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A review by ajam
Quarantine by Greg Egan
4.0
4.5★
"Q: What can you tell us about how you wrote it? Did it develop out of your short work?
A: Quarantine took me about twelve months to write, starting early in 1990. I had a few breaks to write short stories, but other than that it pretty much monopolised my life until it was finished. It's not an expansion of a shorter work, although I did borrow ideas from some of my stories: the "priming" drugs used by cops in "The Caress" to prepare themselves for duty have been replaced by neural modifications which do the same thing - and the neural modifications themselves are used in much the same fashion as the neural implants of "Axiomatic" and "Fidelity". There are echoes of "The Infinite Assassin", but that story wasn't the seed for Quarantine; I actually wrote it half-way through writing the novel, so the influence was the other way round.
With the central idea for Quarantine, I'd been aware for about fifteen years that some physicists believed that only conscious observers "collapsed the wave" - that it was a biological or metaphysical property of being human. I was daydreaming about that when it finally occurred to me that taking the idea seriously could lead to some very bizarre conclusions. I spent about a month reading about the quantum measurement problem, catching up with all the competing theories - which had to turn out to be wrong in the novel, so they're barely mentioned. Roger Penrose's quantum gravity theory is so beautiful that it deserves to be right . . . but the idea that the human brain alone might be responsible for the collapse made a much better story.
Q: A number of critics - amongst them Adelaide academic Michael Tolley in Eidolon - have complained about the sections of Quarantine where you explain quantum mechanical principles et cetera, claiming these passages disrupt the flow of the novel. Are the criticisms valid and do you think you could have done it any other way?
A: I think the only changes I could have made would have been a matter of fine-tuning, rather than a completely different approach. I wanted the middle of the novel to be a time when the narrator had a chance to learn about the physics and metaphysics of his situation - and to think through some of the consequences - before things became too frantic for deliberations like that to be at all plausible. I can see why some reviewers would have preferred less theoretical discussion - but I wanted the events that followed to make sense to readers ranging from people who'd never even heard of Schrödinger's Cat, through to people who were familiar with all the latest debates about quantum metaphysics. If I'd cut out too much explanatory material, some people might have been left floundering.
I do wish I could have handled that section more smoothly - Michael Tolley rightly pointed out that some of the dialogue is pretty clumsy - but I still think that the basic structure was the right choice."-Egan, From his 1993 Eidolon interview
⩨NFO
⩐ Read Via Moon+ReaderPro Android-AsusXOOTD
⩨FootNotes/Remarks:
-N/A
"Q: What can you tell us about how you wrote it? Did it develop out of your short work?
A: Quarantine took me about twelve months to write, starting early in 1990. I had a few breaks to write short stories, but other than that it pretty much monopolised my life until it was finished. It's not an expansion of a shorter work, although I did borrow ideas from some of my stories: the "priming" drugs used by cops in "The Caress" to prepare themselves for duty have been replaced by neural modifications which do the same thing - and the neural modifications themselves are used in much the same fashion as the neural implants of "Axiomatic" and "Fidelity". There are echoes of "The Infinite Assassin", but that story wasn't the seed for Quarantine; I actually wrote it half-way through writing the novel, so the influence was the other way round.
With the central idea for Quarantine, I'd been aware for about fifteen years that some physicists believed that only conscious observers "collapsed the wave" - that it was a biological or metaphysical property of being human. I was daydreaming about that when it finally occurred to me that taking the idea seriously could lead to some very bizarre conclusions. I spent about a month reading about the quantum measurement problem, catching up with all the competing theories - which had to turn out to be wrong in the novel, so they're barely mentioned. Roger Penrose's quantum gravity theory is so beautiful that it deserves to be right . . . but the idea that the human brain alone might be responsible for the collapse made a much better story.
Q: A number of critics - amongst them Adelaide academic Michael Tolley in Eidolon - have complained about the sections of Quarantine where you explain quantum mechanical principles et cetera, claiming these passages disrupt the flow of the novel. Are the criticisms valid and do you think you could have done it any other way?
A: I think the only changes I could have made would have been a matter of fine-tuning, rather than a completely different approach. I wanted the middle of the novel to be a time when the narrator had a chance to learn about the physics and metaphysics of his situation - and to think through some of the consequences - before things became too frantic for deliberations like that to be at all plausible. I can see why some reviewers would have preferred less theoretical discussion - but I wanted the events that followed to make sense to readers ranging from people who'd never even heard of Schrödinger's Cat, through to people who were familiar with all the latest debates about quantum metaphysics. If I'd cut out too much explanatory material, some people might have been left floundering.
I do wish I could have handled that section more smoothly - Michael Tolley rightly pointed out that some of the dialogue is pretty clumsy - but I still think that the basic structure was the right choice."-Egan, From his 1993 Eidolon interview
⩨NFO
⩐ Read Via Moon+ReaderPro Android-AsusXOOTD
⩨FootNotes/Remarks:
-N/A