Discussion
A quote that makes my brain tingle:
[Characters talk about their different childhood experiences] "My earliest memories are of CP4—that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex dimensions, though the global topology's quite different."
Still, I was surprised by the variety: There's some action, there's some sex scenes (but in a pretty weird and fun way), and the final chapters depart from the rest of the book in a way I didn't expect.
The characters felt relatable to me, but they weren't fleshed out very much. (This is a pun – some of them were acorporeal.) And I didn't care so much about the ending.
Any recommendations on which Greg Egan book to read next? Maybe something that talks more about the Qusp technology?
The next book by @gregeganSF I read was "Permutation City"!
It's a much more near-future sci-fi than "Schild's Ladder", taking place around 2050. The premise feels a bit familiar by now: It's possible to copy people's minds, and simulate them in computers.
The story then explores the consequences: How do people deal with being simulated? What are the rules of the simulated worlds? Can you nest simulations? Should you?
Fun to keep in mind that it was published in 1994.
Didn't resonate a lot with the characters this time, they sometimes treated each other pretty badly.
But I loved the detailed descriptions of some very cool user interfaces and of a simplified cellular automaton world! And it was fun to see how what the characters do when time stops being a finite resource.
Thanks to @23n27 for the recommendation! Think I'll pick up one of Egan's short story collections next.
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Finished reading "Schild's Ladder", and thoroughly enjoyed it! It's very gratifying how the story uncovers its sci-fi concepts gradually, and there are some really neat twists! I enjoyed the heavy speculative science, but the story is told through characters, which made it easy to read.
I loved how disagreements are approached through in-depth discussion – the depicted societies are decidedly anti-violent.