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joshsharp 's review for:

Quarantine by Greg Egan
4.0

For the first third of this book, I was like, "hard scifi? This is so accessible, what a page-turner. Maybe I've exaggerated what he's like in my memory." But after that: haha nope. It's Greg Egan going hard. It didn't slow me down too much, though — it's a fun book. Bonus points for actually being set in Australia.

There are a bunch of interesting ideas in this book, some more accessible than others. The "quantum catastrophe" stuff the hilariously bad original cover here mentions is quite hard to follow, I have to admit. I got the gist, I got many of the specifics, I enjoyed the infodumps and all the theoretical musings, but a lot of the time I didn't understand entirely and was happy to just go along with what was happening. I do wonder whether I would have enjoyed it more or less if I was someone with a background in that stuff. Probably less, because I would have seen where the hand-waving falls apart. So I guess I will be happy with my level of comprehension.

The ending was okay. Perhaps a little underwhelming, but good enough.

I read it quickly, I had a good time, I'm gonna read more of Greg sometime.