The polis of Cartan has been in orbit around the black hole Chandrasekhar for almost 3 centuries. Now, a group of polis citizens are preparing to encode clones of themselves into a form that will be able to travel inside the hole and explore the nature of space time at the Planck scale, 10^-35 meters.

i have to read some of the works of greg egan after i finish flatland a romance of many dimensions.

2022-02-08: Speaking of Flatland, Planiverse sounds interesting as well:

I recently praised Planiverse as peak hard science fiction. But as I hadn’t read it in decades, I thought maybe I should reread it to see if it really lived up to my high praise.

The basic idea is that a computer prof and his students in our universe create a simulated 2D universe, which then somehow becomes a way to view and talk to 1 particular person in a real 2D universe. This person is contacted just as they begin a mystical quest across their planet’s one continent, which lets the reader see many aspects of life there. Note there isn’t a page-turning plot nor interesting character development; the story is mainly an excuse to describe its world.

The book seems crazy wrong on how its mystical quest ends, and on its assumed connection to a computer simulation in our universe. But I presume that the author would admit to those errors as the cost of telling his story. However, the book does very well on physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and low level engineering. That is, on noticing how such things change as one moves from our 3D world to this 2D world, including via many fascinating diagrams. In fact this book does far better than most “hard” science fiction. Which isn’t so surprising as it is the result of a long collaboration between 10s of scientists. But alas no social scientists seem to have been included, as the book seem laughably wrong there. Let me explain.