The Clockwork Rocket

What Hacker News says

1. AceJohnny2Aug 2025
   If you like stories of science fiction, I'm surprised no-one mentioned Greg Egan.

   "Singleton": what if many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory was real?

   The Orthogonal trilogy, starting with "The Clockwork Rocket": what if space-time was Riemannian rather than Lorentzian? Physics explained at https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html

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2. pavel_lishinAug 2025
   I think he exceeds at doing both at once. One of the things I loved most about The Clockwork Rocket wasn't the exploration of a universe unlike our own - to be honest, most of it went over my head - but the characters dealing with very human issues in a very non-human world.

   Dichronauts is very similar; in a universe with a slight tweak to the laws of physics, we spend most of the book exploring the consequences of that tweak, but also the experiences of the characters living in it, some of which are a consequence of their world, and some of which feel like situations we could very easily find on our planet.

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3. snapplebobappleDec 2024
   The orthogonal trilogy from Greg Egan really stands out (Clockwork rocket, eternal flame and the arrow of time) for fiction.

   For non fiction "Why nations Fail" by Daron Acemoglu was quite well done.

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4. matthewdgreenAug 2024
   If you haven’t read Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy, you might like it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clockwork_Rocket
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5. bchernyJun 2024
   Also see Greg Egan’s Clockwork Rocket, where this is a key plot point.
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6. wyagerJun 2024
   The Clockwork Rocket trilogy is ++++, and Dichronauts is ++--.

   Reading these really helped my intuitive grasp of relativistic mechanics.

   Incandescence is also cool but (minimal spoilers) is more or less the normal +--- metric. Not nearly as mind-bending as ++++ or ++--.

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