Incandescence
"The Amalgam spans the nearly entire galaxy, and is composed of innumerable beings from a wild variety of races, some human or near it, some entirely other. The one place that they cannot go is the bulge, the bright, hot center of the galaxy. There dwell the Aloof, who for millions of years have deflected any and all attempts to communicate with or visit them. So when Rakesh is offered an opportunity to travel within their sphere, in search of a lost race, he cannot turn it down. Roi is a member of that lost race, which is not only lost to the Amalgam, but lost to itself. In their world, there is but toil, and history and science are luxuries that they can ill afford. When she meets Zak, the male who will become her teacher and mentor, everything starts to change. Their strange world is under threat, and it will take an unprecedented flowering of science to save it. Rakesh's journey will take him across millennia and light years. Roi's will take her across vistas of learning and discovery just as vast"--Dust jacket.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
35mentions
22people
2014–2026years
43% recommend54% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- In general, I can recommend every book by Greg Egan. Especially Incandescence, which really struck me as a great piece of hard sci-fi.
- > I would submit Incandescence as the best sci-fi novel ever written.
In a world with both Greg Egan and Ted Chiang writing sci-fi, one has to exclude their novels from any best-of comparisons just to give other authors a fighting chance.
- My current hero is Greg Egan. I wish Incandescence had a sequel. I was sad when the book ended. Probably the best piece of hard sci-fi I've ever read.
- I don't know if this was what your parent meant, but
One of the fairly noticeable problems with Stephenson is that he uses the "rape as character development" trope a lot for female characters. So, that's not great. In general in fact female characters in his novels are not written as if they were - you know - people, and even when they're the protagonist we get some weird male gaze stuff going on.
It's not a deal breaker, Diamond Age is one of my favourite novels despite this. But certainly it feels at best lazy.
Other routine complaints are that Stephenson's novels are too long (fair) under edited (presumably with the same root cause, ie celebrity) and poorly paced (e.g. six chapters about the protagonist preparing and then eating cereals, two pages on the climactic bank heist they've spent the whole book planning)
Technically I think Stephenson suffers from having noticed that, unlike many contemporaries who wrote fiction set in the near future, he actually has some idea what he was writing about and not realising how limited that knowledge is. William Gibson knows he has no idea how a computer works, so in a Gibson novel he's not trying to convince you his protagonist knows which IPv6 routing protocol to use - William Gibson doesn't know what IPv6 is. But Neal might spend a paragraph about some nonsense that seems plausible if you know as much as he does... but then is laughable if you know more. That seems if anything worse than what Gibson chose.
I like hard SF, but hard SF is really difficult. One of my other favourite novels is Greg Egan's "Incandescence". Egan isn't great at writing women either, but in Incandescence he cuts himself a break, nobody involved is technically human anyway, but he did spend a lot of time figuring out all the tricky physics needed to make the novel's story work. Is there really a civilisation in the core of our galaxy? We'll probably never know, but Egan attempted to design a scenario that could, in principle, technically work.
- That sounds like a Greg Egan book yet to be written :-) I discovered that it is real fun to think about these things when I read Incandescence. BTW, I am taking recommendations for books similar to that one, it appears I love that subgenre.
- Egan is great. Another good book is Incandescence. Only problem is that some of his novels contain some kind of loneliness. Can't describe it.
