Greg Egan on Incandescence

John Joseph Adams | August 25th 2008 at 3:52 am

Tell us a bit about Incandescence. What’s it about?

A million years from now, the galaxy is divided between the vast, cooperative meta-civilisation known as the Amalgam, and the silent occupiers of the galactic core known as the Aloof. The Aloof have long rejected all attempts by the Amalgam to enter their territory, but have permitted travellers to take a perilous ride as unencrypted data in their communications network, providing a short-cut across the galaxy’s central bulge. When Rakesh encounters a traveller, Lahl, who claims she was woken by the Aloof on such a journey and shown a meteor full of traces of DNA, he accepts her challenge to try to find the uncharted world deep in the Aloof’s territory from which the meteor originated.

Who are the main characters?

One of the protagonists, Rakesh, is a distant descendant of humans. He’s lived for a thousand years in his home system, but now he’s decided to become a traveller.  His problem is that he can’t decide where he wants to go; because the emotional cost of being separated from your family and community for thousands of years is so high, it seems too frivolous simply to go sight-seeing, so he’s spent the last century hanging around at a node in the interstellar transport network waiting to hear about a truly worthwhile destination.

The other protagonist, Roi, is an alien living inside a world called the Splinter.  Her culture knows very little about its own history, and she is initially content to spend her time in a communal work team tending the food crops.  But then she meets a male called Zak who is trying to understand why things have different weights in different parts of the Splinter, and her curiosity begins to grow.

What’s the genesis of the novel–what was the inspiration for it, or what prompted you to write it?

I was interested in writing about an alien culture that arrived at the laws of physics by a very different route than the one we took. In our culture, our understanding of gravity was completely dependent on astronomical observations, particularly the motion of the moon and the planets. I thought it would make an interesting challenge to write about a culture that had no easy way to make those kinds of observations, and so had to work things out another way.

Most authors say all their stories are personal.  If that’s true for you, in what way was this book personal to you?

The only sense in which it was personal is that I’m just as fascinated by general relativity as Zak and Roi, and I’m always looking for new ways to think about what it means.

What kind of research did you have to do for the novel?

I spent about six months in all studying the equations in general relativity that describe the exotic situation that the Splinter is in.  Then the real challenge was finding ways in which a culture with technology no more sophisticated than humans possessed in the Middle Ages could come to understand what we think of as one of the pinnacles of modern science.  It turns out that general relativity really does have some very simple and accessible ideas at its core, and — at least in an environment like the Splinter — you really can unravel its secrets with very primitive technology.

What are you working on now?

My next book is a comedy about the geopolitics of virtual reality, set in the very near future.

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For more information about Greg Egan and to read excerpts of Incandescence, visit our Greg Egan mini-site.

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