Schild's ladder - Greg Egan

The new novel from one of the world's most respected and acclaimed writers marks a dramatic move into a new arena - that of the wide-screen SF epic a la Baxter, Banks, Hamilton and Macleod.

Cass has stumbled on something that might be an entirely different type of physics and she's travelled three hundred and fifty light-years to Mimosa Station, a remote experimental facility, to test her theory. The novo-vacuum she creates is predicted to begin decaying the instant it's created, but even so shortt-lived a microscopic speck could shed new light on the origins of the universe.

But instead of decaying, Cass's novo-vacuum is wildly successful and begins expanding, slowly but inexorably taking over the universe . . .