Mikael Kuoppala's Reviews > Distress

I really don’t know how to approach “Distress”. The novel is just so completely full of everything utterly brilliant that writing a reader review on it seems a task tragically overwhelming. Greg Egan is perhaps the best sci-fi author out there, and this is a wonderful tour de force even from him.

The novel is basically a cosmological thriller(!) about a summit where the accurate ultimate Theory of Everything aka TOE is expected to emerge. The protagonist is Andrew Worth, a science journalist who journeys to the summit in order to write a spotlight feature on Violet Mosala, one of the three competing cosmologists about to present their soon perfected TOE. At the same time, an odd mental disease is emerging randomly all across the world, the symptom being a total loss of subjective reality.

Egan writes in his usual, beautifully literal and rich manner, building his characters complex and fascinating. His psychological insight is unparalleled but even more so is his ability of making high level scientific speculation read like a thriller. I couldn’t believe how many brilliant ideas he used here. It felt almost wasteful, because there were enough creative concepts in this one single novel to easily produce a shelf of substantial books.

Egan tickles your brain on every page, causing the reader to go into a hyperactive mode of philosophical pondering and unending curiosity. When he then takes all this and puts it into geopolitical, sociological and societal context we end up with an absolute masterpiece.