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Quarantine by Greg Egan
01/04/2008 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 
pub: Gollancz. 251 page enlarged paperback. Price: £ 7.99 (UK only). ISBN: 978-0-575-08172-7. Buy Quarantine in the USA - or Buy Quarantine in the UK  check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk
Gollancz are currently re-issuing all of author Greg Egan's books and I picked this one, 'Quarantine', at random to read. I mean, it's got all the ingredients of a Science Fiction novel. Big black dumb object blocks the Solar System off from the stars leaving people wondering what it all means. Shades of Asimov's 'Nightfall' story except we still have the light from the sun. Then there is also the problem of how much can I say about the story without giving away the cause of the effect except I learnt more from the back cover about the reality than I did in the story.
Likewise, I probably learnt more about the fact that humans were modifying their minds from the back cover than any demonstration at the beginning of the book. Adding bio-mechanical modules is more like adding cybernetic knowledge than bio-engineering new minds though. If anything, the initial chunk is more a first person detective story looking for a missing woman and then getting into her story to resolve the end. In many respects, I felt this was more of a cop-out to the bigger problem and didn't really address the significance of the quarantine bubble as much as it should.
It might have been me, though. Maybe I was expecting something more significant about this bubble than was used in the story. Certainly, I would have thought characters in this reality would have been investigating the cause more in the thirty years since it happened. In many respects, Egan set everything up to fall into place than to cause too more brain-power to be used to let the reader in on what was going on.
That's not to say I was perplexed, just wish things could have been on the scale such an occurrence would have created. I suspect this one is for Egan fans only.
GF Willmetts
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