紧随上周关于在科幻小说中使用 100% 真实科学（特别是狭义相对论）的 文章 之后，Night Shade Books 送给我一本 格雷格·伊根 最新出版的小说《白炽》。格雷格·伊根写的小说可以用硬太空歌剧来形容。太空歌剧部分来自于他的书设定在银河系大小的画布上，他的大部分主角都是极其先进文明的成员。“硬”部分指的是硬科幻小说——这类故事中遵循的物理定律和发现的自然天体都尽可能地接近科学准确。 《白炽》 follows two narrative threads: that of two bored citizens of the Amalgam, a conglomerate of civilizations that fill the Milky Way's outer disc, and two nascent scientists who live deep in the galaxy's inner bulge, an area that has been pretty much a no-go zone for the Amalgam for countless millennia. The nascent scientists, Zak and Roi, live in pre-industrial world (known as The Splinter) that is so bizarre that it's initially hard to see how such a place could exist within our universe. But their world is threatened with disaster, and (aided by some of the very features that make The Splinter so bizzare) Zak and Roi find themselves pushed to discover that scientific jewel in the crown, the 广义相对论。This is a tall order to pull off for a novel, both in terms of making it logically possible and in terms of creating a story that you will want to keep reading. Egan manages it though, and Incandescence sets a new bar for hard science fiction. Egan is uncompromising about the science, and in places the discussion of various experiments can be a little tough to follow, not least because Egan insists on using Zak and Roi's terms for the various directions that exist on The Splinter -- instead of things like left/right, inward/outward, or even +x/-x, there is garm/sard, rarb/sharq and shomal/junub. But if you really want to get your teeth into it, Egan has built an incredibly detailed accompanying web site that explains much of the science and mathematics (although as I noted last week, General Relavitivity, which incorporates the effects of things like gravity, is a much tougher beastie, conceptually and mathematically, than Special Relativity, which deals with the simpler case of uniform motion and is largely accessible with high-school math and physics). There are a few spoilers on Egan's site, so you may want to wait for at least few chapters in before turning to it, but it does contain an interactive simulation of the Null Chamber, a zero-gravity region of The Splinter. The simulation allows you to perform many of Zak and Roi's experiments and see the counter-intuitive results for yourself without having to troop all the way to the galactic bulge. If you're interested in thinking about just how weird the universe can be, and yet still be recognizable as something of a piece with our own experience, check out Incandescence.
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