Alexandra Pierce Reviews Scale by Greg Egan

Scale, Greg Egan (Self-published 978-1-92224-044-6, $23.00, 272pp, hc) January 2023.

I’m not afraid to admit that I felt trepidation before embarking on this novel. A world where the most significant difference between people isn’t color or creed, but instead their scale – that is, their relative heights – and that comes with a website explaining how the science of that scaling works? The very idea – people on seven different scales, where Scale Seven is 1:64 of Scale One – seemed entirely likely to break my brain. But… it’s a new Greg Egan book, the first since 2021’s The Book of All Skies. I figured that if I managed – indeed, thoroughly enjoyed – his Or­thogonal Universe trilogy, complete with vector diagrams as part of the story, then I was prepared to give this new wild, likely-to-be-immaculately-thought-out, proposition a go.

The thing I love about Egan’s work is that neither the scientific ideas nor the narrative are there to carry the other. The idea that humans could exist at seven different scales isn’t present to make a detective story more complicated, nor does the detective story (which turns into a serious politi­cal situation) exist simply to enable wild, what-if fantasies. Instead, they work together to make this a genuinely thought-provoking story on both a political and a scientific level.

It should be noted that Egan’s concepts here aren’t always easy to wrap your head around. Early on I struggled to remember which scale meant larger humans: our first introduction to the differences between scales is when people of different scales have to modulate frequencies to understand one another. I am no audio engineer, so it wasn’t intuitive for me. Eventually I was able to keep straight in my head that Scale 1 was the largest – and like navigating between different cultures in a fantasy novel, once you learn their characteristics it became straightforward.

The novel opens with a private detective taking a case: locate a missing businesswoman. The de­tective, Sam, is Scale 4, while the missing woman, Cara, is Scale 1. Cara has been doing business with Scale 4 exporters – electronics mostly – and she was in the Scale 4 area when she disappeared. The case rapidly evolves as Sam discovers that folks in Scale 7 have been developing new technology and that Cara may have stumbled on to information that someone desperately wanted to keep secret. Around and contributing to this fraught techno­logical situation is a political one, around how the scales interact with one another.

Early on, Sam tells his son a myth about how the scales came to be: that once upon a time, some people in a village had children who were born half the size of others, who then learned faster than the other ‘normal’ children, and who aged faster as well. Scaled-down animals and vegetation were already known, and so everyone managed to live harmoniously. (It’s unclear when the other scales came along.) These days, at least in Sam’s country, the scales share cities but have their own districts, with appropriately-sized buildings and so on. Disputed urban land is divided according to scale, but there are still disputes about how to scale agricultural land, and indeed further problems are arising as industrial processes don’t scale as easily as living space. There’s a fair bit of maths and physics around this issue, but the upshot is that some smaller-scale folk – who live faster, from the perspective of the larger scales – are discontent with their lot. They are particularly discontented with having to live under strictures imposed by the larger folk, which aren’t necessarily appropriate to Scale 7 ways of living. For example, despite being smaller in height, their mass is the same, which has many consequences: road surfaces that are appropriate for all scales being just one. The technological advances that Cara stumbled on may have explosive consequences for how the different groups can live together.

Egan neatly illustrates the differences between the scales, in particular through Sam’s interactions with both Cara’s sister, at Scale 1, and another private detective he asks for help, at Scale 7. They live at different speeds, so the sister asking for a meeting in two hours is onerous: it may be her af­ternoon, but Sam would usually be asleep by then. At the other end, when Sam is speaking to Scale-7 Jake, Jake has to decide whether to cook dinner around the conversation – since he’ll have the time to do so. Other differences are shown through incidental moments – like a three-month-old boy who is old enough to make stupid decisions, but not old enough to be in a militia. Or that for Scale 7, an entire day on a train is a long journey, the experience likened to being a prisoner.

The reader does need to do some work to be able to follow the intricacies of the situation here; thinking at different scales is unlikely to come naturally. But Scale is rewarding, intriguing, and ultimately highly enjoyable, and while maybe I wouldn’t suggest as your entry to Greg Egan’s work, it’s a marvellous example of how seemingly bizarre ideas can be turned into an excellent novel.

This review and more like it in the March 2023 issue of Locus.

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