Erik's Reviews > The Clockwork Rocket

I’m fascinated by the celebrity of painting. Most children leave elementary school able to recognize names like Van Gogh or Da Vinci but are wholly unfamiliar with other names like Faraday, Turing, Laozi, Kant, Saladin, Tolkien, or so on and so forth. Why is that? What is the obsession with Renaissance-era painters to explain this disconnect between their relatively minute historical importance and their fame?

I’m sure I don’t know the answer, but in many ways it mirrors the personal experience of viewing a painting. For the average person, there’s… really not much to it. Of all aesthetic experiences, I believe painting possesses the largest disparity between the creating and viewing experiences. Take even the most famous paintings - Starry Night or the Scream or the Mona Lisa - and how long will your average person linger in front of it at a museum? A minute? Nope. For the Mona Lisa, it’s an average of 15 seconds.

Ultimately, paintings don’t offer much interactivity. They don’t have much content, visual or otherwise. I doubt I’m alone in finding painting museums boring. And yet I can still appreciate these works’ artistic heft, the weight of effort that went into their creation. The artist’s entire life, the thousands of paintings to finally reach masterpiece level.

Those are my feelings, more or less, towards Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy.

What literally god-like genius must it take to imagine a universe with physics radically different than our own, populate it with a suitable intelligent life, and then chart a course for how that life will discover and manipulate the laws of the universe around them. And Egan does that! It’s got competing theories, political factions pushing their own theories, cross-discipline paradigm shifts as a result of breakthroughs, dead end ideas… and sometimes those dead ends make a comeback to turn out to be the correct theory!

It is genius. I cannot overstate that. It is genius. I’ve read sci-fi with alien species, of course, and alternate dimensions and such. But they have ALWAYS been primarily qualitative, never quantitative to any real degree. Most science fiction is really just futuristic fantasy. Greg Egan puts the science back in science fiction.

BUT - and this is a big BUT - the actual experience of reading the Orthogonal trilogy is awkward and dissatisfying.

At this point, I’ve read almost every novel Egan has written. Except for his out-of-print debut novel, Orthogonal trilogy are my last three. So I know well Egan’s modus operandi.

Basically, he writes science thrillers: a civilization-level catastrophe occurs or looms - vacuum decay in Schild’s Ladder, a quantum rewriting virus in Terenesia, a drought in Dichronauts, etc - and in response, science must save the day! Which essentially means the protagonists must better understand the universe because what is science but the process of understanding?

His early novels - Quarantine in 1992 up to Schild’s Ladder in 2002 - take place in our universe and feature human or post-human protagonists. Incandescence in 2008 bridges his early and later novels, as it is set in our universe and one of the protagonists is post-human BUT the other is quite alien. Then his most recent novels - this Orthogonal trilogy in 2011 and Dichronauts in 2017 - not only feature non-humanoid protagonists… they’re also set in entirely different universes, with different laws of physics!

Orthogonal’s physics change is small but fundamental:

In our universe, in the ‘metric’ of GR’s spacetime, we treat space distances as positive but time distances as negative. If you’ve ever encountered time dilation in your sci-fi or studies, then you know what this negative sign means: travelers moving at extreme speeds will age LESS than those who do NOT take detours through time.

In the Orthogonal universe, time distance is ALSO positive, which means time dilation occurs in the opposite direction: the travelers will age much MORE than those who remain at home. This is, in fact, the core plot, though it takes like half of the first book (which is otherwise rather boring milieu / slice-of-life stuff) to get there:

The (essentially) anti-matter half of the Orthogonal’s universe has looped back around and will soon collide with the normal matter half. In order to avert this cosmic catastrophe, the protagonists launch a generational ship travelling at extreme speeds so that its travelers can improve the state of their science, come up with some way to save the rest of the civilization, and eventually turn around and do so.

So Egan’s standard MO of a science thriller, which I quite enjoy. The problem is that the small alteration of a negative to positive sign in the metric doesn’t just invert time dilation, it changes EVERYTHING. No universal light speed, so stars in the night sky are no longer pinpricks of light but rainbows. And the release of light actually INCREASES energy, so plants/crops now emit light, rather than absorb it. And so on and so forth. It changes so much that I don’t even know what it changes.

For example, I’m almost done with book two at the point of writing this review, and the scientists have just about discovered Pauli’s Exclusion Principle (aka degeneracy pressure) to help explain why gravity doesn’t turn ALL solids into black holes. But I’m like… is PEP even valid anymore? And there wouldn’t really be ‘black holes’ would there? There could be gravity wells that only trap SOME of the colors of light but not others. And… sigh… I really don’t have the time, energy, or expertise to explore a new physics rabbit-hole every other page.

Which breaks the reading experience of a science mystery/thriller.

The way thrillers - and most other genres - work is by generating expectations. Consciously or not, the reader makes guesses about what’s going to happen next and feels compelled to keep reading to discover how those guesses match up with reality. That’s part of what makes humans more intelligent than other animals - our hypothesis engine.

But how can you make expectations when dealing with a universe SO UTTERLY ALIEN to our own? Like HALF of this book is science explanations, but they’re largely opaque even to a science freak like me because I have no idea which assumptions/knowledge I’m allowed to employ in understanding them.

In my Diaspora review, I referenced a strange sadness, in which I considered it one of the greatest sci-fi books I’ve ever read but would recommend it to almost no one. Orthogonal is even worse. This review saddens and disquiets me. The books are an incredible work of genius. Truly, truly genius. But I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone I know, not even myself.

The one optimism I have to cheer me up, though, is the thought that Egan might well go the way of van Gogh: obscure and unappreciated in his own time. But a future, more capable, more enlightened humanity will better able to understand and appreciate his accomplishment. So cheers! Here’s to hoping we overcome our own planetary catastrophe and make it that far.