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?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #744671 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

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

About the Author
SALES POINTS Greg Egan's debut reissued in striking new livery simultaneously with the publiction of his latest groundbreaking novel Cutting edge science fiction from 'one of the genre's great ideas men' THE TIMES 'Never one short of startling ideas, Egan's latest, greatest novel presents us with hard SF miracles... Remember to keep your mouth closed when reading this or your jaw might drop clean off' STARBURST; 'Succeeds wonderfully in expanding the mind...rewards the reader with ever expanding vistas of wonder...The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan' NEW SCIENTIST

Customer Reviews

Astonishing!
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.

Don't worry, it gets better... and better...
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.

Courageous
Lively, well written SF which is packed with more than its fair share of ingenious, well presented ideas in the first 100 pages. Then the central idea is introduced, namely, what it's like in the indeterminate quantum world prior to a measurement or observation being made, written by someone who has more than a just a passing knowledge of the subject (Bell's Inequality & Aspect's experiments, which are both real and apt, are mentioned in a throwaway remark). I was charmed by the boldness of the idea, all the more so since no solution of the measurement problem has been proven.

And then it all fell apart for me because, in the interests of the plot, the author chose an anthropocentric solution, which I couldn't swallow, even though there are people who believe this to be true. That and treating giant physical systems as if they had quantum dynamical properties akin to fundamental particles were hard to take. This is science *fiction* and I have happily gone along with faster then light and time travel and yet I balk at this, mainly because it is explained in such (largely valid) detail by someone who you know knows better and partly because the idea is reused many times in the second half of the book so there's no chance that it will be buried by other events.

While I've been rather critical, Egan has been courageous to have chosen this topic and has shown considerable skill in putting over the fundaments of the measurement problem in a painless way. I shall certainly buy more of his books.