Status Updates From Schild's Ladder

Currently the character is reminiscing about their childhood by breaking out of a planetary slowdown.

Okay, so halfway through the book, they find out that the vacuum bubble expanding at the speed of light threatening to devour the galaxy,is ....alive with sub-particulate...life.🤯

I have this marked as read, both here and in my offline database, but I don't remember a thing about it, and my actual copy doesn't seem to have been read at all (down to the 20 year old exchange token still in it). Anyway: it starts boring, with 30 pages of physics lecture. Let's see if it gets more interesting.

Good so far

I heard this was the hardest Hard SciFi

I completely lost my place in this, complicated by reading it on two different kindles as well as audible, and then possibly have a dream about how the plot evolved, because I simply can’t find the parts of the book I feel I last read (and also really enjoyed)...

This is pretty good, but I'm a bit weary of the by-now-thoroughly-hackneyed sci-fi trope of "Human future means we get 'beyond' religion and abandon it as a relic of the past!" Atheism is itself a religion -- i say that as a professor of religious studies who has had to include a unit on Atheism in his "World Religions" lectures at four different colleges. Read some Durkheim, buddy. Religion is infinitely variable.

Picking up, plot solidifying

A bit confusing, but interested to see how the story will play out. Starting to pick up

Absolutely mind-blowing.

Existential representations and meditations on continuity and preservation of identity over millennia and the nature of human souls.

Lots of hand waving quantum physics.

Still really cool, almost 20 years later.

Updating this based on my bookmark despite not having made progress in an eternity. At this point, I barely remember what's been going on... but I think that's in part because oh my god so little is actually going on aside from the big screw-up in the beginning.

Life had still arisen here, thirty orders of magnitude up the length scale, as heroic and miraculous as some hardy plant on a frozen mountain peak, but all the while, infinitely richer possibilities had been buzzing through the superposition that the dead vacuum concealed.

Oof. Book’s good, but... so much quantum physics, and I can’t tell if any of it is grounded in reality or it’s all “ionic defibulizer” this and “spacetime conspaculator” that. Trippy as all hell, but the kinda trip that makes you feel kinda dumb. But on the bright side, you’ve got fractal universes iteratively unfurling within a vacuum, subsuming our own reality, so there’s that.

Why can't characters have simple to pronounce names? It's an onslaught of unfamiliar words and names that meld into utter chaos. 'Acoporeal' what is that? The author doesn't lend any explanation or assistance. He just tosses in words and expects you to work it out? This book is bloody awful.

Hard to pronounce or understand names. Lots of new phrases that I don't understand. Poor descriptions and a dry sense of writing. It's only just starting to make sense.

Hard to pronounce or understand names. Lots of new phrases that I don't understand. Poor descriptions and a dry sense of writing. It's only just starting to make sense.

This book is hugely hard to follow. It lends nothing to enable you to picture anything. I'm super lost. I vaguely grasp what is happening. Perhaps this is a book for people who have studied and practice physics.

Oh baby, autorul tocmai a turnat o lingura mare de smantana delicioasa pe sarmaua asta de carte.

I think it's accurate that scientific discoveries are more often than not accompanied by "Eureka!" but rather by "Huh, that's weird."

Something fresh for the vacation.

You know you're in for some hard sci-fi when the author resorts to diagrams for exposition.

I like a fiction book that talks knowingly and effortlessly about loop quantum gravity in the first dozen pages.

the author has created a new theory of quantum mechanics, in this theory, in quantum level every particle is represented using a graph. it sometimes become difficult for me to follow the technical details, but like i said: it's a good hard science fiction, an exercise for the mind!

علمی‌تخیلی سختِ سخت. از اون‌ها که قشنگ ذهنت باید ورزش کنه.

Reading this one on my new Kindle! ^_^ And it is absolutely fascinating. I've never read anything like it. It is like quantum physics science book come to life through a story. So bizarre and otherworldly. Quite enthralled so far...

The hardest of Hard SciFi, Schild's Ladder explores a far distant human culture based on mathematics and physics, dealing with an impending, universe engulfing disaster the only they now how. Dense with passages about quantum physics and math, this is a book that is definitely not for everyone. But if you like his style, and I do, it has a lot to offer and might be the definitive book of Egan's oeuvre.

در آغاز گراف بود...
شروعش خیلی عالی بود، کتاب علمی‌تخیلی سخت سخت سخته! بعد ا ز یک سال نغمه‌ی آتش و یخ خوندن تمرین سختیه! ولی خب به نظر می‌آد داستان لذت‌بخشی باشه.

Complesso, molto, ma scientificamente impressionante.

me había olvidado que con greg egan tenés que tener la cabeza abierta porque te ataca por los costados.