Okay. Full disclosure. I'm more thrilled about the actual math and the scientific discoveries inside this novel based in a universe where light doesn't have a speed-limit than any of the actual writing.

Storytelling? Huh? What's that? Oh, yeah, there were a lot of good parts about feminism in alien biologies that seems rather on point. You know, fissioning your female into four kids but losing your mind and identity, having your male take care of the kids. Always fatal. I did like those sequences where the scientists try to solve it and buck the male-run system by postponing the fission and/or trying to, you know, STAY ALIVE. That took up a lot of the story and it was super easy to follow.

The OTHER part of the novel is what I'm raving about even though I have no idea what the hell went on. Like, almost at all. I mean, page after page after page of wavelength, free radicals in troughs, photons bouncing, near-limitless energy propagation, even about how time expands, reverses the effect we know, turning a little trip on its head from what we know. Generations pass in a ship but only a few years pass on the home planet? ODD! :)

But this will be interesting when these science-types all get back home.

So weird. So much jibber-jabber about high-science, diagrams, fully-fleshed out cosmology and physics and light-propagation. Based on REAL MATH, people. It's completely freaking incomprehensible to read, and yet it's thrown into a novel, fait-accompli, for us to ooh and ahhh over.

And I do. Ooh and ahhh. :) This is the highest rating I'll ever give to an incomprehensible novel. :) Full props for the ideas, but damn about the writing. :)

( )

A bit overcomplicated at time with the mathematics ( )

Because this sequel is such a direct continuation of events from Book 1 in the series, I recommend reading it quickly after that novel, so that you don't suffer the same confusion I did on returning to the series after many months. Like most of Egan's work, this story is a tribute to the process of scientific discovery, using a few characters and a plot, although only by necessity. Seriously, if you removed all the mathematical and laboratory discussions, you'd only have about 30 pages or so of narrative. Nonetheless, it has interesting ideas and a fairly strong feminist theme, as did "Clockwork Rocket". ( )

Good story and interesting characters, but the maths makes it difficult going. ( )

This novel, the second of three, is set in a generation starship, the ‘Peerless’, which is a hollowed-out mountain. It holds fields and dwellings and has an alien crew from a planet that is in an alien universe, where the laws of science are different. The aliens themselves are very ‘alien’ - six limbed shape shifters, with eyes front and back. They can 'write' characters on their skin. They reproduce by the mother being divided into four - two twin pairs, called ‘co’s, each usually forming a new reproducing couple, though there are the occasional 'solos', women that avoid their twin and take ‘hollin’, a drug that suppresses the splitting process. Men look after the children. In the first novel their civilisation is discovered to be under threat by bombardment from meteors and a famous scientist, Yalda (who was also a solo) made a succession of conceptual breakthroughs which lead to an audacious plan to send out a ‘rocket’ (the ‘Peerless’) to travel back in time (possible according to the ‘alternate physics in their universe) and avert the destruction of their civilisation.

As this book opens, limited resources have forced measures to limit population. The pressure is also on to make advances in science which will enable them to finish their mission and return home. Carla and Carlo are cos. Carla is a physicist who is pushing the boundaries of their understanding of the nature of light and matter and is involved in a ‘test flight’ of essentially a bag of air, to investigate “The Object”, an asteroid which will pass near the “Peerless”. Her co is a biologist who has been experimenting on his own body, trying to find ways of modifying the reproductive process to make it more ‘survivable’ and is working on a bigger experiment to investigate the possibility of ‘individual’ births. These projects could bring big changes to life aboard the Peerless, but this means that both of them come up against opposition from fellow travellers, ranging from scepticism and a lack of support to anger and violence to stop them.

Now, reading the above may make this novel sound like total pulp sci-fi. It is not. The ‘science’ may not be ours but is it is rigorously worked out. Diagrams are provided alongside the text. The reader does not need to understand these, but they give an aura of respectability. Also, strangely for such a dry, 'theoretical' novel, the plight of these aliens is touching and affecting. And this is another surprise from such an apparently dry novel, in that it manages to engage the reader on an emotional level, as well as an intellectual one. ( )