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Distress: A Novel, by Greg Egan
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“All right. He’s dead. Go ahead and talk to him.”
It is the year 2055, and the battle of the sexes has seven combatants rather than two. “The illusion of empathy” has been dispensed with, and a few idealistic souls try to create a utopia with pirated technology.
But a wired journalist, Andrew Worth, doesn’t want any part of the pop “Frankenscience” regularly dished out to the masses. Burned-out after completing a documentary on controversial developments in biotechnology, he turns down a chance to report on a baffling new mental disorder known as Distress and instead takes an assignment covering the Einstein Centenary Conference on the artificial island of Stateless. There, a young South African physicist, Violet Mosala, is expected to unveil her candidate for a Theory of Everything.
But the assignment is not the tropical respite Worth was expecting. Unfortunately academia’s facade of civility is dangerously cracked with a seething maelstrom of plotting, assassination attempts, and rebellion, and Worth is dragged down into the nightmare. The world’s only hope for survival lies in Violet Mosala’s development of a final Theory of Everything, but whether it will lead to the total destruction of life as we know it or the complete remaking of the universe may be a risk too dangerous to take.
Greg Egan’s audacious voice and literary scope create a fragmented futuristic world where technology and bioengineering threaten humanity’s very existence.
Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
- Sales Rank: #422539 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 5.25" w x 1.25" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 400 pages
Amazon.com Review
After developing a lengthy expos� on "frankenscience," SeeNet reporter Andrew Worth is burnt out. So burnt that he passes up a plum assignment covering the new disease "Distress." Instead, he asks for a lower-key job profiling Violet Mosala, a scientist who earned a Nobel Prize at the age of 25 and who is about to announce her version of the Theory of Everything. The TOE is an attempt to explain how all scientific theories fit together, but it may actually be the catalyst that created the universe, making Violet the "Keystone" of the universe. So much for the quiet assignment ...
From Kirkus Reviews
About 60 years from now, SeeNet journalist and narrator Andrew Worth (he has a camera and computer software hardwired into his body) muscles in on a colleague's assignment to cover a physics convention on the artificial coral island, Stateless, at which Nobel laureate Violet Mosala is expected to announce a watertight Theory of Everything (TOE). The event, however, is complicated by the presence of several noisy anti-science cult groups--among them the mysterious and secretive Anthrocosmologists who believe that whoever first formulates the TOE will become the Keystone in which the completed TOE, mingling information theory with particle physics, will actually change the structure of the universe. Andrew's Anthrocosmology contact, Akili Kuwale, a ``gender migrant'' (s/he has no breasts or sexual organs), warns that a particularly violent, extreme faction intends to assassinate Violet to prevent the Aleph Moment when the completed TOE's effects kick in. Soon, Andrew falls sick--the extremists have infected him, intending that he pass the virus on to Violet; she falls ill, but has arranged for supercomputers to complete her calculations and disseminate the results. As the extremists redouble their violent efforts, Stateless's former owners send mercenaries to recapture the island, while a sort of reverse echo of the Aleph Moment results in a wave of mass insanity, or Distress, whose victims apparently have all turned into Keystones! Challenging, well informed, and iconoclastic, but also abstruse and often heavy: admirable rather than enjoyable, but an impressive first hardcover nonetheless. -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
“A dizzying intellectual adventure.”
—The New York Times
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Bioengineering, cosmological physics, murder. Top notch.
By A Customer
(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.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
A science fiction gem.
By Stephen Dedman
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.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Truth disguised as "bad" science fiction (with a bad audio-book narration)
By Amazon Customer
I tend to describe this book as "truth, disguised as bad sci-fi". And it kind of is both.
I first read this book almost 2 decades ago. At the time I remember it as a nice, solid, near-future sci-fi book. What I remembered most from that first read was just how believable and interesting the genetic engineering aspects of the world were.
I remember thinking to myself that "yes - if biotech is to do in the near future what information-tech did in the near past - this is what it would look like".
Similar to Larry Niven's "Flash Crowd", which is the first realistic description of a society with teleporters I ever saw, this book was the first realistic description of a society with advanced biotech I ever saw.
So that's what I thought about the first time I read it - an enjoyable sci-fi book with good science but bad characters. You know the kind - where all the characters are "too logical" and only exist to explain the science.
Around a decade later, I got an itch to re-read the book. Took me a couple of years to track it down in a second hand book store.
I re-read it - and to my amazement I found that almost all my opinions about society, sexuality, social justice, and "people" in general were in this book. Opinions and views that I thought I developed on my own from observations of the world - I found spelled out almost identical in this book.
Without me realizing it - this book has completely shaped my world view. Even re-reading it, I don't know *how* it did it. The ideas are conveyed... poorly, in the usual manner of sci-fi books, using flat characters and spoon-feedingly-long conversations. Yet there you have it.
I would recommend this book to everyone. Not the audio-book though - that's horrible. Whoever narrated it has no business narrating anything.
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