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Greg Egan's Dichronauts
17 Sep 2017 12:24I, um, did another book-inhale yesterday. Dichronauts, in true Greg Egan fashion, requires some background reading from the author's site to figure out WTF is going on. Mostly because I was a bit confused by the coordinate system. (The Sun rises and sets; the migration happens because the axis of rotation is tilting, not because of the Sun's movement.)
The main characters, Seth and Theo, are in a symbiotic relationship, where Seth (a Walker) sees along the East-West direction and can move, and Theo (a Sidler) echolocates along the North-South direction and subsists off Seth's bloodstream. They share inputs, and have a sort of telepathic communication. Everyone in their society is a symbiont pair. The reason for this arrangement is that instead of three space and one time dimension, there are two space and two time directions. They live on the surface of a hyperbola hourglass thing, and the axial dimension is time-like, so light can't go there – but sound can. The plot is basically an excuse to explore this world and all its weird geometries, but the world is interesting and the exploration well-executed, so I don't mind. Egan also goes into some of the societal tensions of Walker-Sidler relations, and based on the noms spreadsheet, someone seems to want fic of that for Yuletide.
The main characters, Seth and Theo, are in a symbiotic relationship, where Seth (a Walker) sees along the East-West direction and can move, and Theo (a Sidler) echolocates along the North-South direction and subsists off Seth's bloodstream. They share inputs, and have a sort of telepathic communication. Everyone in their society is a symbiont pair. The reason for this arrangement is that instead of three space and one time dimension, there are two space and two time directions. They live on the surface of a hyperbola hourglass thing, and the axial dimension is time-like, so light can't go there – but sound can. The plot is basically an excuse to explore this world and all its weird geometries, but the world is interesting and the exploration well-executed, so I don't mind. Egan also goes into some of the societal tensions of Walker-Sidler relations, and based on the noms spreadsheet, someone seems to want fic of that for Yuletide.