Product Description

The long-awaited new novel from Hugo Award-winning writer Greg Egan! The Amalgam spans nearly the entire galaxy, and is composed of innumerable beings from a wild variety of races, some human, some near-human, and 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!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31379 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

Poor Execution of a Nice Idea
On an enclosed alien world, gravity works very differently than we are used to. As the story begins, the world's previously dormant culture embarks on a journey of scientific discovery to understand their world and its environment.

In a different story arch, the entire Milky Way has been thoroughly inhabited and explored by a peaceful amalgam of races. When given the opportunity to investigate the enclosed alien world in the Milky Way's core, one of the Amalgam's citizens take off, mostly motivated by the boredom stemming from the prospect that exploration is nigh-impossible.

In the center of the story is a scientific riddle. The idea is nice, but if you have read Larry Niven and know a bit of Newtonian physics and relativity theory, you can figure most of it out fairly early in the story.

As the story unfolds, we follow the aliens' scientific struggle to understand their world. Unfortunately, this is written in a rather abstract manner, so it quickly becomes quite repetitive to read.

Egan should be commented for writing a complete novel without having to resort to action writing. In fact, there's no conflict in the novel at all, and only a vaguely felt danger. As such, the scientific puzzle becomes the only real driving force in the story. If Egan had been able to pull this off, this could have been a really noteworthy piece of science fiction, but unfortunately, the book is just boring.

In these days of mammoth science fiction 'epics' bursting with filler, the book's short length is a redeeming feature.

This is an ambitious attempt at a serious science fiction novel for the discerning reader. Alas, it doesn't succeed.

Riding the Crocodile
I just wanted to point out that Egan's story "Riding the Crocodile" is set in the same universe as Incandescence. You can find that story in the anthology One Million A.D. edited by Gardner Dozois.

When Down is Up
This book is very much in the tradition of Hal Clement's hard science fiction, where the investigation of what happens under various extreme physical conditions is the prime focus of the work. For this work, it will definitely help if you are at least somewhat familiar with orbital mechanics as detailed by Newton and Kepler, Einstein's general theory of relativity, and the work of Schwarzschild and Kerr dealing with black hole properties.

The extreme conditions of this book imagine a small, rocky body inhabited by some quite small six-legged insectoid beings that is in orbit around a black hole, and embedded in the black hole's accretion ring. Given the energies and radiation levels associated with such a ring, the inhabitants are by necessity confined to the inside of their little habitat, which provides the necessary shielding from the worst of the radiation, while at the same time the ring provides the necessary energy input to their world to form a functioning biosphere. Clearly, these inhabitants would be at a severe disadvantage in trying to figure out just how their world works, as they cannot just go `outside' and see everything in their heavens. Much of the story of this book revolves around just how they do determine just what is happening, and how they determine both that their world is in danger of having its orbit deteriorate to where it will fall into the black hole and what they can do to avoid such a fate.

This story thread is placed in-between a different story line, where a far-future `human' ("child of DNA") is recruited by the Aloof, a very nebulous group of beings who inhabit the central bulge of stars in our galaxy, to find the origin and current status of an anomalous asteroid found within this bulge with microbiological remnants of DNA based life. As the story progresses, it's clear that the two stories are related, though not directly, and separated in time by perhaps many millennia.

Both story lines are prime examples of the methods of scientific discovery. Most of the charm of this book is in just how the characters connect the observable facts with deductions about the universe around them. The described world of the insectoid race will definitely challenge your sense of `normal', with weird gravitational effects that your first instinct is say `that's impossible' - but as you delve deeper, you begin to see just how such effects would occur, and the fun is watching the major characters determine what is going on. There is a lot of explanation of some fairly esoteric concepts detailed here, somewhat to the detriment of the story line, and this is dense material, as Egan tries to describe in English some rather complicated mathematics. I highly recommend that while reading this, the reader also look at Egan's website at gregegan.net for some nice diagrams and animations that will help with understanding this material (and for those with the necessary background, the actual equations are detailed here also).

However, all this concentration on the pursuit of science means that characterization is fairly slim, and some of the ethical and moral problems faced by the `human' of the second story line don't seem to have any solid grounding in what little background we are given about him. The two story lines do not have a nice, tied-up-with-a-string intersection, but rather the ending is left somewhat open, inviting the reader to do the final connect-the-dots operation.

The net is, if you liked things like Clement's Mission of Gravity and like seeing real science driving a truly odd and different physical scenario that can invoke that `sense of wonder', then this book is for you. If instead, you'd rather have something more character driven, and can't stand math (or had difficulty with algebra and geometry), then this one will leave you cold and unhappy.

---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)