The novel “Schild’s Ladder” by Greg Egan was published for the first time in 2002.
Cass made a long journey to the Mimosa star system, where there’s a station where she can verify the accuracy of the Quantum Graph Theory millennia after Sarumpaet developed it. However, when the experiments lead to the creation of the novo-vacuum, a bubble outside the universe that’s not the ordinary ordinary vacuum, it turns out to be much more stable than expected and starts expanding.
Six hundred years after Cass’s experiments, humanity is fleeing the expansion of the novo-vacuum, that is swallowing planet after planet. At the same time, many scientists are trying to understand the causes of this phenomenon but over time among humans have created two factions: the Preservationists who want to eliminate the novo-vacuum at all costs and the Yielders who want to find a way to interact with that separate reality.
In this novel set about twenty thousand years in the future, Greg Egan blends his typical scientific speculation with a description of how humanity might change over the next millennia. The title is a reference to a mathematical method introduced by Alfred Schild.
Greg Egan is one of the most popular hard science fiction writers and his stories have the reputation of being difficult to understand without an adequate scientific knowledge. In the case of “Schild’s Ladder” as well, certainly it’s helpful to have some knowledge of physics and mathematics but you don’t need to have a Ph.d. The author created a section of his website about the novel for the people wishing to deepen its scientific part.
Specifically, “Schild’s Ladder” starts from Cass’s attempt to prove after millennia the validity of Quantum Graph Theory and finally combine quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Against all reasonable expectations, the novo-vacuum created in the course of the experiments remains stable and starts expanding.
The novo-vacuum is a separate universe and it expands. The story of its creation is only a small part of the novel, the rest is set about six hundred years later. A group of scientists try to discover its secrets but among them disagreement on how to face the problem is growing.
At the beginning of Greg Egan’s career, the main criticism about this author concerned the lack of character development, as characters were essentially used to develop plots based on highly advanced scientific and technological advancements. Over the years he improved a lot from this point of view and “Schild’s Ladder” is also a story of humanity’s future.
In the novel, we see that over the next millennia, humans will expand into space, colonizing several planets. At the same time, they transformed themselves in various ways by embracing various forms of transhumanism. In many ways, however, at least those who haven’t chosen extreme forms of transhumanism have remained the same human as today.
Despite the setting in such a far future with science and technologies very advanced from today, for the reader it’s not difficult to understand the characters’ desires and motivations, which in many ways have remained the same. Many people are afraid of the novo-vacuum, which objectively is swallowing everything in its path during its expansion, and want to destroy it at all costs. They are the Preservationists, who oppose the Yielders, who would like to find a way to interact with it because they consider it too extraordinary to just destroy it.
The two sides are working together to study the novo-vacuum but the agreements between them are fragile. In this situation, Greg Egan develops especially the characters of Tchicaya and Mariama with their complicated relationship that has been going on for a long time. The way they interact shows both the similarities and the differences of these humans of the future with today’s ones.
Personally, I like hard science fiction and in “Schild’s Ladder” I especially enjoyed the part of the novel concerning the study of novo-vacuum. In general, it seemed to me a really good novel, developed with a rather fast pace. For its themes, I think it’s a must-have for hard science fiction fans.
