Greg Egan's Incandescence: Upping the Relativistic Ante

Hot on the heels of last week's posts about using 100 per cent proof real science in science fiction (Special Relativity in particular), Night Shade Books sent me a copy of Greg Egan's recently released novel Incandescence. Greg Egan writes what can be called hard space opera. The space opera part comes from the fact that his books are set on a galaxy-sized canvas, and most of his protagonists are members of fantastically advanced civilizations. The "hard" part refers to hard science fiction -- the physical laws followed and natural objects found within this type of story are written to be as close to scientifically accurate as possible. Incandescence follows two narrative threads: that of two bored citizens of the Amalgam, a conglomerate of civilizations that fill the Milky Way's outer disc, and two nascent scientists who live deep in the galaxy's inner bulge, an area that has been pretty ...