Tomislav's Reviews > Distress

I have only read a few of Greg Egan's books before, but I think this is the one I've enjoyed most so far. My biggest motivation for reading science fiction, is to find new ideas about the physical universe and humanity's place in it. Distress is filled with enough ideas to populate multiple more conventional science fiction novels. To begin with, Andrew Worth is a journalist who is creating a sensationalistic feature about abuses of biotechnology, and his piece consists of four original concepts each explored at some length by Egan. And then we get to the real story as Andrew travels to Stateless, an artificial land in the south Pacific in order to cover a Nobel Prize winning physicist planning to make a breakthrough announcement at a conference there. While revealing the concepts that make the island nation possible, Egan brings extremist groups into the plot, who will stop at nothing to prevent the announcement. Who is really behind those groups? Are their fears legitimate? Will the announcement lead to a waveform collapse on the nature of reality?