Dispersion

By Greg Egan

2020

First Published

3.32

Average Rating

126

Number of Pages

3H51M

Audio Length

This latest novella from Greg Egan, Australia's reigning master of hard, rigorous SF, is an astonishment and a delight. With great economy and precision, it tells the story of an unprecedented new disease—the Dispersion of the title—and its effects on both individual sufferers and the fragmented social structure they inhabit. In a world not quite our own, every living thing is born into one of six discrete “fractions” that are incompatible with—and often invisible to—each other. These fractions have coexisted peacefully for centuries, but now a disease has appeared that seems to drag the infected parts of the body into a different fraction. The effects are devastating. Individual victims suffer painful, protracted deaths. Entire communities turn against one another, and a state approaching perpetual war takes hold. Against this backdrop, Egan has constructed an absorbing account of people determined to confront, comprehend and ultimately overcome a disease that has no recognizable cause, that threatens to obliterate the bonds that hold the human community together. Like the best of Egan's earlier work, Dispersion is both wildly imaginative and plausibly detailed. It offers the sort of unique narrative pleasures that only science fiction can provide, and that Egan's many readers have come to expect. They won't be disappointed.

Avg Rating

3.32

Number of Ratings

135

5 STARS

10%

4 STARS

34%

3 STARS

36%

2 STARS

16%

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Greg Egan

Author · 47 books

Greg Egan specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, posthumanism, mind transfer, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational naturalism over religion. He is a Hugo Award winner (and has been shortlisted for the Hugos three other times), and has also won the John W Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. Some of his earlier short stories feature strong elements of supernatural horror, while due to his more popular science fiction he is known within the genre for his tendency to deal with complex and highly technical material (including inventive new physics and epistemology) in an unapologetically thorough manner. Egan is a famously reclusive author when it comes to public appearances, he doesn't attend science fiction conventions, doesn't sign books and there are no photos available of him on the web. Excerpted from Wikipedia.