Quarantine

This novel is a perfect example of why some people should stay short-story writers. It's packed full with brilliant ideas, any one of which could generate a novel by itself. Unfortunately, Egan gets so wrapped up in the ideas that he loses the thread of the story.

The setup is pretty good. The main character, Nick, is immediately given two story goals. Primarily, he wants to find Laura Andrews. Secondarily, his client is anonymous, with completely opaque motivations. This is what stories are all about: the main character wants something, tries to get it, and encounters obstacles.

Unfortunately, by the middle part of the book, Nick has found Laura. After that, until the last couple of chapters, *he doesn't want anything*! He has no goals, encounters no obstacles, makes no effort. He is quite literally mind-controlled into a spectator's job. He never wonders who hired him (and, indeed, the question is totally dropped ... realistic, perhaps, but poor storytelling). He is, in fact, an observer, a reporter of strange events and stranger ideas, with neither motivations nor desires.

And there are so *many* good ideas here that no one of them is ever fully developed. There's certainly nothing like a theme to be found.

About the only way a story can overcome this kind of burden is with outstanding characterization. _Quarantine_ doesn't have it. Nick is never even described, physically, and he is equally blank in personality--a hard trick, given that the book is narrated in the first person. (Nick, in fact, spends quite a few pages saying--in effect--that character is meaningless and that personality is a fiction.)

In a short story, this kind of thing doesn't matter as much. There, you can take one central idea and make *it* the star, with everything else subservient. It's a lot harder in a novel. _Quarantine_ has the ideas in profusion, but it doesn't have anything else that a full-length novel needs. It reads like parts of six or seven excellent short stories that somehow accidentally got jumbled together.

This not really a novel, it's a book-length essay on the philosophy of quantum mechanics.

The characters are just mouthpieces, and they all talk like they're giving a physics lecture -- even the protagonist, who's supposed to be a cop. I wouldn't have minded a protagonist who was a physicist and spent all his time giving physics lectures, but a protagonist who is a cop and spends all his time giving physics lectures makes for a pretty deadly lack of believability. Egan also shoots himself in the foot by giving the protagonist reasons to emote (a murdered wife who walks on stage sometimes as a ghost) but making him emotionless (because of brain modifications he's carried out on himself). I could have dealt with a protagonist who was Mr. Spock, but if you're going to give Spock a deep reason to emote, you've got to do something dramatically with that conflict between reason and emotion.

The philosophy and science are not really very believable, either. Egan has tried to find a way of dramatizing the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, but in doing that, it seems to me that he's twisted the Copenhagen interpretation into something different -- and more absurd -- than what it really is.

Every time I read Greg Egan, I am so impressed by the ideas. Some of the revelations, the images of some of the quantum phenomenon, the extention to known science can be truly mind-blowing.

The writing, while ok, can sometimes be dull, especially to someone who hasn't read lots of popular science books about quantum mechnics. Egan is often talking about ideas that intrigue him, and he has many discussions between characters who just go off on many philosophical tangents that don't necessarily forward the story.

Egan always does this in his novels, and Quarantine is one of his least distracting.

There were at least two times that I thought that book was pure genius and was simply in awe of the ideas and how they were discussed and used in the story.

I highly recommend this novel to anyone who already is a fan of Greg Egan or any other reader who want to be challenged and doesn't mind putting up with some of the author's indulgences.

Surely, Quarantine by Greg Egan is the novel to read while we await the first real brain modification sets to be sold on the internet......
Before going to bed you spray some vial content into your nostrils, and clever nanomachines are carried into your brain. You lie awake a little thinking about the nanorobots finding their way inside your brain. Whether they will make a perfect mod, - or make vital brain centers into neural spaghetti....
When the nanomachines have rewired parts of your brain - You'll be the same you've always been - with a new career, and new allegiances, new values, new capabilities - that's all....
Lets face it, everything you do changes who you are. Eating changes who you are. As does not eating. So, neural mods change peoples values. So, a little moral nanosurgery creates a whole new person - hey, its a free world, isn't it?
Surely, we humans make choices all the time. Some of them good, some of them bad. Sometimes we "murder" the good people we might have been.
In Egans world there is way out though.
Through brain modifications and
Egans "Quantum Mechanics measurement problem revisited" we can stop being stuck with our bad choices, regain our godliness, and rejoin the rest of superspace.
Or perhaps not .....
Wonderful stuff.
-Simon

The premise of this book was exciting: a bubble suddenly surrounds the solar system, blocking out the stars. Is it aliens, a black hole, God ? After the first couple of interesting chapters, the book changes directions and becomes a dreadful technomystery. The are consortiums and convoluted plans within plans. I stopped reading about half way through because I couldn't stand it anymore. I did thumb to the back to see what the cause of the bubble was and it was explained in one short throw-away paragraph.
The writing here is simply terrible. It is of the quality you would expect from a high school writing fair honorable mention.

!!!! ATTN SPOILERS !!!!

It pains me to give this novel 2 stars, as Greg Egan is one of my favorite SF writers (Diaspora and Permutation City are among my favorite SF novels). I enjoyed the novel at first, but when it became clear to me that Egan was using and relying on the 'consciousness causes wavefunction collapse' I groaned and was bitterly disappointed. First, this idea has been used to death - mostly in ham-fisted ways to try to give humans some special and meaningful place in the universe through physics (Egan doesn't end up doing this too badly). However, my main objection is that it is simply poor physics. Science Fiction is one thing, but science error is another. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is just that, an interpretation, and it is most definitely incomplete. Although all the details have not been worked out fully, Decoherence theory has been around for a while and it almost certainly provides an answer to the 'collapse of the wavefunction' problem without resorting to the idea that somehow it is the consciousness of the observer in an experiment that makes the wavefunction collapse. So once he does that he's resorting to a outdated and discredited idea that was only a step away from 'new-age' nonsense to begin with. I expected more from him. I'll just chalk it up to it being a early novel of his - the ideas in his more recent books have been fresher, more novel, and more plausible or at least less downright contradictory to the current physics knowledge we currently have.

As a example of one of his better ideas, I love the fictional 'Kozuch Theory' in Diaspora - it is unlikely to turn out to be correct unified theory, but it is plausible and consistent with out knowledge of the Standard Model. It also gives a thoughtful fictional resolution to the seeming chasm between the world of fundamental particles in quantum physics and the world of spacetime topology and curvature of General Relativity.

This is two very different stories, linked by two very different characters. Nick is a hard-boiled P.I., an ex-cop with a terrible past. He uses neural implants for this P.I. skills, and to manage his emotions. Substitute neural implants for Prozac and you have a pretty good idea. He's hired to find Laura, a 30-year old woman with the mental development of a 6 month baby. Impossibly, she has vanished from a locked room in a custodial facility. Nice is hired by an unknown to find Laura. So the story starts out as a locked box mystery for a P.I. who uses neural implants.

The Laura mystery faintly echoes the bigger mystery of the humongous grey sphere that, 30 plus years ago, cut the solar system off from the rest of the universe. The biggest locked box mystery of them all, so to speak.

But Nick is captured by the mysterious Ensemble while scouting out a lead. He is given another neural implant, making him absolutely loyal to the Ensemble. And then he is used as a security guard, protecting a woman who is developing very strange skills. Here we have the second story. And, I'm afraid, a great deal of speculation, angst and digression into quantum states and their possibilities.

What if a neural implant could allow manipulation of quantum states? Schroedinger's cat, in its locked box, is famously both alive and dead until you open the box and look. It's quantum state is "smeared" until observation locks its down. What is a human could hold a "smeared" state, preserving all possibilities, until the human chose to lock down a selected state? Of course, if all of those other billion possibilities were "destroyed" by choosing one specific outcome, you might feel a little guilty. If those billions other possibilities ever existed. Nick, the P.I. who uses neural implants to avoid facing his own emotional crises, implausibly spends pages - a lot of pages - agonizing over the inhumanity and improbability of it all.

The ending is messy, with a million corpses, a demolished city and almost all of the hard questions unanswered. The role in all this of the mysterious terrorist group that killed Nick's wife? Unexplained. Nick himself? Unexplained. The fate of the grey sphere and Earth's isolation? Unexplained.

Maybe the problem with quantum uncertainty is that at a macro scale it proves too much. If every conceivable option is possible, there's no room for plot tension. If you have the power to select from an infinite sheaf of possibilities at any instant, there's no room for a plot.

Terrific ideas, some nice efforts at linking plot elements, but ultimately the big premise wraps around the axle of the plot and whole story grinds to a halt. My review title is borrowed from Terry Pratchett. It pretty much summarizes the problem Egan faced.

"Quarantine" is super-hardcore science fiction, for those readers who want the science to come first. Though the back cover makes it look like the entire novel is about the Bubble, there are actually three main thrusts here.

1. Mental implants. By the 2060's, devices known as "Mods" implanted in the brain, can rewire our neurons in any way we choose. Not only making us smarter, faster and more confident, but also adjusting our tastes and loyalties.

2. Quantum theory. This book wrangles with some of the philosophical ramifications of quantum theory at a deep level. Anyone who hasn't studied at least a little quantum physics will probably be quite confused.

3. The Bubble. In 2034, unknown intelligent aliens trapped our solar system inside an enormous barrier. Their means and motives are an enigma at first, but are explained fully by the end. Egan also deals with the human reaction to being "quarantined" in such a manner.

Despite its short length, "Quarantine" is a doozy of a novel with enough twists to satisfy anybody. It begins with Nick Stavianos, hard-boiled P.I., hired anonymously to track down a patient who inexplicably vanished from a mental institution. "Quarantine"'s first act unfolds as a fairly typical mystery story, as Nick hunts for clues through high-tech data networks. However, there's an enormous surprise that totally reverses the course of the book, foiling any predictions that you might have made.

Writing-wise, it's above average for hard science fiction. The first section is perhaps a little heavy on infodump and unnecessary flashbacks. However, it picks up after the aforementioned huge surprise. Without giving too much away, I'll say that it deals with the mods. Nick starts out with several mods in his head, and acquires more as the story progresses. The mods are a tricky issue for the writer to handle, because he has to capture how Nick's thinkiong adjusts based on outside interference. I say he does a good job.

All of that is tangential to the plotline that takes over the second half of the book, which I won't divulge here. But it's a head-bender, all right.

I ended up finding Greg Egan by mistake. My last name is Egan, and while browsing through the SF section, I ran into this author with the similar name. Thought I would do a look see, and ended up loving his work! Since that time, I have read almost every book he has written. I am always highly impressed by his imagination, and at the same time incorporating hard SF into his stories. His predicted theories may or may not be plausible, but nontheless, they make you think! Quarantine kept me on the edge, I couldnt put it down! Like other reviewers have mentioned previously, Egan deals in hard SF, to such a point you may have to stop reading for a moment and think it out. Its well worth the read, and I recommend his other books such as Permutation City.

This is a great piece of work, it does what some of the best sci-fi can only hope to do. It twists your brain into a new shape.

Presented as a noir-style detective story, Quarantine is actually about quantum physics in the real world. It's hard to say more than that without giving much away. Besides, you have to read it to understand what I mean.

It really does rearrange the way your mind sees the world, lots of fun for sci-fi cans!