Distress [Mass Market Paperback]

Greg Egan (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 8, 1998

Investigative reporter Andrew Worth turns down a documentary on a mysterious new mental illness -- "Distress, " or acute clinical anxiety syndrome, for another assignment. He's on his way to the artifical island of Stateless, where the world's top physicists are gathering to decide on a new TOE, or Theory of Everything, to replace Einstein's outmoded legacy.

Chief among the scientists is the brilliant African Nobel laureate, Violet Mosala, the focus of Worth's story, who is the subject of mysterious death threats. Worth begins his own investigation, but it takes on even more urgency when he finds that Distress, the mental plague now affecting millions, is linked somehow to the approaching "Aleph Moment" when the TOE is finalized. The countdown has begun for a disaster that will reach all the way back to the Big Bang. And beyond...

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

After developing a lengthy exposé on "frankenscience," SeeNet reporter Andrew Worth is burnt out. So burnt that he passes up a plum assignment covering the new disease "Distress." Instead, he asks for a lower-key job profiling Violet Mosala, a scientist who earned a Nobel Prize at the age of 25 and who is about to announce her version of the Theory of Everything. The TOE is an attempt to explain how all scientific theories fit together, but it may actually be the catalyst that created the universe, making Violet the "Keystone" of the universe. So much for the quiet assignment ... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

About 60 years from now, SeeNet journalist and narrator Andrew Worth (he has a camera and computer software hardwired into his body) muscles in on a colleague's assignment to cover a physics convention on the artificial coral island, Stateless, at which Nobel laureate Violet Mosala is expected to announce a watertight Theory of Everything (TOE). The event, however, is complicated by the presence of several noisy anti-science cult groups--among them the mysterious and secretive Anthrocosmologists who believe that whoever first formulates the TOE will become the Keystone in which the completed TOE, mingling information theory with particle physics, will actually change the structure of the universe. Andrew's Anthrocosmology contact, Akili Kuwale, a ``gender migrant'' (s/he has no breasts or sexual organs), warns that a particularly violent, extreme faction intends to assassinate Violet to prevent the Aleph Moment when the completed TOE's effects kick in. Soon, Andrew falls sick--the extremists have infected him, intending that he pass the virus on to Violet; she falls ill, but has arranged for supercomputers to complete her calculations and disseminate the results. As the extremists redouble their violent efforts, Stateless's former owners send mercenaries to recapture the island, while a sort of reverse echo of the Aleph Moment results in a wave of mass insanity, or Distress, whose victims apparently have all turned into Keystones! Challenging, well informed, and iconoclastic, but also abstruse and often heavy: admirable rather than enjoyable, but an impressive first hardcover nonetheless. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Eos (January 8, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061057274
• ISBN-13: 978-0061057274
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #732,028 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am a science fiction writer and computer programmer. You can find information, illustrations and interactive applets that supplement my books at www.gregegan.net

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Bioengineering, cosmological physics, murder. Top notch. January 30, 1997

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

(I read the UK paperback.) Greg Egan is currently the best
hard sf writer I know of. He writes science fiction the
way it SHOULD be: imaginative yet plausible, stuff that
makes you think, stuff that draws on real science rather
than warp-space hyper-rubbish.

Egan's novels are pretty good but his short stories are
really excellent. It's interesting that, although "Distress" is a novel, it opens
with a series of interviews (the protagonist is a
journalist), each one of which is like a mini-short story
about some aspect of biotechnology. This plays to Egan's strength: idea, idea, idea. However, after a while the
story settles down to the
central plot, about a theoretical physicist whose life
is endangered by a lunatic group with some strange ideas
about cosmology.

I strongly recommend this book. It deserves a 10 for
ideas; I am downgrading it to a 9 because other aspects
of Egan's writing could still be improved.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A science fiction gem. March 24, 2001

By Stephen Dedman

Format:Mass Market Paperback

Distress is not only the best of Egan's novels that I've yet read, but one of the most inventive and accomplished sf novels I've read in many years. Andrew Worth is a science journalist in a world populated with ignorance cultists, voluntary autists, and gender migrants. Having finished the 'frankenscience' series Junk DNA, he turns down an offer to tape a show on the newly endemic Acute Clinical Anxiety Syndrome (a.k.a Distress), to compile a profile of quantum physicist Violet Mosala, currently at work on a Theory of Everything, or TOE. Worth leaves Sydney and his marriage (both in ruins), and travels to Stateless, a utopian anarchy on an island constructed with pirated biotech. Plots against both Mosala and Stateless escalate as the novel heads towards an astonishing climax. While Egan is best known for his ideas - and there are more ideas in the first chapter of this book than in many sf novels - his characterization in this book is excellent: Worth is a well-rounded character with his own opinions and motivation, Mosala is a welcome example of a fictional sane scientist, and the asex Akili Kuwale is a masterpiece of sf characterization.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Mind Blowing April 17, 2001

By Omer Belsky VINE™ VOICE

Format:Mass Market Paperback

Distress is a very unique novel. It is a quest for the intelect, a discussion of the implications of technology on our lives, and even more importantly, discussion about the implications of actual science on life.

If you want to know what the future will be like, Egan is a place to look for inspiration (although not for answers). Egan not only understands technology and science, and not only has the imagniation to forsee the future in ways which are original and thought provoking, but is able to see the social consequences of technology.

Egan's story, especially in the first two thirds of the novel, is an almost entirely successful and constant challange to the mind, in an enjoyable story. Egan's prose is powerful, and you can often enjoy his phrases, and while his minor characters are awfully indistinguishable, the two major ones, Violet Mosala and Andrew Worth, are very well realised and are sympathetic.

The novel contains ideas about the Theory of Everything. The theory of Everything is a unification of Einstein's theory of Relativity and Quantom Mechanics - it's a theory that can explain, at least theoretically, EVERYTHING, from the motions of planets to those of electrons.

The novel doesn't speculate as much about TOE itself, but about the social and psychological and even ethical responses of it, and it does so by introducing a pseudo-scientific religion which glorifies and demonises the descoverer of the theory.

This religion is interesting, but it is one of the two major failure of the novel because (slight spoiler here) it turns up that it is true in a sense. This changes the story from a scientific to a metaphysic one, and pushes us towards the realms of fantasy.

The other major weakness is that Egan's plotting and story elements are relatively poor. Crisises can be resolved in manners which are hardly satsifactory to the reader, in the sense that they rarely are well established or given proper pay off. Egan attempts to write a 'thriller' especially at the end, and it doesn't work.

But those are relatively minor problems. Distress is a novel of ideas, and thus it functions brilliantly. It'll make you think. So go read it.