Schild’s Ladder by Greg Egan, Gollancz, £10.99 and £16.99, ISBN
0575071230 and 0575070684
ONE favourite science fiction nightmare is ice-nine, from Kurt Vonnegut’s
Cat’s Cradle. This allotrope of ice had a high melting point and spread
virus-like through oceans, locking up all Earth’s water. Similarly, in
Schild’s Ladder, a fatal experiment in quantum gravity creates a new,
contagious geometry for the vacuum itself. Some physicists once feared that
high-energy colliders could do just this.
Expanding in all directions at half lightspeed, gobbling inhabited systems as
it grows, the “novo-vacuum” contains a physics with incomprehensibly different
laws. Future starships can outrun…
