4 Star Book Reviews: Arrows of Time

Arrows of Time by Greg Egan

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

Greg Egan is one of the few authors whose books I can re-read. Arrows of time certainly rewarded me for re-reading it. The first time, I was amused by the concept of reversed time. Now that I’m more grown up, I got the discussion about our deserpate search for meaning in a cosmos that assures us it has none. The balance between what we must and must not know. The terror we have for the part we play in making the future. What will I discover next time?

Don’t read this one without first reading the first two books (The Clockwork Rocket and The Eternal Flame). It’s a different universe in which the speed of light depends on its wavelength. People are amorphous blobs with very strange reproductive politcs. Their politicians are still kind of dumb, though. You tell ’em, Egan!

Arrows of Time by Greg Egan. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13352266-the-arrows-of-time This was a re-read, which I don’t do much. Egan rewards it, though. This time I could remember the “human” story (they’re actually squishy, alt-universe Barbapapa-people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbapapa ), and spend my mental energy trying to wrap my mind around time moving in different directions. It should tell you something that the whole “what of free will in a deterministic universe” problem gets about a paragraph before it’s solved and we move on to other, more interesting exercises. Such as determining whether the cosmos has positive or negative curvature.