Distress

If there were just one book here, it would be easier to review.There is the book about life in 2055, in a world completely transformed by biotech. This book deserves more than 5 stars. I wish I was going to be around to see how much Egan got right.There is the book about how an actual working anarchy might behave and come to be. This is fascinating, and far different from the usual rightish libertarianism to be found in political SF. Four stars for this part.And then there's the scientific book. You have to seriously suspend disbelief here, to take the threat to the universe seriously. But if you can do that (and I could), it's an extremely exciting and well put-together plot. Two or three stars for science fiction, or six for fantasy.It's a mind-bender.Some of the reviews here seem to think it's anti-religious. I don't read it that way. In fact, the ending seems suffused with an eloquent and most unusual mysticism. Whatever this is, it's not so simple as a cold, mechanistic, purposeless universe. As Violet says in the book, the Theory of Everything is what lets us touch.Give it a chance. It's worth the trouble.

Distress is not only the best of Egan's novels that I've yet read, but one of the most inventive and accomplished sf novels I've read in many years. Andrew Worth is a science journalist in a world populated with ignorance cultists, voluntary autists, and gender migrants. Having finished the 'frankenscience' series Junk DNA, he turns down an offer to tape a show on the newly endemic Acute Clinical Anxiety Syndrome (a.k.a Distress), to compile a profile of quantum physicist Violet Mosala, currently at work on a Theory of Everything, or TOE. Worth leaves Sydney and his marriage (both in ruins), and travels to Stateless, a utopian anarchy on an island constructed with pirated biotech. Plots against both Mosala and Stateless escalate as the novel heads towards an astonishing climax. While Egan is best known for his ideas - and there are more ideas in the first chapter of this book than in many sf novels - his characterization in this book is excellent: Worth is a well-rounded character with his own opinions and motivation, Mosala is a welcome example of a fictional sane scientist, and the asex Akili Kuwale is a masterpiece of sf characterization.

From the opening "revival" scene that I had to read three times to the final page, Distress was a great read. I really enjoyed his play with gender--ve and ver, for example, were intriguing. The Theory of Everything was scientific enough to be credible, but written such that even a non-science reader could appreciate it. And the concept of "Stateless" was great. This is science fiction as it is meant to be: plausible, but pushing the envelope.

Distress finds Mr. Egan writing at the top of his form. I found the novel to be chock-full of startling ideas. It seemed that every time I turned the page I confronted another moral or ethical dillemma, each more delicious than the last to ponder and consider. Egan makes some bold predictions for the future. I was fascinated to note that he never brought up some new type of technology or sociology without fully considering and exploring its implications. For instance, Egan suggests that in the not-too-distant future, genetically engineered crops will be produced that are far more efficient and productive than those of today. That alone isn't a particularly daring or evocative prediction--people have been saying that for years. But Egan doesn't leave it there. He considers where the funding for such ventures will come in the future, and comes to the conclusion that it must come from private companies. Mr Egan extends that idea to answer the question of why private companies would spend the enormous amounts of money that such research would require. His answer is that genetically engineered organisms would become patentable. But then, of course, with the new crops under private patent, the people most needing of such crops would not have the means to obtain them. This observation is not the main point of the book. Far from it, it is more of an aside. It is another example of Egan's considerable world-building prowess. Distress has its fair share of techno-speak which makes parts of it a bit inaccessible, especially to those unfamiliar with the basis of the current search for a Theory of Everything (TOE). This hardly detracts from the book, as a complete understanding of theoretical physics is hardly necessary to comprehend the implications of the TOE in Distress. I found Distress to be far superior to both Permutation City and Quarantine with respect to Egan's characters. The characters in Distress are far more three-dimensional and sympathetic than those in Egan's previous two novels. Distress is a fine example of what Hard SF should be. Bold ideas backed by real science, without forgetting that a strong plot and likable characters are what's really important.

(I read the UK paperback.) Greg Egan is currently the best hard sf writer I know of. He writes science fiction the way it SHOULD be: imaginative yet plausible, stuff that makes you think, stuff that draws on real science rather than warp-space hyper-rubbish. Egan's novels are pretty good but his short stories are really excellent. It's interesting that, although "Distress" is a novel, it opens with a series of interviews (the protagonist is a journalist), each one of which is like a mini-short story about some aspect of biotechnology. This plays to Egan's strength: idea, idea, idea. However, after a while the story settles down to the central plot, about a theoretical physicist whose life is endangered by a lunatic group with some strange ideas about cosmology. I strongly recommend this book. It deserves a 10 for ideas; I am downgrading it to a 9 because other aspects of Egan's writing could still be improved.