Call number
Genres
Publication
New York, N.Y.: HarperPrism, 1997.
Pages
342
Description
From the author of Quarantine and Axiomatic, this is the story of journalist Andrew Worth, who uncovers a violent battle to control the biggest question science will ever ask whilst investigating a Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist.
Awards
Aurealis Award (Winner — 1995)
Seiun Award (Nominee — 2005)
Otherwise Award (Long list — 1996)
Kurd Laßwitz Preis (Winner — 2000)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1995
2018-02-07
Physical description
342 p.; 9.8 inches
ISBN
0061052647 / 9780061052644
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User reviews
LibraryThing member psybre
Trumping the gender issues raised, trumping the sexual issues, the political issues, the relationship issues, and the moral issues, this book was my first introduction to a cosmogony that required human consciousness, and so I was kept fascinated throughout. This is the second Greg Egan book I have
I tagged this book: Science Fiction, Australian Fiction, Epistemology, Eschatology, Bioengineering, Bioterrorism, Anarchism, Physics, Cosmogony, Gender, Feminism, Post-Singularity, Journalists, Hard SF, Cyberpunk, Transgender, Transhumanism, Novel, Fiction
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read, slightly preferring "Diaspora" but both are highly recommended to hard science fiction and philosophy lovers. Dense and wonderful like Chris Moriarty. Fun with physics like Benford, fun with bioengineering like Bear, "Distress" is well-written with some very strong moral issues.I tagged this book: Science Fiction, Australian Fiction, Epistemology, Eschatology, Bioengineering, Bioterrorism, Anarchism, Physics, Cosmogony, Gender, Feminism, Post-Singularity, Journalists, Hard SF, Cyberpunk, Transgender, Transhumanism, Novel, Fiction
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LibraryThing member fpagan
SF novel set in and near 2050s Australia.
LibraryThing member RandyStafford
My reaction to reading this novel in 1997. Spoilers follow.
I had heard glowing things about Egan’s works. This work certainly proves he’s capable of producing works with some heady ideas and hard science.
The main scientific notion, anthrocosmology, has a somewhat tenuous connection to science
The book opens with the interrogation of a murder victim, briefly resurrected to gain clues to his killer. Many people have gone beyond traditional sex changes to become “asexs” (Egan creates a new class of pronouns for these people). The asexs have the need for sexual intimacy and the biochemical need for orgasm removed from their brains. There are “voluntary autists” who refuse to become cured by a brain graft. The view autism as liberating them from the delusion of intimacy, a product of evolution and biochemistry. (One character remarks that he doesn’t need delusions to stay sane and that is the ultimate verdict of the book.) Then there is the creepy, rich American Ned Landers who is the ultimate survivalist, made by himself to become a “new kingdom” of life by having the four bases of DNA replaced in his body with substitutes making him immune to new diseases and a suite of symbionts that make it possible for him to exist without oxygen, to eat grass, paper, and old tires (he has maps of North American tire dumps in case of an apocalypse.) He and his wife plan to pass on these modifications to his children. Later on, it is revealed he has more sinister plans to engineer viruses to kill normal humanity and replace it. (The ultimate refutation, as the reporter-narrator remarks, to the claim that no man is an island.)
This is all little more than background detail but shows the disturbing possibilities of “frankenscience”. Egan could have expanded this idea into a novel or novellas but had bigger things in mind. It is suggested that Landers may be the visible part of a much larger group with similar designs. There are the anarchists of the floating island of Stateless. They are all aware of the complex, engineered processes (using stolen genetic engineering techniques) that keep their island of coral afloat. They study not political philosophy but biology and sociobiology to understand the fundamentals of human nature which their diverse political experiments try to account for. But the main plot involves the intrigue and politics and murder surrounding Violet Mosala, an African woman and brilliant physicist who may just have completed a TOE – Theory of Everything. This not only annoys the Mystical Renaissance (a group who wrongly thinks their mystical ideas can be logically reconciled with science) and Ignorance Cults (who think that science can’t or, at least, shouldn’t explain certain things).
Egan, speaking primarily through his narrator and Mosala, spends a great deal of time attacking these notions and that science is simply a culturally biased procedure of relative truth used primarily by white male, Westerners. Egan clearly sees science as the only tool for producing truth. (Truth, says one character is what you can’t escape.) Egan attacks the notion that religion is necessary for morality. One character remarks that you can lead a moral life because you see it’s good. However, I’m unconvinced that religion can be excised – even if it is a delusion – from society without great harm. Egan’s view is morality as almost an aesthetic choice and certainly not a compelled choice. Egan attacks the notion that happiness is a substitute for understanding. I thought, upon rereading these sections, of all the modern proponents of religious faith. They chastise people for following their emotions and pursuing a course of emotional satisfaction but are they any better when they say accept religion on faith (a possible delusion) and for its emotional benefits? The unscientific aren’t the only ones who fear Mosala’s TOE. While some anthrocosmologists try to protect her because she is the keystone, the mind that will explain everything past and future and present, into being, others fear the possible consequences of her specific TOE (why I don’t fully understand) enough to kill her.
The end of the novel is anticlimactic, perhaps deliberately so, as the narrator becomes the keystone. His revelations aren’t as epic as expected. He fully realizes he’s a “dying machine of cells”, there are no absolutes, there is no real intimacy with other minds, no purpose to life beyond what we make, that everyone is a keystone (this isn’t explained well). It’s a cold, sterile, rather unhopeful ending, but you have to give credit to Egan for unflinchingly valuing truth above all else. (This story is in direct counterpoint to George R. R. Martin’s “The Way of Cross and Dragon”. The idea of observer created reality is also in Charles Harness’ “A Newer Reality”.)
I had heard glowing things about Egan’s works. This work certainly proves he’s capable of producing works with some heady ideas and hard science.
The main scientific notion, anthrocosmology, has a somewhat tenuous connection to science
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but, while speculative, is subscribed to by enough physicists to call it hard science of the speculative sort. Distress is a mental disease – a “21 century AIDS of the mind” -- with no cure and growing. Its victims seem to exhibit strangely purposeful but incomprehensible behaviors. It also serves as a metaphor for the central theme of this novel – the consequences, in the political, personal, biological, and cosmic realms – of a clear-eyed vision of the universe. To be sure this is an old – perhaps the oldest – theme in science fiction, the Dr. Faust and Dr. Frankenstein stories. But Egan’s examples are disturbing and plausible in both a scientific and social sense (in other words, I can see people behaving the way Egan describes). The book opens with the interrogation of a murder victim, briefly resurrected to gain clues to his killer. Many people have gone beyond traditional sex changes to become “asexs” (Egan creates a new class of pronouns for these people). The asexs have the need for sexual intimacy and the biochemical need for orgasm removed from their brains. There are “voluntary autists” who refuse to become cured by a brain graft. The view autism as liberating them from the delusion of intimacy, a product of evolution and biochemistry. (One character remarks that he doesn’t need delusions to stay sane and that is the ultimate verdict of the book.) Then there is the creepy, rich American Ned Landers who is the ultimate survivalist, made by himself to become a “new kingdom” of life by having the four bases of DNA replaced in his body with substitutes making him immune to new diseases and a suite of symbionts that make it possible for him to exist without oxygen, to eat grass, paper, and old tires (he has maps of North American tire dumps in case of an apocalypse.) He and his wife plan to pass on these modifications to his children. Later on, it is revealed he has more sinister plans to engineer viruses to kill normal humanity and replace it. (The ultimate refutation, as the reporter-narrator remarks, to the claim that no man is an island.)
This is all little more than background detail but shows the disturbing possibilities of “frankenscience”. Egan could have expanded this idea into a novel or novellas but had bigger things in mind. It is suggested that Landers may be the visible part of a much larger group with similar designs. There are the anarchists of the floating island of Stateless. They are all aware of the complex, engineered processes (using stolen genetic engineering techniques) that keep their island of coral afloat. They study not political philosophy but biology and sociobiology to understand the fundamentals of human nature which their diverse political experiments try to account for. But the main plot involves the intrigue and politics and murder surrounding Violet Mosala, an African woman and brilliant physicist who may just have completed a TOE – Theory of Everything. This not only annoys the Mystical Renaissance (a group who wrongly thinks their mystical ideas can be logically reconciled with science) and Ignorance Cults (who think that science can’t or, at least, shouldn’t explain certain things).
Egan, speaking primarily through his narrator and Mosala, spends a great deal of time attacking these notions and that science is simply a culturally biased procedure of relative truth used primarily by white male, Westerners. Egan clearly sees science as the only tool for producing truth. (Truth, says one character is what you can’t escape.) Egan attacks the notion that religion is necessary for morality. One character remarks that you can lead a moral life because you see it’s good. However, I’m unconvinced that religion can be excised – even if it is a delusion – from society without great harm. Egan’s view is morality as almost an aesthetic choice and certainly not a compelled choice. Egan attacks the notion that happiness is a substitute for understanding. I thought, upon rereading these sections, of all the modern proponents of religious faith. They chastise people for following their emotions and pursuing a course of emotional satisfaction but are they any better when they say accept religion on faith (a possible delusion) and for its emotional benefits? The unscientific aren’t the only ones who fear Mosala’s TOE. While some anthrocosmologists try to protect her because she is the keystone, the mind that will explain everything past and future and present, into being, others fear the possible consequences of her specific TOE (why I don’t fully understand) enough to kill her.
The end of the novel is anticlimactic, perhaps deliberately so, as the narrator becomes the keystone. His revelations aren’t as epic as expected. He fully realizes he’s a “dying machine of cells”, there are no absolutes, there is no real intimacy with other minds, no purpose to life beyond what we make, that everyone is a keystone (this isn’t explained well). It’s a cold, sterile, rather unhopeful ending, but you have to give credit to Egan for unflinchingly valuing truth above all else. (This story is in direct counterpoint to George R. R. Martin’s “The Way of Cross and Dragon”. The idea of observer created reality is also in Charles Harness’ “A Newer Reality”.)
Show Less
LibraryThing member antao
“At least two conflicting generalised measures can be applied to T, the space of all topological spaces with countable basis. Perrini’s measure [Perrini, 2012] and Saupe’s measure [Saupe, 2017] are both defined for all bounded subsets of T, and are equivalent when restricted to M - the space
In “Distress” by Greg Egan
“’The physicists have it easy - with their subject if not with me. The universe can’t hide anything: forget all that anthropomorphic Victorian nonsense about ‘prising out nature’s secrets.’ The universe can’t lie; it just does what it does, and there’s nothing else to it.”
In “Distress” by Greg Egan
Egan’s novel reminds me of one the best science books I read last year: “Lost in Math” by Hossenfelder: Mosala (an Information-Theory-applied-to-Physics-a-la-Roy-Frieden proponent; those of you who studied Statistcs in college surely remember the so-called Fisher’s statistic test of independent events) as Hossenfelder, and the Anthrocosmologists (ACs) as Stringer Physicists. Yes, yes, the emphasis on the beauty of the math & all those extra dimensions likely engages Hossenfelder's crap detector as does Mosala’s crap from the other two TOE competing theories in the novel. One of Hossenfelder's mantras is "pick the *right* math", not what's aesthetically pleasing or feels "natural", both of which stopped getting particle physics anywhere decades ago. Given Hossenfelder's frustration with theoretical physicists' disrespect for the Standard Model - despite its amazing success - because the math is "ugly" (ditto quantum theory) she might see this attempt to find the "right math" overrides its making the SM "more beautiful." Hossenfelder might enjoy that "If something isn't working, do more of it" (and repeat) is one of the strategies used by dysfunctional families, long recognized by Family Psychotherapists. I also like to think of Hossenfelder as the Keystone of Physics (like Mosala), but as things are going no such luck in sight...
"’If something isn't working, do more of it’ (and repeat)"
Seems also what the searchers of the fundamental unified force do with their theories regarding neutron decay. "If neutrons don't decay, extend the deadline." The Higgs was previously predicted and with a range for its mass. It was found within that range. After the Higgs, everything is nebulous speculation. Supersymmetry should have shown up even before the LHC. When it didn't, the goalposts were moved. And keep moving. "Build bigger colliders & they [particles] will come" makes sense to a certain point, but it's looking more & more that we're past that point. Yes, the dollars do take away funds for other research or infrastructure. Don't you remember all the wailing & gnashing of teeth inside & outside NASA when the decision to go with the Space Shuttle was made? That definite rearranged the research landscape. The F35 fighter seems to have done something similar with the defense budget, or so it's said.
The phrase Too Big to Fail comes to my mind.
At places clunky narrative and hard to engage with? Non-relatable characters? But sheer otherworldly ideas FFS: Stateless (IP-free pirate island), voluntary autists, Anthrocosmology, seven distinct biological sexes, yanking a camera gear out of Worth's body and not caring, Africa getting lots of Nobel prizes in Physics, autistic characters, competing TOEs... Beautiful, inspiring science communicated through exceptionally SFional content. Every sentence, every thought is deeply meaningful; the images and inserts I got while reading this novel added another dimension to the experience... The beauty of art, science and the human mind are merging into one entity in Egan’s novel. We’re not even near of having a TOE right now twenty years later; read “Distress” instead. It’s the second best thing. Egan is one of the few SF writers out there whose science actually feels up to date even we read him on TOE as in this novel more than 20 years since he wrote it. Many SF authors will mention TOE or whatever crap they come up with, but only as a convenient hook to introduce the same old time travel crappy yarn. When Egan writes about TOE, he's actually exploring the ramifications of current theory, not just using it as a hook for an old plot/narrative hack. Like Egan, we all have high hopes for a Scientific Renaissance when everyone understands the underlying physics governing the world. Do I understand everything he is on about? Nope. But that’s the fun of reading this kind of SF. It makes me think deep thoughts...
Bottom-line: Greg Egan, along with Ted Chiang (also one of my favourite writers, of a SFional persuasion or not; maybe I’ll do a post about my favourite SF writers one of these days when I feel so inclined), belong to the a category of writing I like to call ontological SF (as opposed to epistemological SF): writing seeking to depict the world itself (ontology), and not an interpretation of it (epistemology). In a SF publishing world of crappy lookalike writers, they both are very inspirational. Read them if you don’t do read brain-dead SF.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
Show More
of n-dimensional para-compact Hausdorff manifolds - but they yield contradictory results for sets of more exotic spaces.”In “Distress” by Greg Egan
“’The physicists have it easy - with their subject if not with me. The universe can’t hide anything: forget all that anthropomorphic Victorian nonsense about ‘prising out nature’s secrets.’ The universe can’t lie; it just does what it does, and there’s nothing else to it.”
In “Distress” by Greg Egan
Egan’s novel reminds me of one the best science books I read last year: “Lost in Math” by Hossenfelder: Mosala (an Information-Theory-applied-to-Physics-a-la-Roy-Frieden proponent; those of you who studied Statistcs in college surely remember the so-called Fisher’s statistic test of independent events) as Hossenfelder, and the Anthrocosmologists (ACs) as Stringer Physicists. Yes, yes, the emphasis on the beauty of the math & all those extra dimensions likely engages Hossenfelder's crap detector as does Mosala’s crap from the other two TOE competing theories in the novel. One of Hossenfelder's mantras is "pick the *right* math", not what's aesthetically pleasing or feels "natural", both of which stopped getting particle physics anywhere decades ago. Given Hossenfelder's frustration with theoretical physicists' disrespect for the Standard Model - despite its amazing success - because the math is "ugly" (ditto quantum theory) she might see this attempt to find the "right math" overrides its making the SM "more beautiful." Hossenfelder might enjoy that "If something isn't working, do more of it" (and repeat) is one of the strategies used by dysfunctional families, long recognized by Family Psychotherapists. I also like to think of Hossenfelder as the Keystone of Physics (like Mosala), but as things are going no such luck in sight...
"’If something isn't working, do more of it’ (and repeat)"
Seems also what the searchers of the fundamental unified force do with their theories regarding neutron decay. "If neutrons don't decay, extend the deadline." The Higgs was previously predicted and with a range for its mass. It was found within that range. After the Higgs, everything is nebulous speculation. Supersymmetry should have shown up even before the LHC. When it didn't, the goalposts were moved. And keep moving. "Build bigger colliders & they [particles] will come" makes sense to a certain point, but it's looking more & more that we're past that point. Yes, the dollars do take away funds for other research or infrastructure. Don't you remember all the wailing & gnashing of teeth inside & outside NASA when the decision to go with the Space Shuttle was made? That definite rearranged the research landscape. The F35 fighter seems to have done something similar with the defense budget, or so it's said.
The phrase Too Big to Fail comes to my mind.
At places clunky narrative and hard to engage with? Non-relatable characters? But sheer otherworldly ideas FFS: Stateless (IP-free pirate island), voluntary autists, Anthrocosmology, seven distinct biological sexes, yanking a camera gear out of Worth's body and not caring, Africa getting lots of Nobel prizes in Physics, autistic characters, competing TOEs... Beautiful, inspiring science communicated through exceptionally SFional content. Every sentence, every thought is deeply meaningful; the images and inserts I got while reading this novel added another dimension to the experience... The beauty of art, science and the human mind are merging into one entity in Egan’s novel. We’re not even near of having a TOE right now twenty years later; read “Distress” instead. It’s the second best thing. Egan is one of the few SF writers out there whose science actually feels up to date even we read him on TOE as in this novel more than 20 years since he wrote it. Many SF authors will mention TOE or whatever crap they come up with, but only as a convenient hook to introduce the same old time travel crappy yarn. When Egan writes about TOE, he's actually exploring the ramifications of current theory, not just using it as a hook for an old plot/narrative hack. Like Egan, we all have high hopes for a Scientific Renaissance when everyone understands the underlying physics governing the world. Do I understand everything he is on about? Nope. But that’s the fun of reading this kind of SF. It makes me think deep thoughts...
Bottom-line: Greg Egan, along with Ted Chiang (also one of my favourite writers, of a SFional persuasion or not; maybe I’ll do a post about my favourite SF writers one of these days when I feel so inclined), belong to the a category of writing I like to call ontological SF (as opposed to epistemological SF): writing seeking to depict the world itself (ontology), and not an interpretation of it (epistemology). In a SF publishing world of crappy lookalike writers, they both are very inspirational. Read them if you don’t do read brain-dead SF.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Lyndatrue
This has been a very carefully read book, and a delight, all the way through. Considering how very long ago it was written (1997), the math remains interesting, and still relevant. Greg Egan has interesting characters, and fascinating premises. On to Diaspora, next (written in 1998), and then
Extraordinarily inventive, and I'll read it again, and soon.
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Teranesia (1999).Extraordinarily inventive, and I'll read it again, and soon.
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