Incandescence - Hardcover

Greg Egan is a computer programmer, and the author of the acclaimed SF novels Permutation City, Diaspora, Teranesia, Quarantine, and the Orthogonal trilogy, all published by Night Shade Books. He has won the Hugo Award as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Egan’s short fiction has been published in a variety of places, including Interzone, Asimov’s, and Nature. He lives in Australia.

The Milky Way has been thoroughly explored and cataloged, and journeying among its networked worlds, called the Amalgam, is a simple matter of digital transmission. People in the Amalgam exist indefinitely in digital form, able to assume any race when they are “embodied,” millennia passing as if only hours. The only unknown is the bulge, home to the Aloof, who resist all communications. Rakesh, who has fruitlessly searched for something new, cannot pass up the opportunity to enter the bulge when a stranger asks him to locate a lost race. Paralleling Rakesh’s investigation is the story of that lost race, a collective of drones with no knowledge of themselves and their world. That changes when two citizens wake from dormancy, sparking an epidemic of scientific discovery that ultimately will save their world. The driving forces of this novel are a pure scientific puzzle and the intellectual joy of finding answers; Egan wastes little effort on character and conflict. Those who like their science hard will appreciate his thorough research and intricate speculations. --Krista Hutley