Greg Egan is still my favorite science-fiction writer and I’m glad to see that he is still producing work. Even so his more recent work has been disappointing and this one with a length somewhere between a novella and a novel, is so underwhelming that I find it impossible to recommend to anyone. It’s still a quintessentially Egan story in that longtime fans will immediately recognize what it is in here that interests him but it’s such a narrow conceit that it’s hard to imagine many people would be similarly enthusiastic and Egan fails to develop an interesting story around it.

Del is a conservator who works in a museum and she is excited to receive a complete manuscript of the Book of All Skies. This book chronicles the history of the ancient Tollean civilization. At on that very night, the book is stolen from the museum despite the security precautions Del and her colleagues have taken. Del and her people live in a world that is composed of many different lands, connected to each other by a pair of huge hoops and extend into the ground and up into the sky. The hoops act like portals transporting them to distant lands, apparently so far apart that even the stars in the sky are different, hence the title, and the hoops are present in every land. This doesn’t go on forever: at one extreme end, the hoop terminates in the solid rock of a mountain range and on the other into empty space. The Tolleans however supposed found a way to cross the mountains into a completely different set of lands and Del was eager to study the book to learn the route. Later after losing the book however Del is contacted by a man who is forming an expedition to travel to these unknown lands in the opposite direction: crossing the empty space at the nub.

Portals connecting spaces are something that everyone would be familiar with but likely few other media would have explored the concept of permanent portals and how their presence warps physics and the wider world around them. Egan’s primary interest here seems to be in working out the topology of what he calls this multiply connected space and how gravity in particular is affected by the hoops. As usual I don’t have the mathematical competence to follow along completely, but he has a full explanation on his personal website and I trust that it’s correct. This is fascinating of course, in particular in how it uses electrostatics to stand in for gravity and how gravity changes while they are actually crossing between the lands, but that’s not enough to sustain interest in a full story, even for me. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Del does eventually make it to what the Tolleans call the Bounteous Lands and it turns into a kind of first contact story. This part is alright but it’s also painfully clear that it isn’t Egan’s passion and so he tells it in a very matter of fact, straightforward way. Finally the book just stops and ends in a very abrupt way with no resolution at all.

There are a few ways that Egan might have made the book more interesting. He could have delved deeper into the conspiracy on Del’s side that is intent on blocking access to the other side and that would have meant going into how the government works. He could have elaborated on how the seemingly communist economy on the other works. But there’s no detail except that it works and probably would fail if they didn’t have access to practically infinite free energy. He only shows enough to move the plot forward and confirm his leftist politics without going any deeper. The contrast between how much detail he goes into the physics and mathematics compared to the economics and politics of his worlds is stark to say the least. I also think it’s intellectually lazy. If this isn’t his area of interest then why bring it up at all as a plot point? The story is even light on the biological details of what species Del and her people actually are or the ecological implications of the lands being separated in this way. They seem human but have been bioengineered to possess abilities such as seeing heat. It would have been neat to find out how else they might be different.

This book is being sold at a rather cheap price which somewhat offsets some of these complaints. Even so this probably isn’t worth your time and arguably Egan’s own essay on the physics of the hoops captures most of the value of what he created here. I’m sad to say that this is a rather bad book and judging from what I can see his latest Scale is similarly lackluster. I suppose I just have to accept that the time when I would buy anything he would care to write is over.