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Distress
The Theory of Everything may be more than just a theory
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Distress
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By Greg Egan
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HarperPrism
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$21.00
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Hardcover, June 1997
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ISBN 0061052647
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Review by Susan Dunman
 ndrew Worth is a science correspondent equipped with the latest internal hardware and software required by top-notch journalists in the year 2055. With eyes that double as camera lenses, ears that record every sound, and complete neural control over narration and editing functions, Andrew is the ultimate roving reporter. Having successfully completed a particularly morbid assignment for SeeNet involving "Frankenscience," Andrew is next asked to cover the outbreak of a mysterious new mental disorder called Distress. There is no known cause or cure for this frightening malady, which inflicts its victims with magnified anxiety attacks.
Unwilling to investigate this depressing subject, Andrew requests reassignment. He is then told to prepare a documentary on Violet Mosala, a preeminent physicist who will present her definitive Theory of Everything (TOE) at the upcoming Einstein Centenary conference. The conference is to be held on Stateless, an artificial, bio-engineered island in the South Pacific. The island was created with stolen DNA sequences, and its renegade inhabitants must endure stringent boycotts and political isolation to live their simple, semi-communal lifestyle.
Upon arrival at Stateless, Andrew is disturbed to find the anti-science Ignorance Cults in full force. Humble Science, Mystic Renaissance and Culture First are all vehemently protesting the conference proceedings. Even more alarming is the revelation that a more secretive group, called the Anthrocosmologists, believes the universe may be drastically altered if a TOE is formulated. Lending credence to their claims is the possible connection between the growing cases of Distress and the imminent arrival of the "Aleph Moment" when the TOE is actually achieved. Who can say whether plans to assassinate Violet Mosala before she explains her theory will save the universe or destroy an innocent woman?
The future is as crazy as the present
Greg Egan's future is not so different from the present, but his knack for extrapolating current trends and rolling them forward generates lots of interesting ideas. Advances in medicine allow short-term resuscitation of murder victims so they may identify their killers before succumbing to permanent death. As for the living, sexual identity may be expressed by adopting one of seven different sexual orientations, yet relationships between the sexes have not necessarily improved.
Protagonist Andrew Worth reveals these and many more technological phenomena. As a science correspondent, he also makes pithy observations about the pervasiveness of the news media and the power of information. Nowhere is information's power more evident than in the TOE, described by Violet Mosala as "just the simplest mathematical formulation we can find which encapsulates all the underlying order in the universe."
Egan uses the TOE as a clever device to explore interrelationships between the universe and the creatures that inhabit it. Do humans ultimately control the laws of the universe, or do universal laws determine the fate of humanity? It's not an idea easy to explain, and occasionally the narrative gets bogged down as Egan elaborates on the concept.
In fact, some of the more ludicrous theorizing on the TOE unintentionally brings to mind The Ultimate Question About Life, The Universe And Everything of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame. Unlike Douglas Adams, Egan is dead serious about his grand questions and suggests that the fate of the universe depends on knowing the correct answers.
Ironically, the Theory of Everything seems to be the weakest link in an otherwise intriguing story that has engaging characters, steady pacing and riveting ideas. This is a must read for Egan fans, and well worth the effort for anyone else.
Now I know why I never took physics in college. -- Susan
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The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection
It's time once again for Dozois' picks of the year...
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The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection
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Edited by Gardner Dozois
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St. Martin's Press
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$17.95/$24.99 Canada
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Trade Paperback, June 1997
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ISBN 0-312-15703-7
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Review by Clinton Lawrence
 ardner Dozois' annual retrospectives have become a fixture in the science fiction field. This year's edition, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection, features stories from across the science fiction spectrum, with such luminaries as Gene Wolfe, Robert Silverberg, and Bruce Sterling represented alongside new writers like Jim Cowan, William Barton and Bud Sparhawk.
The anthology shows Dozois' clear preference for literate stories with rich, complex characters and themes. On the whole, the stories tend toward the novelette length, with a few novellas thrown in, and the majority of the stories have a serious atmosphere. Beyond that, it's difficult to find a common theme in his choices. Everything from psychological drama to hard science fiction, from alternate history to cyberpunk, is represented, conveying the rich diversity of styles that has come to mark science fiction in recent years. In a notable development, Dozois shows that he's paying attention to electronic publishing as well, choosing two stories from Omni Online, and mentioning Cowan's early fiction in the electronic magazine Intertext.
An outstanding group of stories...
Dozois' choices this year are impeccable. There's not a questionable story in the lot, and several are true standouts. One of the most impressive is Nancy Kress's "The Flowers of Aulit Prison," a story set on an alien planet and told by one of the natives, who believes she murdered her sister. Her punishment is to live confined to her house with her sister's corpse displayed in a glass coffin, until her sentence is over. But she also works as an informer for the government when needed, and when it sends her into Aulit Prison to learn the secrets of a human prisoner, it leads her to some important discoveries about her own situation. It's a beautifully written and haunting story.
Robert Reed's "Chrysalis" is perhaps the best story in the anthology. It's the tale of Sarrie, a young girl genetically raised for the talent of communication with alien life forms. The vast spaceship that is her home originated as an escape vessel from the war that finally destroyed humanity. Machines run the ship, to protect the humans from themselves. Reed's depiction of the strange, evangelical culture roaming the galaxy to collect life forms before intelligent species self-destruct is brilliant, and Sarrie's development as a Voice is effectively portrayed.
Other particularly noteworthy stories include Tony Daniel's "The Robots Twilight Companion," which traces the life of a mining robot in the Pacific Northwest through abandonment, political turmoil and its relationships with the humans it works with; Ian McDonald's "Recording Angel," about an unusual alien invasion in Africa; Silverberg's "Death Do Us Part," the story of a marriage between a 300-year-old man and a woman in her thirties; Michael Swanwick's "The Dead," a haunting tale in which a man is being recruited by a firm trafficking in revived corpses as a cheap labor source; and Maureen F. McHugh's "The Cost to Be Wise," the story of anthropologists on another world caught in unarmed village that's being raided.
Overall The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection is an excellent anthology that captures some of the finest recent work in science fiction.
I always look forward to these anthologies. But usually, I don't read them all at once. Doing so provides a real perspective on how strong and diverse the writing in science fiction has become. -- Clint
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Wyrm
We're on the Information Highway to Hell
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Wyrm
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By Mark Fabi
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Bantam Books
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$13.95
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Trade Paperback, June 1997
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ISBN 0-553-37871-6
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Review by Curt Wohleber
 t's 1999 and the chess-playing supercomputer Goodknight has come down with a software virus. The panicked programmers call in Michael Arcangelo, freelance virus-hunter, martial-arts apprentice, and foe to hackers everywhere.
Trouble is, this is no ordinary virus that has infected Goodknight. The "Wyrm" virus eats programs whole, incorporating complex software into its own programming, often improving on the original. Getting rid of the virus means crippling the computer.
Helping Arcangelo is a motley supporting cast of eccentric computer geeks, professional game-testers and a scientist rendered mute and immobile by a disastrous experiment in direct mind-computer interfaces. Lurking in the shadows is the secretive, morally ambiguous Roger Dworkin, master programmer for the software giant Macrobyte.
Dworkin, Arcangelo discovers, has included some secret features in "MABUS 2K," the world's best-selling PC operating system. These features have enabled Wyrm to infect millions of computers and attain awesome powers. Wyrm is poised to take over the Internet and ring in the new millennium with a bang. It's up to Arcangelo to save the world, win back his lost love, and find his missing luggage.
Hackers and dragons and AIs, oh my
Wyrm has all the ingredients of a tasty cyber-thriller, but it just isn't soup. Fabi is an intelligent and energetic storyteller with a flair for painless technical exposition. Unfortunately, he's tone deaf when it comes to narrative and dialogue. Arcangelo and his girlfriend, Alice "Al" Meade, are too perfect to be interesting. He's brilliant, warm and sensitive (except where the plot requires boorish stupidity), and she's brilliant, warm and sensitive, a programming wizard, and "built like an aerobics instructor." They are so well-adjusted that Fabi has to resort to feeble contrivances to inject the obligatory strife into their relationship.
None of these bugs are fatal, however. What crashes Wyrm is a lengthy and criminally boring excursion through a series of AI-enhanced Multi-User Dungeons. Arcangelo and friends slay dragons, cast spells, solve riddles and collect magical items, while intrepid readers must survive an excruciating onslaught of puns, slapstick, and Monty Python references. In these chapters Fabi demonstrates impressive knowledge of mythology, but the MUDslinging amounts to little more than prolonged puzzle-solving and whimsical asides. What's sorely needed is a sense of urgency and menace. The dire quotations from the Book of Revelations that begin each chapter are no substitute for skillful foreshadowing and mood-setting.
But Fabi has promise as a science fiction writer. Here and there, some of the characters engage in intriguing speculations on machine intelligence and human consciousness, though much of this material has been mined more effectively in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Vernor Vinge's "True Names" and elsewhere. Will Fabi be able to fulfill his promise in future books? That, alas, is a cliffhanger more suspenseful than anything in Wyrm.
I'll be glad when 2000 comes and we'll be safe from end-of-the-millennium thrillers for at least a few centuries. -- Curt
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