Quarantine

Huh, what a frustrating book. There's a really good psychological novel in here hidden in the science conceit. The best parts of the book read like a version of PK Dick's schizoid disassociative novels. The mind mods work much like the Pennfield mood organ and the way the narrator can't trust his own mental state and individualization reads like the most disorienting parts of VALIS or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Loved that aspect of the story.

But then this early Egan novel veers into Egan's trademark hard-science conceits. He tries so, so hard to make quantum superposition and many worlds make coherent sense as a psychological framework as well as an action plot device. And it almost works. But it doesn't quite hold together and at parts it just reads like gibberish rather than entertaining fiction or brilliant hard scifi. It just didn't quite work.

Interesting read though. And it's kind of nice to see Egan writing human characters with human emotions and interactions; that's not really his strength in his later books.