Distress (Paperback)

As far as Egan the "idea man," well.....
The scenario of the butchered man revived for questioning is Alfreds Bester's The Stars My Destination.

The mob of New Agers besieging the cosmologists is Isaac Asimov's Nightfall.
And the computer that triggers the end of the universe by calculating ultimate truth is Ray Bradberry's The Nine Million Name of God.

.... All of which were better than Distress

Egan's other novels (the two i've read) do a much better job of that. But in this one... For the first half of the book, the scenes don't develop the plot at all; they're just triggers for the protagonist to spout another philosophical or ethical lecture. These tend to be not very deep and most of the people reading this book will probably agree with them anyway.

The actual plot doesn't start being developed until page 200 or bette, and when it comes, it may disappoint a lot of hard science readers. The thesis that intelligent beings somehow have a special place in the laws of the universe (rather than obeying the same laws of particles, forces, quantum mechanics, etc. as all other objects) is very weak---much weaker than the similar theme put forth in Egan's other novel "Quarantine".

And in the end, the plot's resolution doesn't come out of the desire to have a good story; it's just a final shot at delivering the main philosophical message (and yes we do get a final "lecture" at the end), which is that it is impossible for people to really understand each other.

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.