Scale

by Greg Egan

When electronics importer Cara Leon goes missing, private investigator Sam Mujrif is hired by her sister to investigate. Cara is eight times taller than Sam, but evidence soon points to players much smaller than either of them. As Sam and his cross-scale colleagues pursue the case, it becomes apparent that Cara’s disappearance is linked to the development of technology with the potential to reshape their whole society, and radically alter the balance of power between the scales.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 30, 2022

About the author

Greg Egan specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind transfer, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism over religion.

He is a Hugo Award winner (and has been shortlisted for the Hugos three other times), and has also won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. Some of his earlier short stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror, while due to his more popular science fiction he is known within the genre for his tendency to deal with complex and highly technical material (including inventive new physics and epistemology) in an unapologetically thorough manner.

Egan is a famously reclusive author when it comes to public appearances, he doesn't attend science fiction conventions, doesn't sign books and there are no photos available of him on the web.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Kam Yung Soh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and entertaining book about living on a world in a universe where people can come in different scales. Here, there are eight of them, each one half the size of the previous scale. This comes about because there are eight different kinds of leptons (like electrons) with different masses, causing the atoms they make to have different sizes. Egan explores the possibilities this difference in sizes causes to mass, biology, physics, chemistry, etc. to come up with a world where people of different sizes have learned to live next to each other.

But all may not be well. At the start of the book, a private investigator is hired to find a missing sister. His investigations would lead his to discover a secret being hidden by some people from a smaller scale. As he passes on his investigations to fellow investigators from the smaller scale, what they find would lead to the discovery of a secret that will alter the delicate negotiated balance the people of various scales have agreed to on how to share their environment. And now, the race is on to find a solution to avert a possible crisis that may involve weapons of unimaginable power being used on the peoples of other scales.

Egan expects the reader to be able to pick up the physics of the world from the situations and characters presented in the book, without much exposition being dropped in by him. If you find the consequences of living at different size scales puzzling, then this might not be a book for you. Otherwise, the reader will find living in a world where people are of different scales to be a fascinating experience.

Egan also gives a thoughtful and rational look at how people of different scales interact with each other and what can happen if people of one scale discover they have the ability to radically change the balance of the relationship between themselves and people of other scales: a rough equivalent would be people of different cultures on our world interacting with each other to share a common environment. The debates and arguments that ensue show the different possible reactions, and it is left to the reader to discover which option will be the one that will determine the future of all the people at various scales.

[Rufus T. Firefly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one is extra dry. As every Greg Egan novel of late, it’s a thought experiment crudely enacted. A purely intellectual exercise where plot, consistency and characters are all traded off for the high-concept topic of the novel. Egan is the kind of writer that takes the notion of high-concept and runs away with it. He is one of a kind, that is. His novels are very barebones in terms of the actual literary stuff - character development, plot, worldbuilding, language, descriptive parts - you know, the stuff that allows some sentences stringed together to be called literature. But he fully compensates all that with the intellectual joy of exploring a universe with different laws and figuring out its rules.

In that regard Egan always has been - even more so beginning with the Orthogonal trilogy - a subgenre by himself. While other SF writers come up with various tech novelties or social developments and extrapolate how they would affect humankind, Egan comes up with new Universes with different rules and extrapolates how humankind would function in such a Universe. His recipe is dismantling our Universe, twisting a fundamental physical law and rebuilding it from scratch, trying to figure how things - from particles to humans - would play out within the different ruleset.

This time around the fabricated Universe is not only fun to explore in itselt, but its premise gives the author the chance to comment on global politics and social justice. The second part of the novel sometimes reads like a Brexit debate.

As always with an Egan novel, to fully understand and appreciate the premise and context of the novel, you have to go to his personal website (that still looks like it time traveled to the future from the 90’s) and read his introductory essay. An essay that looks more like an advanced multidisciplinary thesis than an introduction. Which means that having a PhD in at least physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology and ecology helps with understanding it :) Otherwise grasping the main ideas and conclusions is still possible, but you may have to take his word for the technical parts. As is my case. I have never understood why these essays are not put into the printed novels themselves as an introduction or appendix, as they are essenstial to “getting it”. I guess he doesn’t want to scare away the casual reader.

TL;DR: not a good novel from a literary standpoint, but a fascinating thought experiment with bonus social commentary on very actual issues.

PS: not sure whether it’s a plothole or there was something I missed: how come people of various scales need their own version of water but are able to breathe the same air?
Also, why is long-distance transport for the smaller scales such an unsurpassable obstacle?Piggybacking on the closest neighbouring scales’ means of transport, with some feasible adjustments, should have done it.

[Blarg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bad book, very boring. It all takes place on a version of Earth where a difference in "leptons" make it possible for atoms to exist in different sizes such that there are seven different "scales" of things and people. The Scale 1 people are regular size like us. The scale 7 people are 1/64th our size but have the same mass and weight and their lives are much shorter and faster. That interesting concept is barely part of the story. It's just a mystery of who kidnapped a young adult and then a local government squabble.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

SMALL DETECTIVES. BIG MYSTERIES.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greg Egan loves to change one aspect of physics, and see how it plays out. Sometimes it can be hard to visualize, but keeping up with him is part of the fun. Mindbending, but fun.

In this one, he has changed an aspect of subatomic physics (see his website at gregegan.net to see a lengthy mathematical explanation of lepton engineering). This allows him to suppose that sometime in history, different sizes of people and animals developed, and even water had different sizes. He has seven different sizes of human, each one twice as large (or small) as the next. So the difference from the smallest to the largest is 1:64.

The smaller you are, the faster time moves, and the faster you move. So a minute is a really long time for people at D7, the smallest scale. We spend a lot of time at this scale, partly because the action moves faster and partly because some engineers have discovered how to manipulate lepton engineering to create nuclear fusion (not fission, fusion. Don't ask me how this works.)

That impels the powers that be to declare independence from the other six scales and break away, or try to. The climax of the story comes down to a vote on this.

There's also a missing person's case that starts the book, where a person at the largest scale (D1) is missing, and a detective at D4 is hired to solve it, while working with someone at D7. As I said, it's hard to visualize.

The pros and cons of this book are standard with Egan's work. His science is incredible, but his characters are fairly flat. They tend to act very rationally in the face of great pressure – it's almost like they are the Vulcans of Star Trek. Unfortunately, the past three years have shown us that people act emotionally, not rationally. Thus, his characters come off as a little distant, the way a Vulcan would.

It was easier to visualize the situation here (people of different sizes, moving at different rates) than in some other more recent books, like The Book of All Skies and Dichronauts. Those made my head hurt.

[Daniel Bensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave Egan another chance after The Book of All Skies, which was lazy and obnoxious. Scale, I was happy to find, wasn't obnoxious, but although it wasn't exactly lazy, it was thin. The speculative physics of the book is interesting, but then there is quite a lot of biological hand-waving to get us to the point where we have tiny, dense, very fast humans. They're all genetically related to each other and they all speak different dialects of the same language. But it isn't easy to make cities accessible to all "scales" of people, and then an evil corporation joins forces with the corrupt government to leverage a new technology than can upset the balance between the scales. The story is all there, but it's very bare bones, the minimum needed to keep us interested in the leptons.

[Roy Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another excellent book from Greg Egan.
He does a great job of explaining and exploring the book's universe of scales.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Upsetting… I absolutely LOVED “Permutation City” and was expecting to feel the same way about Scale, but it only took me around 40 pages to realize this book was not going to live up to my expectations.

The story takes place in a universe where organisms can be found in seven different sizes (or “scales”), and each “scale” is exactly 1/2 the size of the previous. Greg Egan tries to explore how people could co-exist with these differences, and how each size would interact with the world around them.

At first glance this sounds too interesting. But instead of really describing the settings and interactions between each scale, he only touches on these aspects when absolutely necessary. To me, this seems like a huge waste.

And, worst of all, his characters are flat and robotic. There was zero drama, just a sequence of debates and completely rational decisions. Who wants to read that?

I also found out his last few books have been self published. I think that an editor/advisor is EXACTLY what he needs. I don’t want anymore half baked novels (that could be so much more amazing) in the universe.

[Goshak · Rating 3 out of 5]

there’s sci-fi, there’s hard sci-fi, and then there’s greg egan. few authors have consistently blown my mind like he has. he’s truly one of a kind. i’m not as keen on his latest work however. Scales starts off with a fascinating premise—the universe is composed of seven different sizes of atoms, with everything existing on seven different scales—but it eventually veers into a political thriller, which isn’t really my thing. still, the ideas are undeniably brilliant.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greg Egan writes science fiction thrillers, about genuinely fictional science. They’re always incredibly readable and take the idea as far they possibly can. If you want a genuinely exciting read about lepton engineering - this is it.

[Richard Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

► Review: I struggled to complete Scale; not up to the standard I expected from reading Schild's Ladder and Permutation City.

The concept is cool, if ambitious to reconcile in the messy details. But I was continually frustrated that Egan gave so few descriptive details of the different perspectives of physics, in daily life experience for the smaller scales. He glossed over a very major plot detail and entirely ignored the issues of e.g. shared air. I think because it (and other things) were too implausible.

It's mostly written as a straight detective mystery, from 3 main character perspectives. Which plays to his weakness of flat characters. Then, as politics becomes a major theme, that feels naïve, as if seen from space. And the bits of action aren't very thrilling.

I'd have preferred to see more of his usual trick, of skipping ahead through time periods and settings. Thus exploring more of the technological changes, and timescale divergence, in this wild little civilisation. Perhaps he knew it couldn't hold together.

Overall, I think this concept could have worked as a cheeky short story. Padding it out with human intrigue didn't work for me. I didn't care about Cara.
I was hoping it would become a metaphor for the seemingly imminent advent of AGI, in real life. A cautionary tale for the likes of Eliezer Yudkowski to wield. But it was only a snapshot. And not all that artistically rendered. Didn't really accentuate (let alone lampoon) the timescale disparities. No whit.

I'd instead strongly recommend reading his earlier novels, mentioned above.


► Specific technical holes in world building & plot [SPOILERS]:

• He states a couple of times that district 7 (D7) is only one metre across. This doesn't tally with scale 7 humans being 64 times shorter: roughly equivalent to a Lego figure. That'd be a very small village, especially given how much more spread they need to be with their super-concentrated (full sized human) mass.

• The under-river base is supposed to be the same 1 metre size as the district (and also sub-divided into sections). Yet they fit a scale 1 lady into it..? Without harming her.

1m square is a viably cramped space for a person. But they would also need to transport her there. So the submarine's *cargo bay* .alone, would need to be about as big as the stated size of D7!?

• I don't know if his lepton explanation bears much relation to real atomic chemistry. It's been 2 decades since my failed physics degree and you can see the author's technical explanations here on his site. But it's clear that the scale-divided animal kingdom could not co-exist. Not in anything like the natural way of things we're used to. He mentions S4 people breaking their feet on S7 rats.

But this would be everywhere, all the time, disrupting, poisoning and tearing apart the different scale animals and insects as they interact. Let alone microbes, etc.

• He mentions the S7 water being far (far!) more dense than the (biologically inert) rock of the riverbed. Not knowing how much has seeped through to the Earth's mantle...

Even if we ignore flow to the lowest point of the ocean floor, there's no way there'd be any left on it. Like liquid mercury atop soap bubbles!

Worst still, how would it evaporate and stay suspended in the (ambiguous density) air? A water cycle would be needed, for life on land, before the developement of irrigation. We only hear of S1 rain, clearly because S7 rain would shead the larger, softer scales!

• Gravity is going to feel very slow and weak to S7 people. Pretty much irrelevant. But interia would be a bitch!

And forget sinking into sand (which must all be scale 1l, there's no way they'd get any purchase for horizontal movement. To accelerate a whole human mass 64 times faster, by pushing against a foot surface area 64x64 times less…

Even S1 granite would get shredded. So they would not be walking/running/driving around, conventionally, as described. Same and worst for all wildlife.

• I'd have been happier to go along with glossing over all the above, from another writer, with a more lively and amusing narrative. But I expected a little more technical detail from Egan, here. Given the mediocre plot, that seemed rather low stakes compared to the other books I've read, of his.

[Dániel Darabos · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was good! The setting is fantastic! There are smaller versions of atoms, and there are smaller humans and rabbits built from these. The smaller humans have the same number of atoms and the same weight as the big ones. They are just small. And fast. And sweat a lot. And hear/see higher frequencies.

This gives the setting a lovely sense of familiarity (gnomes!) and novelty (they can walk through steel walls!).

Perhaps to add a dose of normalcy, the technology and society is mundane. They make phone calls, hire private detectives, write to the council, and worry about road works. I think that's reasonable. But perhaps a few interesting technologies could have added a dose of cool! One pervasive setting-specific technology is rescalers. But they just make conversations between scales more mundane.

Same with the characters. They are all very sensible. You know how annoying it is when a character in a book does something silly that they could have avoided by thinking for a second? Well somehow the opposite can be annoying too.

The plot is okay. A bit too sensible, haha! Like, the big secret technology is discovered in a laboratory trial stage, far from any world domination-stage trials. (That's okay.) The plot structure is a bit haphazard. Of course we jump between the scales and that's cool. But it's basically a tiny glimpse of Scale 1, a good dose of Scale 4, and then 80% Scale 7. So unfair! I think I'll go protest against those shifty little gnomes!

I had one question throughout the book: Scale 1 is not the same as rootlife, right? It's already half that. So what happened to rootlife humans? I expected to find out the horrible truth at the end, but no. Looks like I will have to make up my own horrible theory!

[Vladimir Ivanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Иган в кои-то веки написал роман, для чтения которого не нужно перемножать в уме многомерные матрицы или ориентироваться во времяподобных пространствах.

Мне кажется, ему вообще сначала пришла в голову чисто фентезийная идея — а вот было бы клево придумать мир, где живут люди разных размеров, причем чем человек больше, тем он медленнее (т.е базовый человек около 2м ростом живет с нормальной скоростью, 50 см карлик ускорен х4, а 16-метровый великан наоборот замедлен в 8 раз относительно базового уровня).

Сразу возникает куча интересных вопросов — как они между собой взаимодействуют, как разговаривают, как у них все устроено в обществе. Как взаимодействуют службы, если, допустим, некое преступление затрагивает сразу несколько масштабов. Надо немедленно написать про все это книгу! Ну он и написал.

А потом Иган подумал — да не будь я Грег Иган, если не придумаю этой фентезийной ерунде идеально научное обоснование! И придумал. Так фэнтези волей автора превратилась в твердейшую НФ.

А что касается сюжета, то детективное начало с похищением «великанской» девушки бандой «лилипутов» очень интересное, но к середине интрига сдувается, уступая место бесконечным (и довольно заунывным, честно говоря) рассуждениям на тему «сотрудничество — хорошо, сепаратизм и изоляционизм — плохо». Тщательно описанная предвыборная агитация, голосования, референдумы, митинги, переговоры... все это немного не то, в чем Иган силен, и совсем уж не то, за что мы его любим.

7/10

---

P.S. По странному совпадению, за пару лет до Игана супруги Дяченко тоже написали роман про взаимоотношения технологически развитых лилипутов и простецких великанов, и тоже назвали его «Масштаб». Сильно подозреваю, что именно от них австралиец и позаимствовал идею.

[Zack · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's ironic that this book, with a setting closely approximating 20th century Western culture, is perhaps Egan's least plausible sci fi world building. While Egan naturally did his homework on the physics of tightly packed atoms, it's hard to swallow the notion that a single environment can host eight separate versions of all chemistry. Or provide enough energy to support a population living 64 times as fast with a body temperature hot enough to boil large scale matter without that same environment also cooking the lighter scale people. Or that there's exactly enough of each type of atmospheric gas sitting at exactly the right height so that each scale has enough to breathe without asphyxiating on a different scale's air.

That's not the main reason for the rating though. The real issue is that the plot is just not interesting enough to make up for the fact that the novelty of the world is exhausted in the first third of the book. Normally in Egan's work we would get a slow and steady exploration of new and interesting scenarios that can crop up in his unique worlds, but this work is pretty light on that front.

[pelican eats books · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first experience with Egan's work; I read the first 22 chapters and then the final chapter. I found that a sentence or two from the chapters in between was enough to get the gist of what was going on, namely, that Greggie was introducing us to his hard sci-fi concept through the lens of a detective novel slash political thriller. I found neither angle of this idea executed immersively enough to deliver a satisfying experience. I think the story would have benefited from less commitment to the bit- what I mean by that is that it suffers from the characters having to teach us about the setting of Scale itself while they're dealing with said world being turned on its head. Scale could be really strong if we had more interaction with the environment on its own terms and were allowed to draw conclusions about how the plot with Cara and G8 was unfolding on ours. Ultimately, I am glad I tried it and am looking forward to reading more by Greg Egan.

[Evan Þ. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This's Weird Science Egan - close to his best; and with a fast-paced story of political adventure amid the well-done weird science.

He explores well the implications of the world he sets up, where matter and animals and people come in different scales which live life at different speeds. Analogies to AI present themselves in my mind, but he never leans into them. The plot proceeds beautifully according to its own logic, as new scientific discoveries at the small scale urge the smaller-scale people to live their own faster lives and remake the world themselves without waiting for the larger-scale slower people...

... but must it be war? Or can they be better together? Can our protagonists fight injustice? And it must be the smaller scales that fight, for things move too quickly for the faster scales. It's a good story, in an exciting setting.

This's probably one of my favorite Egan novels

[Guilherme · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greg Egan's alternate cosmologies are pretty clever theoretical constructions, but this may be one of the few that's also a good speculative construction: Dichronauts was too confusing, and Book of All Skies was too sparse, but you read about an Earth where all matter, including living things and humans, comes in up to eight different size scales, and the mind immediately goes to work on how things would work when a Scale Seven person can be sixty-four times smaller, sixty-four times faster, and just as heavy as a Scale One person.

Unfortunately most of the latter half of the book focuses exclusively on Scale Seven and their efforts to create a floor they can stand on and not break with their weight (this is not sarcasm; this is an actual plot point). Otherwise, an excellent story.

[Simona · Rating 5 out of 5]

A typical Egan. The story telling is very clunky, characters are one-dimensional and not relatable, but the physics premise is original, fresh and very exciting. He created a world(8 different-sized atoms), assumed that there would be human biology in every scale(doubtful imo or at least non-sufficiently explained) and thought it through to the smallest detail. How would cities, food, rivers, telephones work, what would the competitive advantage of different scale humans be, what would politicians quibble about, how would transportation work. The intricacies of different scales are a crucial part of the story.

I really loved this.

[David Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greg Egan creates an incredibly imaginative world, populated by credible characters.

A woman vanishes and a private detective is tasked with finding her. If you think you know where you are with the story so far, you're completely wrong. The world they inhabit defies description and leads to complications that Raymond Chandler was not equipped to contend with.

My only gripe with this book is that it was too short. I hope Greg that goes on to develop this world further.

[Chris Aldridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another proper Hard SF masterpiece from Greg Egan. A missing person case is far more interesting when people exist at 7 different scales. The social and economic tensions rise when the technological advantages of being tiny start to be exploited, and these tiny short lived people realise they can't wait half their lifetimes for the slowest largest scales to convene a meeting to decide what to do about them.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

fine? like all Egan, it has a good scifi idea that's executed and explored to precision, but it just never sorta gelled into being that interesting a story to me. oh, and I guess even more than most of his other stories, you'll need to read the associated website since I don't think lepton shielding is explained in the book, and I never felt like I had a good sense of how different scale matter actually worked.

I suspect I'll never read it again, vs e.g. Quarantine that I probably read every couple of years, but it was a fine few hours.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's good! There's a "what if" premise based on alternative physics, as always, but it comes with good character arcs and plots.

At the expense of the realism of the alternative setting, but you can't have everything.

This allows Egan to flex. There are chapters that are very private-dick-noir-gumshoe. I mean this as a positive.

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very enjoyable Egan. I also read his Diachronauts this year, and that was a hard one.
But Scale is, well, light, especially considering Egan's usual fare. It's a murder mystery in a science fiction, so a long tradition, but, fortunately, Egan is Egan so the premise is excellent, and the mystery that much more interesting.

[Pete Windle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent Egan novel that takes some insane physics and projects a detective story onto the What-If. Much more accessible than some of his previous work - "what if there were 8 races of people each one 2x smaller and faster than the previous" is easy to get your head around!

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt this was one of Egan's more approachable books. The concept is relatively easy to picture, and in practice very interesting. I enjoyed the murder mystery aspect of it that morphed into something a bit more interesting. Very fun book!

[Ben James · Rating 1 out of 5]

This should probably be called 'Density' not 'Scale'.

Was hoping for a fun Borrowers- or George Shrinks-style adventure, but this was just dull politicking (with vote counting included!) from one group of people against another, with size barely a factor in the story.

[Tim L · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entertaining story based on very clever premise.

In classic Egan fashion he creates an internally consistent alternate physics in which to tell an interesting story. The idea of 7 different scales of matter, life, and people existing is fascinating.

[Andrew Brooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strangely for a Science fiction book and especially from an author know for Hard SF, this story is stronger on the humanities issues rather than the science side. In fact, you have to squint a good bit to keep the science side believable, but if you manage that it not a bad read

[Rigel Zifkin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A somewhat enjoyable read with an interesting concept, but the later half of the book falls flat and doesn't quite deliver the interesting development that I'm used to from Greg Egan.

[Chloé]

Le concept qui porte le livre m'a donné envie de le lire, mais l'histoire n'a pas réussi à me captiver.