#orthogonal trilogy

[churchofthecomet]

greg egan novel bingo

[realsciencefiction]

One Plus Sign Created a New Universe

A science fiction author changed one minus sign to a plus sign.

That sounds like nothing.

In Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy, it changes everything.

Spacetime stops behaving like spacetime.

Time is no longer fundamentally different from space.

There is no universal speed limit.

Time dilation reverses.

Light travels at different speeds depending on wavelength.

Stars smear into rainbow trails.

Photons have mass.

Electrons do not exist.

Technology has to be rebuilt from the ground up.

And a generation ship called the Peerless uses this broken version of physics to buy centuries of subjective time while only years pass back home.

This is not normal worldbuilding.

This is an entire alternate universe engineered from one mathematical change.

I made a documentary breaking down why Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy might be one of the most ambitious hard science fiction universes ever created.

One plus sign.

One impossible universe.

One of the wildest acts of science fiction worldbuilding ever written.

[darkmatterzine]

The Arrows of Time by Greg Egan

The Arrows of Time by Greg Egan - a review

A review by Rebecca Muir

ISBN: 9780575105775

Page count: 384

Publisher: Gollancz (Hachette)

The Arrows of Time is the final book in Greg Egan’s Orthogonal trilogy. The first two books, The Clockwork Rocket and The Eternal Flame, have been reviewed by me previously – follow the links to get to the reviews.

This is an amazing trilogy, unlike anything I have ever read. It is set in a fictitious…

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[panzertron]

Finished reading The Clockwork Rocket (the first book of the Orthogonal trilogy), and started reading the second book.  I get what a lot of people have complained about, but it didn't stop me from actually finishing the book.  I think this was because, while it is ridiculously full of complicated physics and confusing diagrams, I actually did find the story itself pretty interesting.

There just comes a point where you feel like the one dumb person in a room full of physicists having a conversation about weird alternate universe physics, and you just have to accept the fact that you can read the words but won't understand what the hell they mean until the characters in the book start putting their theories into practice (and sometimes not even then).  It's like you have to trust the author to make it all make some sort of sense, somehow, and you kind of go:  "Okay, I don't know what this part means at all, but I'm pretty confident the characters at least mostly understand it, so let's just run with that."  I wouldn't say I'm exactly comfortable with a book that makes me read it this way, but, like I said, even if a lot of the physics over my head, I like the story itself.  At least Egan seems to be able to write a story that works and is consistent, even if you don't understand 75% of the crazy physics involved.

I'm interested enough that I'll probably finish reading the trilogy (whenever the third book gets around to being finished).  But holy crap, reading this book is the hard sci-fi equivalent of trying to eat food that's so spicy that you have to just pick at it and wait for it to actually make your mouth go numb before you can get down to business and start seriously eating it.  If that makes any sense.