Rating: 
Summary: Sense of wonder SF at its finest
Review: Some people have criticized Quarantine for its lack of characterization. Frankly, if you're looking for that kind of book, you're in the wrong place. Don't get me wrong: I love a good character-oriented book--but Quarantine is much more about drowning the reader in a profound sense of wonder.Be forewarned, this is not light reading material: Egan demands full intellectual participation from his reader, and a reader without a basic understanding of quantum mechanics and the many-worlds theory might not enjoy Quarantine as thoroughly as someone with that background. But if you're willing to put in the effort, this is a richly rewarding book to read. (One more warning: I strongly suggest that you not read the description on the back of this book. Not only does it spoil the plot, but it is also very misleading and it ruins a great deal of the story's suspense.)
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful stuff
Review: Surely, Quarantine by Greg Egan is the novel to read while we await the first real brain modification sets to be sold on the internet...... Before going to bed you spray some vial content into your nostrils, and clever nanomachines are carried into your brain. You lie awake a little thinking about the nanorobots finding their way inside your brain. Whether they will make a perfect mod, - or make vital brain centers into neural spaghetti.... When the nanomachines have rewired parts of your brain - You'll be the same you've always been - with a new career, and new allegiances, new values, new capabilities - that's all....
Lets face it, everything you do changes who you are. Eating changes who you are. As does not eating. So, neural mods change peoples values. So, a little moral nanosurgery creates a whole new person - hey, its a free world, isn't it? Surely, we humans make choices all the time. Some of them good, some of them bad. Sometimes we "murder" the good people we might have been.
In Egans world there is way out though.
Through brain modifications and
Egans "Quantum Mechanics measurement problem revisited" we can stop being stuck with our bad choices, regain our godliness, and rejoin the rest of superspace.
Or perhaps not ..... Wonderful stuff. -Simon
Rating: 
Summary: I found this story very frustrating.
Review: The beginning was very fasinating, and introduced us to the world of nano-technologies. I started looking forward to the mystery of finding a missing woman and then became very disapointed as the story went off in other tangents that confused me greatly. Other characters were glimpsed for short stays but their place in the story was never fulfilled. The end of the story just left me glad that I did not have another page to turn. The story left me empty and not wanting more.
Rating:
Summary: An outstandingly original book. Fascinating new ideas!
Review: The field of hard SF is one in which it is very difficult to come up with a really new idea. Greg Egan has managed to fill an entire book with fascinating concepts and original ideas.
If you have done any reading about the work being done at the fringes of modern science in quantum mechanics then you will be astounded with the way that the author has produced a ripping yarn from such dry ideas.
This is one of those books I press on my friends.
Rating:
Summary: Simply horrible
Review: The premise of this book was exciting: a bubble suddenly surrounds the solar system, blocking out the stars. Is it aliens, a black hole, God ? After the first couple of interesting chapters, the book changes directions and becomes a dreadful technomystery. The are consortiums and convoluted plans within plans. I stopped reading about half way through because I couldn't stand it anymore. I did thumb to the back to see what the cause of the bubble was and it was explained in one short throw-away paragraph. The writing here is simply terrible. It is of the quality you would expect from a high school writing fair honorable mention.
Rating: 
Summary: The Ending Got Smeared
Review: The premise of this story is that our everyday world of experience is underpinned with a series of smeared, multi-valued quantum-probable worlds. My first whine is who picked the title, Quarantine--one having nothing to do with the story? Next the importance of the Bubble asked the reader to stretch since man hasn't ventured outside the solar system--who, besides academia, cares if the star show flickers out? The Author peeks into the future and finds that brains have been augmented with nanobug implants to make the wearer focused, loyal, strong, brave, this or that. I liked the cyber enhanced PI but after awhile it seems like Nick was playing a chess game with his own head. Also each implant enhancement came at the high cost of stifling human qualities. Finally, I liked the secret Ensemble group but got lost when the new secret, splinter group, The Canon, declared war on the Ensemble. The reader never finds out whether the original Ensemble group's goals were good or bad.
Greg's story started out great but somewhere along the trail the theories of quantum physics, eigenstates, collapsed multiverses, and nanobot implants smeared up the ending, but good. I thought I was on board until page 264 when Nick burns that clean hole in the bad guys head. Then this tough guy PI turns baby-puss! It seems his brain implants are turned off and he's never ever killed anyone--'my guts are squirming.' Then the name of the story becomes pick your ending--the reader gets several alternative conclusions. None of them are prepared for. At this point it doesn't really matter which ending you pick since they were all equally arbitrary. The ending was murkier than the probability waves that never seemed to collapse. 'Am I still smeared, Mama?' All in all it appeared that the story's multi-layers of quantum complexity were inserted for their own sake, rather than to allow characters to develop and work out their conflicts.
Rating: 
Summary: Great idea, bad writer.
Review: The world was fascinating. The concept was fresh. The author should have put it into a short story. As it was he beat the reader to death with useless facts, backgrounds, and sidetracks to dead ends. The author did have some interesting writing conventions as he leapt the reader from one failed eigenstate to a successful one. This writer should be forced to write only short stories until he learns how to pace a full novel/novella.
Rating:
Summary: Pointless technology, pointless ending
Review: This book is full of technobabble for technobabble's sake; separate the wheat from the chaff and you're left with a mediocre short story with an unsatisfying ending. I admit that 90 pages into it there are a host of potentially promising possibilities. But to borrow the author's deus, he deftly manages to "collapse" the many possible outcomes into the least satisfying, least meaningful "reality". I only hope that of all the alternate universe me's out there, I'm the only one that read this through to the end and that all the others spent their time doing more enjoyable tasks.
Rating:
Summary: Pointless technology, pointless ending
Review: This book is full of technobabble for technobabble's sake; separate the wheat from the chaff and you're left with a mediocre short story with an unsatisfying ending. I admit that 90 pages into it there are a host of potentially promising possibilities. But to borrow the author's deus, he deftly manages to "collapse" the many possible outcomes into the least satisfying, least meaningful "reality". I only hope that of all the alternate universe me's out there, I'm the only one that read this through to the end and that all the others spent their time doing more enjoyable tasks.
Rating:
Summary: Quantum Mechanics, with a twist.
Review: This is an extremely well written book. It takes a look at the wild future of Quantum physics and nano-technolygy. It gives you a great beggining look at the basics of Quantum physics while keeping it understandible and exciting. And it also builds a great PI character who is struggeling to understand who he truly is. The ending is unexpected, though slightly unsatisfying. A definatly must read for any Hard SF fan!
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