m. c. de marco

At io9, a belated review of Greg Egan’s Incandescence:

Although occasionally uneven and frustrating, the book is a terrifically interesting thought experiment that will appeal to anyone who likes a strong, intelligent science mystery. And Egan’s civilization-building is simply breathtaking. His deft creation of an alien civilization of tiny insects living in orbit around a neutron star at the center of the galaxy provides such an appealing narrative throughline that you won’t be able to put Incandescence down until its extremely weird conclusion.

Via Night Shade Books: John Scalzi has a guest post by Greg Egan discussing his new novel Incandescence.

So for us, astronomy was crucial even to reach as far as Newton, and postulating Einstein’s theory — let alone validating it to high precision, with atomic clocks on satellites and observations of pulsar orbits — depended on a wealth of other ideas and technologies.

How, then, could my alien civilization possibly reach the same conceptual heights, when they were armed with none of these apparent prerequisites?

Via SFScope: Night Shade Books has published Walter Jon Williams’ Implied Spaces, with bonus downloads. Also new in their catalog is Greg Egan’s Incandescence.

Via del.icio.us scifi: Greg Egan’s story “Oceanic” is available at his web site. The fine print: Copyright © Greg Egan, 1998. All rights reserved. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1998.