archergal 's review for:

Quarantine by Greg Egan
4.0

I saw this book in my recommendations on Scribd. I decided to give it a shot, even though Greg Egan is one of the authors who seems to make me feel ignorant and stupid. It's not his writing style, which is quite good. It's his SUBJECT matter. He picks wickedly complex and difficult things to write about, like light has no universal speed, or (as in this book) quantum mechanics and eigenstates and collapsing wave functions. O.O

This books starts out like a nice cyberpunk detective story. Then it gets... COMPLICATED. There are various mental/emotional mods that Nick, the ex-policeman protagonist has undergone. In the course of searching for a woman who has been somehow escaping from locked rooms, he's caught and modded AGAIN to be perfectly loyal to the company who'd kidnapped the woman. And then he finds out what they're researching, and how he can be a part of it and use their research.

All this takes place in a world where the whole Solar System has apparently been enclosed in a Bubble (the Quarantine of the title) because Reasons. Ok, that was cool, even though the idea of never seeing the stars again would be daunting and depressing. And then there's the whole utilizing a myriad of "selves" to solve a really problem and then collapsing them into one entity ("you," for some iteration of YOU) to continue and to use the solution. The question is: is the YOU who is using the solution to the problem the same YOU who stated the problem at the outset? How would you know? HOW WOULD YOU KNOW? is the question that kinda obsesses our protagonist. And what if the ability to do this quantum testing was available to everyone? Would there be any objective reality anymore?

Honestly, it kinda made my head spin. I kept thinking of Samuel Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley If you can't tell if you're the same person, how could it matter if you are or not??? But I admit up front that I am not a really deep thinker or student of physics. I read it all anyway, and admired the ideas and the kind of mind that could come up with a book like this.

Egan, like Charles Stross, is a writer that I enjoy reading, mostly. But I tend to come away from their books thinking that my view of the world is so totally simplistic that I must be really stupid not to see it as they do. But sometimes it's ok just to enjoy the ride even if you don't know exactly why anyone wants to GO there.