Quarantine

by Greg Egan

A book review by Mark L. Olson

Harper Prism, 1992, $4.50, 280 pp.
Quarantine is yet another pyrotechnic SF novel by Greg Egan following his standard technique of taking some outre speculation and building a story around it. Quarantine starts out ordinary enough and builds to crescendos of spectacular science and action, with a very healthy dose of paranoia and how-do-we-know-that-anything-is-true thrown in.

The central gimmick in Quarantine concerns the problems of quantum mechanics and the collapse of the wavefunction: QM is a theory perfect except for the kludgy requirement that the wavefunction collapse on observation. Egan's book revolves around that in a wonderful and beautifully plausible way. I won't go through the plot, but I will assure you that he does a very good job of making it all hang together.

Just about everything Egan writes is good.

Recommended.

See my other review of books by Greg Egan: Shild's Ladder, Quarantine

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