Schild’s Ladder

Greg Egan

Gollancz, hardback, 248 pages, £16.99

Published February 2002

ISBN 0575070684

Review by Mike Don (2002)

In essence, hard SF cubed. I pride myself on a science based education, but my long ago wrestling with phase relations in upper mantle peridotite melts is Janet and John level compared to the concepts Egan handles with such blithe assurance. In places I understood about one sentence in ten, briefly wondering if Egan was pushing the outer limits of reader comprehension.

For all that, Ladder is worth the effort. The grandeur of the ideas stir up that old sense of wonder in a way that space opera can never match. Consider: creation of an artificial pocket universe rewrites the laws of physics, suggesting that they are merely a Special Case, perhaps in the way that Newtonian physics is a special case of Einsteinian. Egan is a proselytiser for ‘science’ as an ongoing quest for understanding. For all that, his characters, even though some exist as acorporeal data packagers, have a warmth, and a capacity for pig-headed, thrawn stubbornness, which indicates that some aspects of humanity don’t change.

Hard going (unless you’re an astrophysicist) but recommended (unless you’re a fundamentalist).

As a postscript: Egan’s treatment is new, but in some ways the idea isn’t; distant relatives appear in Haldeman’s Forever Peace and Greg Benford’s Cosm •

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