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cryingalot49 's review for:
Quarantine
by Greg Egan
Detective Nick Stavrianos is every cynical noir detective and he's looking for a catatonic girl who went inexplicably missing from a mental institution. He won't be able to find her for quantum mechanical reasons. It's a fascinating set-up for a story, but so much of the mind-boggling quantum physics don't pair well with detective cliches, however upended and subverted they are (Nick being cynical and pragmatic because neural programming is suppressing his emotions and not because he's just that desensitized was a really nice touch).
I'd love to talk to someone who understands the proposed science in this book better than I do, because I gave it a lot of credit simply for attempting to grapple with ideas like wave-collapsing and the results of actually wielding such science as a practical and narrative tool. But once the story swelled out of a single eigenstate, I felt disconnected from it, like the act of trying to wrap a linear narrative around the notion was futile.
I don't know if a toning down of the science or an elevation of the narrative would've helped, but so many things seemed woefully underexplored in favor of things like Nick picking a lock while he's smeared across different eigenstates. There are so many things going on in such a short book and they all hook together in such brief spaces—a shadow organization, neural programming that changes personalities, an unexplained "bubble" existing around Earth, the social and religious responses to said bubble, and all of that is outside the main concern of experiments to harness the wave-collapse and smearing. It feels like a messy book, and maybe that was intentional, but to juggle so many things I would've liked the writing, characters, and universe to be much, much weirder.
I'd love to talk to someone who understands the proposed science in this book better than I do, because I gave it a lot of credit simply for attempting to grapple with ideas like wave-collapsing and the results of actually wielding such science as a practical and narrative tool. But once the story swelled out of a single eigenstate, I felt disconnected from it, like the act of trying to wrap a linear narrative around the notion was futile.
I don't know if a toning down of the science or an elevation of the narrative would've helped, but so many things seemed woefully underexplored in favor of things like Nick picking a lock while he's smeared across different eigenstates. There are so many things going on in such a short book and they all hook together in such brief spaces—a shadow organization, neural programming that changes personalities, an unexplained "bubble" existing around Earth, the social and religious responses to said bubble, and all of that is outside the main concern of experiments to harness the wave-collapse and smearing. It feels like a messy book, and maybe that was intentional, but to juggle so many things I would've liked the writing, characters, and universe to be much, much weirder.