Schild’s Ladder by Greg Egan || book review (some spoilers)

Hi everyone. Today, I’m going to be reviewing the hard sci-fi novel, Schild’s Ladder, by Greg Egan.
#hardscifi #sciencefiction #GregEgan

Review criteria
***** - Blew my mind. Simple as.
**** - great story, well written, entertained me all the way.
*** - good story, well written, mostly entertaining.
** - has good bones but failed in a number of ways.
* - failed in every way a book can.

____________________________________________________________________
MY STUFF
____________________________________________________________________
vvv MORE vvv

MY SCI-FI NOVELS

DELPHINE DESCENDS
After her family is killed and her homeworld occupied, young Kathreen Martin is sent to the distant world of Furoris for re-education. She will live the rest of her life as a serf – to be bought and sold as a commodity of the Imperial Network.

When her only chance of escape is ruined, a chance mistaken identity offers her a new life as the orphaned daughter of a First-Citizen Senator and heiress to a vast fortune.

She vows to claw her way into power to sit among the worlds’ elite. Then, with her own hands, she will reap bloody vengeance on them all.

But to beat them, she must play their game. And she must play it better than them all.

BLACK MILK
Prometheus has the chance to bring his wife back from the dead, but doing so will mean the destruction of Earth.

Spanning time, planets and dimensions, Black Milk draws to a climactic point in a post-apocalyptic future, where humanity, stranded with no planet to call home, fights to survive against a post-human digital entity that pursues them through the depths of space.

Five lives separated by aeons are inextricably linked by Prometheus’s actions:

Ystil.3 is an AI unit sent back in time from the distant future to investigate Prometheus’s discovery...

The mysterious Lydia has devoted her life to finding a planet that the last remaining humans can call home…

Tom Jones (he’s a HUGE fan!) is an AI trapped inside a digital subspace, lost and desperate to find his way back to his beloved in real-time…
Dr Norma Stanwyck is a neuroscientist from 24th Century Earth whose personal choices ripple throughout time...

Prometheus must learn the necessity of death or the entire universe will be swallowed by his grief.
____________________________________________________________________
GOODREADS
____________________________________________________________________

[xavierxeon]

Later Greg Egan novels are even 'harder' sci-fi, where he start from a hypothetical physical assumption and then builds a world around it. Those novels are also harder to read.

[chasethevioletsun]

Schild's Ladder is among my top three science fiction novels of all time, a top three also populated by Egan's other novels, Diaspora and Permutation City.

[kellymoses]

Greg Egan is essentially his own genre of ultra-hard sci-fi with real math and physics.

[snovid]

Great job. You not only actually review a book (most of YouTubers fail to understand the concept), but make it interesting to listen to. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ for this clip! Would you consider reading "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski?

[FITBREAD]

Have read this twice Nd planning Nother read for later this year. Egan, to me, is one of the really underappreciated authors in the genre.

[thethirdchimpanzee]

@Book Odyssey Egan's later books, like those of Neal Stephenson, are much harder, denser. I would go back to Egan's earlier work...which is already complex enough...but what complicates a book like Shild's Ladder even more, is that it does something that most of Egan's later work does - it INVENTS IT'S OWN PHYSICS.

Before you can understand how different and weird this growing region of space is with it's new rules...you FIRST have to learn the book's almost completely made up from scratch physics. Which makes understanding it twice as hard.
In Egan's earlier works you just had to learn and kinda understand some obscure complicated real-world math and physics...but in Shild's Ladder you have to understand a totally made up physics...and then understand a different made up physics and compare the two.
And in books like The Clockwork Rocket or Dichronauts, you have to understand real world physics...but how they would work in a universe with different spacial and temporal directions. Like what if time had a *sideways* or the universe was saddle shaped. So whatever way you turned you were a different size or could see the near future in front of you and the near past behind you. It's bonkers.
I heard once that for some book he wrote, he devised an entirely new type of mathematical system that had different rules (he is a mathematician, and in higher math...like WAY up there, when you get to the rules of how and why 2+2=4...you can postulate perfectly self-consistent (within' the limitations of the Incompleteness Theorem) mathematical systems where 2+2≠4, and then you can play around I'm them.
(I'd give almost anything to be able to understand even half of what these John Nash type people do. Just to have a glimpse of their superhuman minds.)
Anyway, Egan...
Many of Greg's later books and some earlier books have entire unattached appendices online explaining the book's concepts in more detail - with pictures...just Google Greg Egan's website.
Maybe start out with a short story collection like Axiomatic. Or try Diaspora...or take a run a Permutation City. In fact, start with a short-story collection of his - there are several: Axiomatic, and Oceanic - then try Permutation City then Diaspora (both deal with consciousnesses living as software...some who start out as physical beings, some that are "born" that way....)

[harveywhitfield]

I would love to see a review on Diaspora by Greg Egan. I am currently reading Schilds ladder

[owsie]

Greg Egan is amazing. The first story of his I read was Whangs tiles I think. Not for everyone but I've loved all his books. Australia is quite strong in good hard sci-fi

[Journeyofnow_]

I’ve got several of the books you recommend. I love your channel. It is the hardest sci-fi book I’ve ever read. True mind bender. I will have to read this again.

[johnmendoza]

The short stories.. a great start to get familiar with the author's writing style.

[tehdii]

I have just read it and what I can say is that you will understand everything more or less but if you are not ruminating about the world through Egan glasses you won't be in the default position to instantly catch every little idea of his. The structure has layers, intertwined and I like when earlier chapters are preparing us for things that will occur much later. I have read many books from popular science genre but I did not understand to the mathematical root, explanations given by the author ;) There is a solid idea at the foundation of the story but without the specific knowledge about this specific part of science and math governing it the idea remains a hard one to catch up with. The structure is typical (understandable) to scifi genre ( not bad not revolutionary like books by nova-structure makers like DFW, Nabokov etc. ), the metaphors and descriptions are great, the idea is engaging, the last two chapters are order of magnitude denser ;)

As the Preservationists from XXI Earth I just want to say Nova-vacuum eunt domus :)

Next one Permutation City, wish me luck ;)

[peterfmodel]

This sounds like a great story. Isaac Asimov has a number of video discussing digital existence, which is rather interesting.

[andreasxanthros]

Amazing review Darrel, thanks! I'm not sure if I've heard of this author but you have intrigued me. I have to say that math was by far my worst subject in school but I am still willing to check this out. Wish me luck...

[gosnooky]

I enjoyed the book for the most part - and like you, I could barely understand any of the hard science parts, but the most difficulty I had was Egan's writing style. This was my first Egan book and what bothered me was the bad punctuation in the prose (way too many commas, in places, they shouldn't, be), and how he puts dialog tags before the dialog, rather than after as most people do. Both these quirks broke my concentration and took me out of the story.

[HiroNguy]

OK about 4 minutes in and Egan is now on my Mons TBR.

[flowaroundtherock]

Amazing review and video! I'm adding this book to my TBR <3

[robertlewis]

Thanks for the spoiler warning, just added this TBR. Good review.

[deardaughter]

Do you know anywhere I can read a chapter summary for it? I just want to make sure I'm catching everything as I read it but can't find one online.

[yidaweng]

It's very enjoyable, thanks a lot!

[jiri-novotny-active]

Your GR link doesn't work. I have found your profile through your books but maybe you should update the link so that more people can start stalking you :). Also thank you for your videos I enjoy them!