Mare Somniorum

I think I’ve called Egan “interesting to read” or something like that on more than one occasion.  “Schild’s Ladder” is interesting, no doubt, but if one ever found either Diaspora or Permutation City to be daunting reads, this isn’t even literature.   “Schild’s Ladder” is full of conceptual ideas and models down to a point where the story, even it’s intent, is caught up in it.  When you name a piece of literature after what Wikipedia describes as “a method for parallel-transporting a vector along a curve using only geodesics“, you know why people learned to duck and cover once upon a time.  I suppose a lot of people will be happy that it’s all over in under 300 pages,  and to be honest, I’m probably one of them.

The opening paragraph sets the standard:

In the beginning was a graph, more like diamond than graphite. Every node in this graph was tetravalent: connected by four edges to four other nodes. By a count of edges, the shortest path from any node back to itself was a loop six edges long. Every node belonged to twenty-four such loops, as well as forty-eight loops eight edges long, and four hundred eighty that were ten edges long. The edges had no length or shape, the nodes no position; the graph consisted only of the fact that some nodes were connected to others. This pattern of connections, repeated endlessly, was all there was.

I’m not going to say it’s easy to follow the ideas without wrestling with the science involved.  It honestly isn’t.  The reader is forced to comprehend context to be able to follow the message from Egan, and that context is unequivocally tied to the science.  You don’t have to be able to hold (or even follow) a lecture in quantum graph theory, but I’d put money on that knowledge making the content easier to follow.  At some point you realize that you can only battle so many things at once while reading fiction.

That being said, we’re again moving into the realm of identity.  We always are with Egan, but this time we’re dealing with it more on the level on consciousness and the journey of the self, rather than defining the entity we see as the I itself.  To this end we run into constructs that bend time, space and probably the idea of free will into concepts that bear little resemblance to even most philosophical debates you’d run into.

“Schild’s Ladder” is as hard as Egan gets.  It may cause his ideas to be harder to follow, but it also gives them a lot more of a foundation to work on.  Other books probably serve as a better introduction to Egan, but once you pop, you just can’t stop.  Read it.  With patience and without worry about time it takes.  Besides, time is just another facet of the flipping the pages.