Most helpful customer reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Returning to the island of butterflies, Jun 13 2003
As a boy, Prabir Suresh lived on a remote island in Indonesia he named Teranesia with his parents and younger sister. His parents were researching a butterfly that had unique genetic mutations, so Prabir was left to his own devices much of the time. They thought they were remote enough to escape notice during the Indonesian civil war, so were not prepared when it reached them. With intense feelings of guilt and of protectiveness toward his sister, Prabir grows up in Canada, and hides all thoughts of Teranesia beneath the everyday rhythms of work and his routine with his boyfriend. When his sister joins a research team sent to investigate the growing number of new species in the remote islands of Indonesia, Prabir can't hold back his feelings of protectiveness and follows her alone. Joining with an independent scientist, he collects evidence of the strange new animals and plants, and faces down his darkest demons when he finally ends up on Teranesia, where it seems the mutation revolution began. Ending on a somewhat mystifying note, "Teranesia" nonetheless is a fascinating and compelling story of a young man journeying into the darkest reaches of himself, all wrapped inside a truly scientific science fiction novel. It's a massively ambitious novel and is largely successful at its aims.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
They won't like it, Dec 4 2001
Any of the grups of people who are drawn to buy SF for cleverness won't like this. It gets personal.Surprisingly behind the young survivors this book becomes scathing book at times, and yet a brutally simple story of hope. One of the few Australian writers with any gumption to talk about the attitudes here to immigration, he also tends to ruffle other feathers He knows so many out in literature land will refuse to recognise the truthof the dangerously obscure and mediocre doublespeak the intellectual world tries to implant into discussions of true importance in culture, simply to create boundaries within which their positions are secured from reality. A novel of ideas that after you finish this may seem to fly away, and perhaps are united in passion rather than regular form and not always concretely stitched, it fires off with great passion in a number of directions. As such it seems less like a book and more like memories in review. At times the main thrust seems merely hopeful in comparison with the involved issues and episodes. Some Egan fans will fell a slackening perhaps, but this and the sometimes disparate, episodic nature of the story emphasises the fractures of perceived reality pretty well. Whether we do experience our reality as this fractured is moot. What Egan posits is clearly, that we can.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Not up to Egan's Standards, Aug 18 2001
A weaker effort from an otherwise brilliant writer. The book's main message seems to be to promote science and rationalism against superstition and sociobabble. Egan's scenes featuring postmodern sociologists Keith and Anita are the high points in the book: "Well, I'd already done a Ph.D. in X-Files Theory at UCLA, and Anita was just starting her Master's in Diana Studies with the University of Leeds, via the net. U Toronto was in the process of opening its own Department of Transgressive Discourseat last!so it was only natural that we both applied for positions." Unfortunately, the book severely undermines that message with a weak ending that essentially asks the reader conditioned to rationalism to take a denouement full of biobabble on faith. While I wouldn't hesitate to highly recommend any other novel by Egan, I cannot recommend this one.
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