Schild's Ladder

I made the mistake of reading this as my first Egan and I do not recommend that path. Word around my book club, and confirmed by enough other readers I trust, is that Permutation City and Diaspora are the on-ramp, and Schild’s Ladder is what you attempt once you’re already used to Egan turning physics into plot rather than backdrop. I got through it. I wouldn’t say I understood every page.

The premise is genuinely wild even by his standards, a failed physics experiment replaces our universe’s laws with an entirely new set in an expanding bubble, and centuries later people are living inside and studying the edge of that bubble the way you’d study a coastline. Egan doesn’t soften any of it for the reader, he builds out the new universe’s rules with the same rigor he’d apply to real physics, and there were stretches where I was reading sentences twice just to keep the concepts straight.

What actually got me through it wasn’t the physics, it was the relationship writing tucked inside the harder stretches, brief but genuine, and those sections gave me something to hold onto between conceptual gut punches. I was a math major and this still made my head hurt more than once, which either says something about the book’s ambition or my rusty math, probably both.

Three stars, and I mean that as real respect rather than faint praise. This is a tough row to hoe conceptually, worth attempting once you’ve built up some Egan tolerance elsewhere first, and not the book I’d hand a first time reader of hard SF.