The Eternal Flame is a hard science-fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan and the second part of the Orthogonal trilogy.
[1][2][3] The novel describes the journey of the generation ship Peerless, which has departed in The Clockwork Rocket,[4][5][6] and the development of new technology as well as changes of the society on board.
[8][9][10] Three generations after the departure of the Peerless from the home world, the ever increasing population (which can't be controlled due to spontaneous reproduction) overstreches its limited capacities.
The long mission of research is continued in the meantime: Tamara, an astronomer, studies an object on a course close to the Peerless and plans to dispatch the spacecraft Gnat to it.
Previously it has been discovered through coloring, how their flesh can end up in different parts of their limbs during this process, giving rise to the question about how the ever changing communication with the brain works.
Carlo intends to measures those signals and swap them, potentially transferring the division into only two children artificially to their own species, solving the population crisis.
Their way of reproduction also poses a problem to Tamaro, the co of Tamara and therefore supposed to trigger hers, who doesn't want her to go on board the Gnat and hence risk the lives of their children.
Tamara, not wanting them to have the last word with violence, but knowing about the fatal consequences of Carlo's last experiment, agrees to have the arborine signal transmitted into a part of her body.
Message of the birth is made public and swings the vote around, making the new technology available for every female choosing it and hence solving the population crisis.
She does some sketches involving an atom with three different orbitals as well as the emission and absorption of photons, one of which is reflected by a moving mirror to change its frequency, and finally realizes to just have come up with a process to make the eternal flame possible.
Carlo tells Carla to be delighted to have saved her life with his new technology, but she refuses to immediately make use of it, as she rather wants to wait what the new day will bring.
Due to Greg Egan begin very popular in Japan, the novel was released by Hayakawa Publishing in Japanese as エターナル・フレイム (etānaru fureimu, direct transcription of the original English title into Katakana) in 2016.
[14] The consequences of the sign change in the metric on the laws of physics are explained in detail (with illustrations and calculations) on Greg Egan's website.
[20][21] Ordinary matter and antimatter colliding results in their total annihilation,[22][23] which happens in the novel and explained with the opposite arrows of time.
David Brin, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of Earth and Existence, claims that "Greg Egan is a master of 'what-if' science fiction".
His "characters work out the implications and outcomes as they struggle to survive and prevail" and he presents "the most original alien race since Vernor Vinge's Tines".
[25] Jerry Oltion, Nebula Award-winning author of Abandon in Place, claims that "when most people switch a minus sign for a plus, they re-do the math.
"[25] Karen Burnham, writing in Strange Horizons, says that "the physics is mind-blowing" and that "Egan develops almost all of the ideas in the story through dialogue.
Concerning the struggles with reproduction, she writes that "more than any Egan story to date, the books of the Orthogonal trilogy place science in a broader social context".
[26] In a review of the sequel The Arrows of Time, she adds that "in order to get there, we tour through a huge amount of speculative world building, physics, biology, and sociology.