#speculativephysics — Public Fediverse posts
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Greg Egan - The Clockwork Rocket. Orthogonal book 1
Greg Egan writes Science Fiction so hard, it could as well be called ‘Fictional Science’. Often SF starts from a question ‘what if?’
Egan's ‘what if’ is ‘what if the speed of light in a vacuum is not constant, but varies with its color?’. This leads to all sorts of speculative consequences that need to be explained. To be able to do that, he creates a main character that travels the distance from being born on a farm to being the world’s Einstein and mission leader for a generational ship trying to save the world. Where their universe is in a way more 4-dimensional than ours, but the characters in this novel are rather 2-dimensional.
The explanation stays at the conceptual level, a general understanding of ‘our physics’ is enough to grasp Egan’s explanations of ‘their physics’, including the graphs and schemas he uses.
But still this will not be everybody's cup of tea. Too much explanation, too little plot. But I really liked it. On to the 2nd book in the trilogy!
#WatWouterLas26 #ScienceFiction #SpeculativePhysics #Books # Reading #Bookstadon