"Scale" by Greg Egan - review and critique

► Review: I struggled to complete Scale; not up to the standard I expected from reading Schild's Ladder and Permutation City.

The concept is cool, if ambitious to reconcile in the messy details. But I was continually frustrated that Egan gave so few descriptive details of the different perspectives of physics, in daily life experience for the smaller scales. He glossed over a very major plot detail and entirely ignored the issues of eg shared air. I think because it (and other things) were too implausible.

Scale on Greg Egan's website.

It's mostly written as a straight detective mystery, from 3 main character perspectives. Which plays to his weakness of flat characters. Then, as politics becomes a major theme, that feels naïve, as if seen from space. And the bits of action aren't very thrilling.

I'd have preferred to see more of his usual trick, of skipping ahead through time periods and settings. Thus exploring more of the technological changes, and timescale divergence, in this wild little civilisation. Perhaps he knew it couldn't hold together.

Overall, I think this concept could have worked as a cheeky short story. Padding it out with human intrigue didn't work for me. I didn't care about Cara.

I was hoping it would become a metaphor for the seemingly imminent advent of AGI, in real life. A cautionary tale for the likes of Eliezer Yudkowski to wield. But it was only a snapshot. And not all that artistically rendered. Didn't really accentuate (let alone lampoon) the timescale disparities. No whit.

I'd instead strongly recommend reading his earlier novels, mentioned above.

► Specific technical holes in world building & plot (SPOILERS):

[Edit: please see the comments on my Reddit post version of this discussion for corrections to some of the goofs I made, from bad memory and judgement!] 

• He states a couple of times that district 7 (D7) is only one metre across [about ~150m]. This doesn't tally with scale 7 humans being 64 times shorter: roughly equivalent to a Lego figure. That'd be a very small village, especially given how much more spread they need to be with their super-concentrated (full sized human) mass.

• The under-river base is supposed to be the same 1 metre size as the district (and also sub-divided into sections). Yet they fit a scale 1 lady into it..? Without harming her. 

1m square is a viably cramped space for a person. But they would also need to transport her there. So the submarine's *cargo bay* ,alone, would need to be about as big as the stated size of D7!?

• I don't know if his lepton explanation bears much relation to real atomic chemistry. It's been 2 decades since my failed physics degree and you can see the author's technical explanations here on his site. But it's clear that the scale-divided animal kingdom could not co-exist. Not in anything like the natural way of things we're used to. He mentions S4 people breaking their feet on S7 rats.

But this would be everywhere, all the time, disrupting, poisoning and tearing apart the different scale animals and insects as they interact. Let alone microbes, etc.

• He mentions the S7 water being far (far!) more dense than the (biologically inert) rock of the riverbed. Not knowing how much has seeped through to the Earth's mantle... 

Even if we ignore flow to the lowest point of the ocean floor, there's no way there'd be any left on it. Like liquid mercury atop soap bubbles! 

Worst still, how would it evaporate and stay suspended in the (ambiguous density) air? A water cycle would be needed, for life on land, before the development of irrigation. We only hear of S1 rain, clearly because S7 rain would shed the larger, softer scales!

• Gravity is going to feel very slow [or maybe the size scaling compensates the time scaling?] and weak to S7 people. Pretty much irrelevant. But interia would be a bitch!

And forget sinking into sand (which must all be scale 1l, there's no way they'd get any purchase for horizontal movement. To accelerate a whole human mass 64 times faster, by pushing against a foot surface area 64x64 times less…

Even S1 granite would get shredded. So they would not be walking/running/driving around, conventionally, as described. Same and worst for all wildlife.

• I'd have been happier to go along with glossing over all the above, from another writer, with a more lively and amusing narrative. But I expected a little more technical detail from Egan, here. Given the mediocre plot, that seemed rather low stakes compared to the other books I've read, of his.