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Greg Egan

Distress: A Novel Paperback – January 6, 2015

by Greg Egan (Author)

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“All right. He’s dead. Go ahead and talk to him.”

It is the year 2055, and the battle of the sexes has seven combatants rather than two. “The illusion of empathy” has been dispensed with, and a few idealistic souls try to create a utopia with pirated technology.

But a wired journalist, Andrew Worth, doesn’t want any part of the pop “Frankenscience” regularly dished out to the masses. Burned-out after completing a documentary on controversial developments in biotechnology, he turns down a chance to report on a baffling new mental disorder known as Distress and instead takes an assignment covering the Einstein Centenary Conference on the artificial island of Stateless. There, a young South African physicist, Violet Mosala, is expected to unveil her candidate for a Theory of Everything.

But the assignment is not the tropical respite Worth was expecting. Unfortunately academia’s facade of civility is dangerously cracked with a seething maelstrom of plotting, assassination attempts, and rebellion, and Worth is dragged down into the nightmare. The world’s only hope for survival lies in Violet Mosala’s development of a final Theory of Everything, but whether it will lead to the total destruction of life as we know it or the complete remaking of the universe may be a risk too dangerous to take.

Greg Egan’s audacious voice and literary scope create a fragmented futuristic world where technology and bioengineering threaten humanity’s very existence.

Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Night Shade
Publication date

January 6, 2015
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.1 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

1597805416
ISBN-13

978-1597805414
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A dizzying intellectual adventure.”
—The New York Times

About the Author

Greg Egan is a computer programmer, and the author of the acclaimed SF novels Permutation City, Diaspora, Teranesia, Quarantine, and the Orthogonal trilogy, all published by Night Shade Books. He has won the Hugo Award as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Egan’s short fiction has been published in a variety of places, including Interzone, Asimov’s, and Nature.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Night Shade; Reprint edition (January 6, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1597805416
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1597805414
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,475,454 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,500 in Australia & Oceania Literature
- #4,237 in Technothrillers (Books)
- #5,373 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
125 ratings

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Greg Egan

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Greg Egan lives in Perth, Western Australia. He has won the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Japanese Seiun Award for best translated fiction.

Customer reviews

5 star		40%
4 star		32%
3 star		21%
2 star		6%
1 star		1%

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Truth disguised as "bad" science fiction (with a bad audio-book narration)

Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2014

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I tend to describe this book as "truth, disguised as bad sci-fi". And it kind of is both.

I first read this book almost 2 decades ago. At the time I remember it as a nice, solid, near-future sci-fi book. What I remembered most from that first read was just how believable and interesting the genetic engineering aspects of the world were.

I remember thinking to myself that "yes - if biotech is to do in the near future what information-tech did in the near past - this is what it would look like".

Similar to Larry Niven's "Flash Crowd", which is the first realistic description of a society with teleporters I ever saw, this book was the first realistic description of a society with advanced biotech I ever saw.

So that's what I thought about the first time I read it - an enjoyable sci-fi book with good science but bad characters. You know the kind - where all the characters are "too logical" and only exist to explain the science.

Around a decade later, I got an itch to re-read the book. Took me a couple of years to track it down in a second hand book store.

I re-read it - and to my amazement I found that almost all my opinions about society, sexuality, social justice, and "people" in general were in this book. Opinions and views that I thought I developed on my own from observations of the world - I found spelled out almost identical in this book.

Without me realizing it - this book has completely shaped my world view. Even re-reading it, I don't know *how* it did it. The ideas are conveyed... poorly, in the usual manner of sci-fi books, using flat characters and spoon-feedingly-long conversations. Yet there you have it.

I would recommend this book to everyone. Not the audio-book though - that's horrible. Whoever narrated it has no business narrating anything.

14 people found this helpful

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David

Very Interesting Premise, But ….

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2022

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The premise of this well-written book is excellent. The physics that drives the story can be, at times, difficult. But this shouldn’t cause potential readers to shy away. I could only give this book four stars, however, because of the unnecessary, out-of-place, and clumsy “physical” episode that takes place near the end. Why Mr. Egan felt compelled to wander down this path seems a mystery as it does nothing for the book’s plot. Otherwise, an excellent read (if a bit cerebral, which is a good thing).

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Joshua Smith

Avoid strenuous bowel movements. And try not to laugh too hard.

Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2014

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So many plot threads come together in unexpected ways in this novel, that it is difficult to say much about the plot without spoiling something. I would just suggest reading the blurb.

I was strongly reminded of _Quarantine_, in which for some reason only a human mind is a suitable observer to collapse wave functions of quantum events. This particular plot point is silly in _Quarantine_, and its rough equivalent here is even sillier. (All of Egan's Subjective Cosmology Cycle, while aptly named, gets a little too speculative for my taste--the Dust Theory in _Permutation City_ would be another example.) Nonetheless, the suspense thriller elements of the plot succeeded in keeping me guessing almost to the end, and a few of the sideplots were excellent: the Neo-DNA plot echoed and expanded on Egan's short story "The Moat" (and was brilliantly brought back into the novel without warning about two-thirds through), and one of the five sexes in the novel set the stage for _Diaspora_ (so far my favorite of Egan's novels, though I have yet to read _Zendegi_, _Teranesia_, or the Orthogonal Trilogy). It also had an unusual amount of humor for an Egan novel, and several characteristically awkward sex scenes (as in _Schild's Ladder_ and _Permutation City_).

I'll give this one four stars for the suspense, surprises, and abundance of clever ideas. It's more of a page-turner than most of Egan's novels, but I think _Diaspora_, _Schild's Ladder_, and _Incandescence_ are more rewarding overall, and give more insight into the author's worldview.

Edit: On thinking about this book a little longer, one thing that occurs to me as pretty silly is that Worth had a documentary, apparently recently enough that he was married to Gina, about the five sexes. However, in the novel, it's obvious that ufems, umales, and asexes are basically everywhere, so wouldn't this documentary be a bit like making an exposé in 2014 called "On the Gays and their Gayness" and having it be a big hit? Am I off base here?

2 people found this helpful

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Jenny

Sexuality, understated philosophies, anarchy, biochemistry... All of my favorite things?

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2017

Verified Purchase

I don't know if I'll ever give Greg Egan less than 5 stars. Maybe more philosophy than science and still more science than any other author I've read. It seems that heaven for Egan may be the same as the one I have contemplated myself: understanding.
The exploration of sexuality was both brutal and beautiful. I will make my sisters read this.
Distress was a slower start since I'd come from Schild's Ladder and didn't quite want to be stuck on Earth, but once I got going I was reading through my multivariable calculus class. (Wish me luck on the test...). Thank you Egan for some fresh insights to keep my brain working!

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GeekDaddy

tour de force!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 2, 2013

Verified Purchase

It's often said the best sci-fi is that which requires a sci-fi setting. It seems obvious, but the vast majority of sci-fi consists of stories that could be told equally well when transposed to another setting. Greg Egan is one of a very few writers whose work who satisfies this basic tenet. Many of his stories would simply not be tellable in any other setting. The concepts and events related within absolutely depend on technologies and ways of thinking that do not exist at the time of writing.

This is proper HARD sci-fi. But it's not hard to read.
A common criticism of hard sci-fi is that it contains only ideas, and little plot or action. Plenty of both are to be found here.

Another criticism commonly leveled at sci-fi is that the characters are wooden, and show no development thru the course of the story. Egan again bucks the trend, one may truly use the term 'novel' to describe many of his books, especially this one.

Egan is renowned for his extremely creative and mind-bending ideas. This is perhaps not his weirdest excursion, but there's plenty to sink your teeth into in that regard.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this particular work is how all these elements, which are not often found together at all, are perfectly balanced here. There's not too much action at the expense of character development, and there's not to much introspection at the expense of action. Everything fits together to make one cohesive and immensely satisfying whole.

I've read a lot of Egans books, he's one of my favourite authors, but this one is still my favourite, for the reasons outlined above. I don't think I could go into any more detail without risk of plot spoilers. It's a good 'un, what are you waiting for?!

2 people found this helpful

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