Dichronauts
Seth is a surveyor, along with his friend Theo, a leech-like creature running through his skull who tells Seth what lies to his left and right. Theo, in turn, relies on Seth for mobility, and for ordinary vision looking forwards and backwards. Like everyone else in their world, they are symbionts, depending on each other to survive. In the universe containing Seth's world, light cannot travel in all directions: there is a “dark cone” to the north and south. Seth can only face to the east (or the west, if he tips his head backwards). If he starts to turn to the north or south, his body stretches out across the landscape, and to rotate as far as north-north-east is every bit as impossible as accelerating to the speed of light. Every living thing in Seth’s world is in a state of perpetual migration as they follow the sun’s shifting orbit and the narrow habitable zone it creates. Cities are being constantly disassembled at one edge and rebuilt at the other, with surveyors mapping safe routes ahead. But when Seth and Theo join an expedition to the edge of the habitable zone, they discover a terrifying threat: a fissure in the surface of the world, so deep and wide that no one can perceive its limits. As the habitable zone continues to move, the migration will soon be blocked by this unbridgeable void, and the expedition has only one option to save its city from annihilation: descend into the unknown.
Stats for nerds
15recommend
31mentions
24people
2016–2025years
65% recommend29% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 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.
- Greg Egan wrote a science fiction book in a world with two timelike dimensions - that is, two terms in the Minkowski metric are negative. It's a fascinating world to explore. The book is titled Dichronauts.
- 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 ++--.
- Egan is prolific and his quality is quite uneven. I loved Permutation City, Diaspora and Dichronauts (although the latter had a weak story). But other books like Scale and Phoresis are downright bad. It's so hard to pick which Egan books to read because often the ones that sound the most interesting are the worst.
- It's been years since the last one I read, so it's a bit hard to recall. But the stories that have really stuck in my mind are the results of Egan tweaking some physical law, constructing a universe that might reasonably arise under those physical conditions, and then writing a plausible adventure within that universe.
Dichronauts (2 spacial and 2 time-like dimensions instead of our 3 and 1) and the Orthogonal trilogy (Riemannian spacetime instead of our "Lorentzian") come to mind. I just really like the care he puts into constructing these universes, from how planets form (the worlds in Dichronauts are infinite hyperboloids instead of spheres), to how scientific discovery progresses (as a result of the physics in Orthogonal, light of different frequencies travel at different speeds and visually separate as a common matter of course, which leads to a much earlier understanding of relativity by a fairly primitive civilization). It feels like he's building universes from first principles and taking care to consider every little consequence and detail, which leads to a lot of "Ohhhhh" moments when you encounter something counter-intuitive but then realize it directly follows as a consequence of the initial physics tweak.
- I love sc-fi. It's by far my favourite type of novel to read. In fact I usually read either non fiction (popular science, reportage) or sci-fi. I have read probably a couple hundred sci-fi books, including many on that list. I have read a lot in order to find the really good stuff which is quite rare imo. My favorite sci-fi authors are Arthur C. Clarke and Greg Egan. I also like Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Stross, Robert L Forward, Andy Weir, Stephen Baxter. The stuff you mentioned are movies / tv firstly and secondly I wouldnt even personally classify them as sci-fi, they are more pure fantasy.
Just for example, Greg Egan's written some of the most far-out sci-fi Ive ever read, eg. Dichronauts describing life in a universe with different geometry to our own + symbiotic intelligent lifeforms that can each percieve space on different axes. https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html
