I do think Greg Egan’s writing is amongst the most imaginative and challenging out there. But again I will have to say that I think that his short fiction is better than his novels. His stuff is strong on ideas and short on people, especially when in most of his work the characters aren’t human but computer simulated people of one type or another.
This book is the same. I never got into the characters; they were there purely to perceive the story through. Their relationships were weak and the attempt at dramatic opposition between the protagonist and his long lost love/hate/friend/enemy figure is just weak and petulant. I’ve never seen more immature 10,000 year olds. The main character has nothing to love or hate about him, and neither do anyone else. The future for Egan seems to be full of bland drones. Maybe will be.
His explanations of the physics are wonderful pseudo science but he does spend too long trying to explain it and gets a bit esoteric in both real physics and his new stuff. Hard to escape from when the book is about a new universe with a massively more complex physics, but he could have cut it bit shorted in places. I just read and didn’t try to understand much of it. Just let the sound and feel wash over me. I do think some readers want to understand everything but it is after all a fantasy and one must suspend belief and just read the story.
The end feels fairly predictable and most of what happened I saw chapters in advance. A few good ideas, but many not fully thought through, and when you’re always one step ahead of the characters who are super intelligent computer programs or centuries old humans the book becomes much less exciting.
