a galaxy-wide information network, with the ability to materialise at almost any point on that network at will, keep on reading.

As with Diaspora and Permutation City before it, Incandescence has a quest at the heart of its story. A disembodied being struggles to find meaning in his existence and finds it in an exploratory journey. It’s a book about three very different civilizations, one of which remains an enigma right to the end of the story. One contains beings that were once human and beings that were never any kind of living thing at all. The third are a biological species that was created by another. There are two storylines containing two protagonists that never actually meet, but their civilizations do. The big issues get dealt with: Why do we need to find out about the world around us? What really matters when you’re faced with death? What would still matter if you never had to face death?

There’s a wealth of cool ideas of course. The timescales are enormous because there’s plenty of interstellar travel but nobody ever exceeds the speed of light. If you are immortal, with the ability to turn yourself off when you’re bored, that doesn’t really matter does it? A nice idea. Except all your friends live in another place and time now. How do you feel?

People already familiar with Egan are going to be asking about the difference between Incandescence and his previous work. The answer is detail and thoroughness. He has taken an idea and created beings that will investigate every aspect of that idea for him. He has invented a civilization that lives in an environment very alien to the one you and I live in, a very extreme environment where all the rules are different. In that environment the things that are hidden from human beings are part of everyday life.

There are places in this novel where a character spends three or four pages going through the mental processes behind a technical idea, and we might be talking about the finer points of gravitational engineering here. Some readers are going to find this tiresome. Greg Egan doesn’t care. This is a guy that provides technical notes at the end of his book, together with suggestions for further reading. I’m not sure how much of this kind of detail is necessary for the story but Egan wants us to care about the details because he certainly does. In the real world the details matter, so why shouldn’t he write a story full of references to hard science? I think he truly wants us to go and investigate the science web-links at the end of the book.

Read this book because it’s an adventure: a big, swashbuckling adventure where the action takes place in the realm of ideas.