Greg Egan

It causes riots and religions. It has people dancing in the streets and leaping off skyscrapers. And it's all because of the impenetrable gray shield that slid into place around the solar system on the night of November 15, 2034. Some see the bubble as the revenge of an insane God. Some see it as justice. Some even see it as protection. But one thing is for certain -- now there is the universe, and the earth. And never the twain shall meet. Or so it seems. Until a bio-enhanced PI named Nick Stavrianos takes on a job for an anonymous client: find a girl named Laura who disappeared from a mental institution by the most direct possible method -- walking through the walls.

Quarantine

It's late in the 21st century and bioengineering is now so common that people are able to modify their minds in any way they wish. It is an era which has been shaped by information systems so vast that security, in any form, is easily breached. Now you can be whatever you want to be, and do whatever you want to do. On Earth anyway. One night, thirty three years ago, the stars went out. 'The Bubble' - a perfect sphere centred on the sun - appeared in the sky, isolating the solar system from the rest of the universe. For thirty-three years, humanity has lived with the religious cults and terrorism which spawned in the wake of the darkness. We are now alone. Humanity has been cut off. Quarantined.

Janice Hopper

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.

Quarantine

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