Distress by Greg Egan
Six people attended this discussion. Two other Reading Group members had read the book but weren’t able to attend the meeting, so they relayed their comments via e-mail and word-of-mouth. The subject of this month’s discussion, Distress, is a hard SF novel that follows a journalist covering a physics convention where top scientists are presenting their “Theories of Everything”.
We all liked this book quite a bit. The near-future Earth in which the story takes place was well realized, with a believable amount of “progress” from today’s world. The book is full of expository lumps as the scientists explain their theories, but Egan writes so well that it isn’t hard to digest the material. The realistic portrayal of a scientific conference is a nice change from the stereotypical “lone