Distress - Greg Egan

Greg Egan's sixth book, and one that almost makes me regret not picking him up much sooner. It concerns - or perhaps, given Umberto Eco, it absolutely does not concern, much in the way that a tangent touches but never penetrates a circle - the quest for a Theory of Everything and an epidemic of mental illness related to the Observer Effect, in a near future world that is just crying out for a proper state-of-the-nation address. One thing that would make me very happy is if science fiction authors would begin including census data in the back of their books - population, gross domestic product, education, lifestyle, legal data for the civilisations they describe. In ...  Read the complete review