Teranesia

Rating:
Summary: Incredibly promising, but...
Review: ...unfortunately not done nearly as well as it could have been. The characters are far better drawn than they have been in any previous Egan books, but the plot suffered. The ending is terrible. Nothing is resolved, nothing is connected from the story. Characters just disappear, without anything really explained.

The idea behind the book, as it always is in what Egan writes, is fascinating. It could have been used far more than it was, however; I got the feeling that Egan rushed through the writing of the book. The typeface is rather large and only lasts for 320 pages - this book should have been a good 50% longer. More of the ideas should have been illustrated by things happening instead of through implausible long conversations between characters.

"Teranesia" is worth reading simply for the brilliant ideas behind the text. But it's not worth buying, especially not in hardcover, when it only takes a few hours to read. Get it from the library instead.

Rating:
Summary: Not up to Egan's Standards
Review: A weaker effort from an otherwise brilliant writer. The book's main message seems to be to promote science and rationalism against superstition and sociobabble. Egan's scenes featuring postmodern sociologists Keith and Anita are the high points in the book:

"Well, I'd already done a Ph.D. in X-Files Theory at UCLA, and Anita was just starting her Master's in Diana Studies with the University of Leeds, via the net. U Toronto was in the process of opening its own Department of Transgressive Discourseat last!so it was only natural that we both applied for positions."

Unfortunately, the book severely undermines that message with a weak ending that essentially asks the reader conditioned to rationalism to take a denouement full of biobabble on faith.

While I wouldn't hesitate to highly recommend any other novel by Egan, I cannot recommend this one.

Rating:
Summary: They won't like it
Review: Any of the grups of people who are drawn to buy SF for cleverness won't like this. It gets personal.

Surprisingly behind the young survivors this book becomes scathing book at times, and yet a brutally simple story of hope. One of the few Australian writers with any gumption to talk about the attitudes here to immigration, he also tends to ruffle other feathers He knows so many out in literature land will refuse to recognise the truthof the dangerously obscure and mediocre doublespeak the intellectual world tries to implant into discussions of true importance in culture, simply to create boundaries within which their positions are secured from reality.

A novel of ideas that after you finish this may seem to fly away, and perhaps are united in passion rather than regular form and not always concretely stitched, it fires off with great passion in a number of directions. As such it seems less like a book and more like memories in review. At times the main thrust seems merely hopeful in comparison with the involved issues and episodes.

Some Egan fans will fell a slackening perhaps, but this and the sometimes disparate, episodic nature of the story emphasises the fractures of perceived reality pretty well. Whether we do experience our reality as this fractured is moot. What Egan posits is clearly, that we can.

Rating:
Summary: Returning to the island of butterflies
Review: As a boy, Prabir Suresh lived on a remote island in Indonesia he named Teranesia with his parents and younger sister. His parents were researching a butterfly that had unique genetic mutations, so Prabir was left to his own devices much of the time. They thought they were remote enough to escape notice during the Indonesian civil war, so were not prepared when it reached them. With intense feelings of guilt and of protectiveness toward his sister, Prabir grows up in Canada, and hides all thoughts of Teranesia beneath the everyday rhythms of work and his routine with his boyfriend. When his sister joins a research team sent to investigate the growing number of new species in the remote islands of Indonesia, Prabir can't hold back his feelings of protectiveness and follows her alone. Joining with an independent scientist, he collects evidence of the strange new animals and plants, and faces down his darkest demons when he finally ends up on Teranesia, where it seems the mutation revolution began. Ending on a somewhat mystifying note, "Teranesia" nonetheless is a fascinating and compelling story of a young man journeying into the darkest reaches of himself, all wrapped inside a truly scientific science fiction novel. It's a massively ambitious novel and is largely successful at its aims.

Rating:
Summary: Horribly abrupt ending
Review: Egan develops great characters, and, as always, an interesting premise based in science. I've always enjoyed his forays into AI & physics.

The last two chapters, however, destroy this book. He takes the interesting biogenetic monster virus he's developed so well, and has it attack the main character. The book ends immediately, and rather than explain the mystery and leave you thoughtful about science and the future, no conclusions are drawn at all.

Finish the book next time, Greg.

Rating:
Summary: Horribly abrupt ending
Review: Egan develops great characters, and, as always, an interesting premise based in science. I've always enjoyed his forays into AI & physics.

The last two chapters, however, destroy this book. He takes the interesting biogenetic monster virus he's developed so well, and has it attack the main character. The book ends immediately, and rather than explain the mystery and leave you thoughtful about science and the future, no conclusions are drawn at all.

Finish the book next time, Greg.

Rating:
Summary: Great Ideas, Nasty Opinions
Review: Greg Egan explores a brilliant fusion of molecular biology and quantum physics in Teranesia in the form of a puzzling island that seems to defy evolution. He does so in an articulate, intelligent way that is highly accessible, and this is precisely what has made so many of his short stories so excellent. The ending (as at least one other review states) is weak, but many highly idea-driven SF novels, including some of the best, fall to the same trap. My chief complaint follows. Once we depart the realm of science for philosophy, Egan takes a more contemptible tone. I am a Christian, but one who enjoys reading the essays of Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, two atheists who leveled some strong challenges to religion. Those two writers, with their intelligent, generally respectful prose, were a challenge and a pleasure to read, and I am richer for them. Egan, however, takes many of the worst stereotypes of a missionary (this time a missionary of atheism and rationalism) in this book by making unintellectual, highly insulting attacks on religion without ever getting to any really meaty argument. I came away irritated that I wasted my time on the book, and sorry that such a fine mind as Egan's could stoop to sych a low level. I love the basic ideas of this book, but the writing and attitudes are such that I can't really recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Too much character - too little science
Review: Having read all of the previous titles, it was with high expectations that I tore into this latest creation of the new saint of SF. What a letdown, perhaps akin to watching Michael Jordan play baseball. Greg's understanding of the AI nature of technology futures is truely profound and he has the ability to weave this into a deeply moving, spiritual tale that keeps you on the edge. Now that he has proven that he can write deeply detailed characters with a patina of science, let's hope that he gets back in the kitchen and serves up some meat & potatoes.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointment
Review: I am a rabid Greg Egan fan first hooked with permutation city but this book just wasn't up to standard. Egan's best quality in his work is the power of his ideas and this work was considerably lacking in them. Every other book of his I've read has left me staring off into space every other page going...wow could that happen..or thats nifty. I did that perhaps once in this book.

The only possible explanation I can think of is that Egan paid attention to all those people who kept screaming about not enough charachter development. Well don't listen to them (at least not if it reduces the density of ideas) plenty of sci-fi books have reasonable charachter development only yours had extroadanairy speculative ideas.

Rating:
Summary: A Decent Book
Review: I enjoyed reading Teranesia. Even though I enjoyed Distress and Diaspora more, it was only because I enjoyed Teranesia that I was led to read them. Egan's knowledge of science, computers and mathematics are well shown in all of his works. I have found few authors who can capture my scientific side as well as he. Most science fiction only brushes on the fields of science and math, usually leaving them as mysterious knowledge beyond the grasp of the readers. It was also a pleasure coming across a book filed outside of the gay/lesbian literature section of the bookstore with a gay main character. I feel that even though this work was not built completely in the walls of the imagination like some of his other books, it satisfied my appetite as a reader of science fiction.