51uptd6ZJaL. SL160 Incandescence by Greg Egan ReviewIncandescence by Greg Egan

In Incandescence, Greg Egan appears to channel the spirit of Hal Clement. Readers may remember Clement fondly as one of the hardest of all hard sf writers. His stories consisted mostly of interesting science problems with a plot tacked on: What if there were a world with gravity roughly 200 times that of Earth? What would it look like? What would life there be like? (Mission of Gravity, 1954). Now Egan writes a very similar story. An alien society exists inside an asteroid-like object they call the Splinter. Outside is a realm of deadly brightness they call the Incandescence. Their existence is under threat, and it is only by investigating and describing the gravitational situation they are living in that they will be able to save themselves. Thus we get to watch a pre-industrial society, with no computers, bootstrap their scientific knowledge from Galileo through Newton all the way to the General Theory of Relativity. It’s three hundred years of science, compressed into half of a fairly short book, minus biology, chemistry and electromagnetism. If you find nothing amazing about a society being able to deduce the upper bound on physical speed (speed of light) without ever measuring the speed at which light travels, this may not be the book for you. It is certainly a book for me, though.

SF Signal: REVIEW: Incandescence by Greg Egan.