Publications: Reviews

SCHILD’S LADDER by Greg Egan

Gollancz 2001 250pp £10.99

In this, his sixth novel, Greg Egan again shows us (as if we really needed it) that in his hands the science fiction novel of ideas is alive and well, and as hypnotically arresting as ever. There is more in a typical slim Egan novel than in most bloated and open-ended series.

Schild’s Ladder starts with a cosmological experiment going disastrously wrong. In the second part of the novel, it becomes clear that the experiment went so wrong that entire planets are now being swallowed up as the “novo-vacuum” relentlessly expands at half light-speed from its creation-point. The novo-vacuum is a region where a whole new physics rules -- not just another dimension, or an alternate universe to ours, but a new creation entirely. Equal.

Centuries down the line, as the expansion of the “border” continues to threaten, two polarising factions have emerged. There are the Yielders, who want to study the border, and the Preservers, who want to save our universe at all costs, even to the destruction of the border, and all that it possibly contains.

Schild’s Ladder is thus the story of opposites, both on the macrocosmic level and the personal, as friends find themselves in opposing factions, and yet have come together to try and achieve compromise. Egan’s novel is a tense exploration of the interaction of the human (embodied and acorporeal) as well as with the utterly alien.

As ever, Egan’s understanding and use of personality and character is wide-ranging and generous, and is well-served by his crisp and clean prose. There is always a slight chill in Egan’s space -- a quite acceptable feeling considering what he has in store for character and reader. But his hot passion for ideas, for physics and biology, for what it is to be alive and to encounter them and their consequences, dominates his work.

Greg Egan writes some of the “hardest” sf around, and his work is certainly indispensable at that end of the sf spectrum. At the very least, Schild’s Ladder amply repays a careful read -- with another old-fashioned virtue, Sense of Wonder.

Copyright (c) 2001 John Howard