The Clockwork Rocket: Orthogonal Book One

Paperback, 344 pages

Published by Night Shade.

ISBN:
978-1-59780-292-5
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3 stars (1 review)

6 editions

Review of 'Clockwork Rocket' on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

It's a Greg Egan novel -- which means that half of it is an extrapolation of theoretical physics in another universe. Which all the characters understand right off the bat, or even worse, understand implicitly. Half the fun of Egan is working out what underlying physics model is responsible for half the odd things you see in the beginning of the book, but once the protagonist becomes a physicist and starts laboriously explaining it, it becomes fairly obvious that you're reading an arXiv paper.

The physics of this one is tricky, as initially I had thought that it was set in our universe with their planet under extreme time-shifted velocity relative to the rest of the system. It is not. It is different from beginning to end, it just looks deceptively similar. See the video here for more details.

So what's the rest of the novel like? The protagonist is …