eBook
Published Dec. 31, 2022
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.
Not my favourite Greg Egan book, I found it hard to get involved at first, but as ingenious and bizarre as ever.
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 …
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.
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 …
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!
