Rachel's Reviews > Distress

In the future, medical/genetic and computer sciences have advanced, and physicists are closing in on a Theory of Everything, or TOE. Our protagonist is a journalist; working mostly with implanted equipment. He's also pretty self-centered, and not that nice a person. Most of the book takes place as he covers a physics conference on a settlement called Stateless, built up out of the ocean. Some of the best parts of the book describe Stateless's structure and culture.

The titular Distress is an illness, presumably engineered, that causes its sufferers to be so upset they need to be hospitalized. But it's not a big part of the book.

This book is 25 years old. It's a tribute to Egan's vision that (mostly) the technology and the culture don't seem quaintly retro, as they do with many books after a quarter century. His writing is excellent, if elaborate enough that reading the book was slow going for almost the first half. One of the main plot elements was possible consequences of pinning down the TOE, and for me, that was not that exciting or plausible. Three and a half stars, rounded up for sheer writing quality.