The Clockwork Rocket (Orthogonal Book 1)

I finally found it, a hard scifi book that was too hard scifi for me. I like Egan's shtick and have enjoyed many of his books, even when they focussed mostly on the implications of some fictional physics instead of characters and plot and stuff.

But the Orthogonal universe was too much for me. I tried really hard to follow the alternate physics the first twenty or so pages. But it just never really made sense to me; either I'm too dumb, it's badly explained, or it's just not consistent enough to be coherent. And there's a lot of that physics presentation throughout the whole book, I ended up just skimming most of it. Ironically it all made a lot more sense when I finished the book and found the appendix that explained some of the basics without all the fictional narrative context. Perhaps if I'd read that first I'd like it better.

I was left feeling like this book was trying to be Flatland and falling short.

Surprisingly the part of the book I liked best was the plot and character. And particularly the setup of gender and reproduction. The fate of women in this story is really poignant and fascinating and the author addressed it well. Even used it effectively as motivation for various plot points throughout the book. That's not usually this author's strength. I was left being kind of curious what would happen to the society in subsequent books but I didn't like this one enough to want to read the rest.