Review: Embodiment and Humanity in Schild’s Ladder.
!http://tinyurl.com/6aah2(Schild’s Ladder)!:http://tinyurl.com/3nkyu I just finished reading “Schild’s Ladder”:http://tinyurl.com/3nkyu by “Greg Egan”:http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/. I’ve had a spotty relationship with Egan’s novels. I first read “Quarantine”:http://tinyurl.com/58m37 in Jr. High, and it completely blew me away, opening my eyes to the strange world of quantum physics. I’ve re-read it since, and it has remained sterling over the test of years. I was not so lucky with “Permutation City”:http://tinyurl.com/6towz, which is a nearly meaningless book with pitiful characters so wrapped up in their own nihilism that they barely care more what happens to themselves than the reader does. “Diaspora”:http://tinyurl.com/4cpqa, as baroquely intelligent as it may have been, simply went above my head and never came back. Note: any time an author tries to help you visualize rotations in four and five dimensions, be afraid. Be very afraid.
You might imagine then that it was with some trepidation that I approached Schild’s Ladder. The premise interested me: a scientific experiment probing the basic nature of reality accidentally sets off a vacuum energy “phase transition”:http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/cs_phase.html, an expanding bubble of spacetime with new and destructive physics that threatens (what else?) interstellar human civilization. The characters must study the phenomenon and decide how to react to it–a Preservationist faction wants to stop it at all costs, while a Yielder faction wants to embrace it and adapt to it.
You must realize, Greg Egan likes to write “cosmological” sf. To this end, he has developed, extrapolating from current research and theory, his own fictional physical theory of everything, a unification of relativity and quantum physics, called “QGT(Quantum Graph Theory)”:http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/SCHILD/Connect/Connect.html. The man is smart (he’s a computer scientist by trade), and realizes fantastic worlds (like the universe inside the bubble) with panache.
Contrarily, Egan’s characterizations often fall flat. Being the good “Moravecian”:http://tinyurl.com/62hyj that he is, he’s really into the idea of “acorporeal” humans living as algorithms in a simulated environment. In Permutation City and Diaspora, we spent almost the entire book in this mode. Representing this world to us old-fashioned baseline humans is a significant task, and perhaps Egan deserves credit for taking on the challenge, but it is plain old hard to connect with these people at a human level. This isn’t taking into account that his characters are often dry, cold and cerebral atheists or bored and lonely nihilists.
God be praised, this is not the case with Schild’s Ladder. In fact, Egan chooses to take the bull by the horns, making embodiment one of the primary themes of the story, and an incidental factor to the main conflict. Our hero, Tchicaya, is a near-baseline human with real parents, a real childhood, and human concerns. His friend, Yann, is an acorporeal who’s taken on a body in accordance with local social norms. Through flashbacks and memories, we gain a feeling for the human civilization that has spread across the stars and the challenges that arise from maintaining personal and societal cohesion even across the gap of centuries’ travel at mere light speed. When another planet is destroyed by the onrushing bubble, Egan takes us to a memorial service for the natives of the planet where the sense of nostalgia for place overwhelms. The inhabitants escaped by going acorporeal and transmitting themselves elsewhere, but the place they once called home is gone forever. Later, an acorporeal sacrifices his temporary body and a few minutes of personal continuity to save the continuity of an embodied human.
All throughout, Egan scatters these tidbits of struggle and compromise, culminating in the primary conflict between Preservationists and Yielders: how and why is place and embodiment important? What price must we pay to defend it? While Egan and Tchicaya fall squarely on the side of the Yielders, the novel is no one-sided polemic against tradition and for change. The conflict is human, and the characters, baseline and acorporeal, handle it like humans, down to the very last page.
4.0 out of 5. A thrilling cosmological speculation driven by a powerful human question.
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