Quarantine

by Greg Egan

Reviewed by Ruby

I picked up this book because the concept looked interesting; the world has been enveloped by a huge bubble that cuts it off from the rest of the universe. When I started reading it I noticed that it didn’t have much to do about that. At least at first. It stars off with a PI searching for a woman, who vanishes from a mental hospital. It then goes from a crime novel with a lot of sci fi elements to a sci fi books dealing with quantum mechanics on a macrocosmic level. Needless to say it went way over my head. I have a basic grasp of quantum mechanics, with the whole Schrodinger’s Cat and everything but it went very beyond me

It was too bad that I couldn’t understand what the author was trying to communicate because the world that was laid out for us was very interesting and very detailed. The technology that was used by the characters seemed like it would be things that I could see people inventing in the very near future. Even the story itself was well written and was fascinating. Even then, though the book wasn’t that long, there were parts in it that seemed to drag and take forever to go anywhere. There was even a section where the author explained about this radical group and its leader in great detail only for it to have nothing to do with the rest of the book.

Unfortunately, even though I understood the overall concept of what he was saying there were just pages and pages of technical mumbo jumbo that I skimmed because they might as well have been talking another language and overall the book just felt disjointed.

Grade: C