Incandescence

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While the blurb isn't wrong, it does undersell one crucial thing about Incandescence: the nature of Roi and Zak's deciphering of subtle clues. The book alternates every other chapter between Rakesh point of view, and the Splinter's. Each viewpoint takes up about 50% of page time, so nearly half of the book deals with the deciphering.

This deciphering half embodies the novel's main idea: on Scalzi's blog Egan wrote that the book "grew out of the notion that the theory of general relativity -- widely regarded as one of the pinnacles of human intellectual achievement -- could be discovered by a pre-industrial civilization with no steam engines, no electric lights, no radio transmitters, and absolutely no tradition of astronomy."

Big parts of Roi and Zak's chapters are descriptions of and dialogue about physics experiments concerning gravity, motion and orbits, and your mileage may vary. That is to say: at times it was a bit too dry, long-winded and detailed for my tastes. Not that I don't like science or non-fiction (on the contrary), but the subject matter and the way it was presented wasn't fully for me. This is not to say I didn't like the book, but it did alter my reading experience, and ultimately knocked off a star or 2 should I have to rate that part of the reading experience - mind you, not the book per se. More on that later.

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Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It...