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aix83 's review for:
Quarantine
by Greg Egan
This is exactly what you expect a book written by a mathematician to be. A living stereotype of Wigner's friend quantum mechanics explained to death.
The good side: the hard sci-fi concepts are really cool and interesting and the world building is awesome.
The bad side: sadly, the writer isn't experienced as a writer but he's using his books as a method to push his high flying concepts to people. The characters fall flat and I couldn't care much about the MC even though the book is written in first person and first person is supposed to make you root even for an unsympathetic character. Our MC feels a lot like a robot and honestly if they killed him and stuffed his brain in a jar I wouldn't have been bothered even a little.
Then another problem is that after he introduces his setting, the author goes skimming even more on character development by introducing new characters who read like one big single secondary guy/girl.
But the worst thing is that at some point the book derails completely into a mental experiment in quantum mechanics. You get this huge portion of the book where you just read pages and pages of logical derivations of the consequences of the quantum mechanical rules that were just introduced. Absolutely, this exercise is essential so that readers can follow how the setting rules will enforce what happens in act 3 of the book but the whole thing is so alienating and frankly tedious that I've read textbooks that are more exciting. At least textbooks have this habit leaving the exercise to the reader, habit which is sadly absent in this book.
The good side: the hard sci-fi concepts are really cool and interesting and the world building is awesome.
The bad side: sadly, the writer isn't experienced as a writer but he's using his books as a method to push his high flying concepts to people. The characters fall flat and I couldn't care much about the MC even though the book is written in first person and first person is supposed to make you root even for an unsympathetic character. Our MC feels a lot like a robot and honestly if they killed him and stuffed his brain in a jar I wouldn't have been bothered even a little.
Then another problem is that after he introduces his setting, the author goes skimming even more on character development by introducing new characters who read like one big single secondary guy/girl.
But the worst thing is that at some point the book derails completely into a mental experiment in quantum mechanics. You get this huge portion of the book where you just read pages and pages of logical derivations of the consequences of the quantum mechanical rules that were just introduced. Absolutely, this exercise is essential so that readers can follow how the setting rules will enforce what happens in act 3 of the book but the whole thing is so alienating and frankly tedious that I've read textbooks that are more exciting. At least textbooks have this habit leaving the exercise to the reader, habit which is sadly absent in this book.