Incandescence

I am very much a fan of Greg Egan's hard scifi. Here he presents us with two stages in the development of society and intelligence. One world that has reached, discovered and understood all there is, and struggles with finding balance and reason to live their eternal lifes. And one that is just in the process of awakening and developing a thirst for knowledge (or so it seems).

The story of the inhabitants of the splinter feels like a visit to a more substantial version of Abbott's Flatland. Even though not 2-dimensional, there are parallels in how the reader is transported into a world that is not understood. Egan let's the reader discover the world together with the protagonists by using for example foreign words to describe their geometry that only slowly start to make sense.

And even though Egan tackles some difficult physics when he lets his heroes discover orbital motion, gravity and the space-time continuum, the user is not necessarily required to follow it all. Because the main message of the book is not the physics, but the pretty universal dilemma that too much knowledge doesn't make you happy.