- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Gollancz; New edition edition (12 Aug 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1857985907
- ISBN-13: 978-1857985900
- Product Dimensions: 17.2 x 10.8 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 330,081 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Quarantine
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Greg Egan, an Australian, is a master of intellectual dazzle who can still amaze hard-SF readers who know all the tricks and demand to be shown a new one. Quarantine (1992) was his first novel, though his short stories in Britain's SF magazine Interzone had already caused a stir. The quarantine of the title is a gigantic space-time bubble placed around Earth's orbit by unknown hands in 2034, making the stars and outer planets invisible and unreachable. Why? Investigating a pointless kidnapping, a resourceful cyber sleuth with a head full of computer add-ons stumbles on--and is forcibly recruited into--a technological conspiracy whose researches hint at the reason for the Bubble. It's there to protect the universe, or rather an infinite multiplicity of universes, from the destructive effects of human minds. In a ferociously intellectual argument Egan tackles the central weirdness of Quantum Mechanics, which is both the most successful and worryingly inexplicable theory of modern physics. Suppose it were possible for a thinking being to be consciously "smeared out" over the countless simultaneous probability states that according to QM are "collapsed" into a single reality when observed or measured? This happens to our hero, and the results are very strange indeed. Dizzying concepts and hardware overshadow the slightly flat characters, but it's a terrifically impressive book. - -David Langford
Product Description
In the late 21st Century on Earth, Bioengineering and information systems have changed the face of humanity - you can be exactly who you want to be, but don't expect life to be any less uncertain in a world rife with religious cults and terrorism spawned by fear of the unknown. Then one night, the stars disappear - blocked out by 'The Bubble' which isolates the whole solar system. Humanity has been Quarantined - but why and more importantly still, by whom?
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Astonishing!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Quarantine (Paperback)
Greg Egan has come up with enough ideas in this book to get a lesser author through a career. His portrayal of quantum mechanics - a pretty abstruse subject - in real and visceral terms is something else, at points in the book i was genuinely astounded. As hard sci-fi goes this is granite; i have a physics degree and i can tell you that given his postulates, it's all rigorous stuff. in short, i can't recommend this book strongly enough.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't worry, it gets better... and better...,
By
This review is from: Quarantine (Paperback)
I came across Greg Egan because someone had told me it was 'cyberpunk'. I'd finished Gibson and wanted more - more grit, more international megacorporations, more cyberwear.And I got it, in 'Quarantine'. But that wasn't the point. The first quarter of so of the book is very cyber: neural modifications, private police, dodgy corporations all over the shop, and just when you think it's become boring, that Gibson did it first and better, Egan throws one of the best spins I've seen in recent science fiction and you find out what the raison d'etre of the book really is. Whether or not you like cyberpunk as a genre has nothing to do with whether ot not you'll like Quarantine, although if you're already into it you'll get through the opening chapters better. It's really good old-fashioned speculative sci-fi, the sort that used to be set on alien worlds surrounded by spaceships, but which Egan has now set on a mid-21st century Earth - a brilliant fusion.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Awsome book,
By paul@sucs.swan.ac.uk (South Wales, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Quarantine (Paperback)
WOW, I was very impressed with Egan's use of science-fact in this book. But its where that goes, with the huge twist at the end that really makes this book great.It's a great shame the book didnt end a few pages earlier though, i was quite let down the way the ending was all tied up. Thats the only reason i couldnt give it 5 stars. It was the first book by Egan i have read, and i am looking for more... P
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