Distress
by Greg Egan
Synopsis
“All right. He’s dead. Go ahead and talk to him.”
The bioethicist was a laconic young asex with blond dreadlocks and a T-shirt which flashed up the slogan SAY NO TO TOE! in between the paid advertising.
Ve countersigned the permission form on the forensic pathologist’s notepad, then withdrew to a corner of the room.
The trauma specialist and the paramedic wheeled their resuscitation equipment out of the way, and the forensic pathologist hurried forward, hypodermic syringe in hand,
to administer the first dose of neuropreservative. Useless prior to legal death — massively toxic to several organs, on a time scale of hours — the cocktail
of glutamate antagonists, calcium channel blockers, and antioxidants would halt the most damaging biochemical changes in the victim’s brain, almost immediately.
Andrew Worth is a science journalist with optic nerve taps and a gut full of memory chips. Burnt out after completing a documentary on controversial
developments in biotechnology, he turns down a chance to report on a baffling new mental disorder known as Distress and instead takes an assignment covering the Einstein
Centenary Conference on the artificial island of Stateless.
There, a young South African physicist, Violet Mosala, is expected to unveil her candidate for a Theory of Everything.
But the assignment is not the tropical respite Worth was expecting. While the politics surrounding the creation of Stateless grows more turbulent,
and ignorance cults stage protests against the gathering scientists,
a secretive group known as the Anthrocosmologists, with some very strange ideas about the Theory of Everything, begin to enact their own agenda.
Publication history
- Orion/Millennium, London, 1995. ISBN 1-85798-286-X (hb) ISBN 1-85798-285-1 (tpb) — 1996. ISBN 1-85799-484-1 (pb) — 2008. ISBN 0575081732 / ISBN13 978-0575081734 (pb, reissue)
- HarperPrism, New York, 1997. ISBN 0-06105-264-7 (hb) — 1998. ISBN 0-06105-727-4 (pb) [Out of print; see reissue by Night Shade Books below.]
- Distres, Editura Teora, Bucharest, 1997. Translated by Mihai-Dan Pavelescu. ISBN 9-73601-576-9 (pb) (Romanian translation)
- L'énigme de l'univers, Robert Laffont/Ailleurs et Demain, Paris, 1997. Translated by Bernard Sigaud. ISBN 2-22108-439-X (tpb) (French translation)
- Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 1998. ISBN 9-65131-294-7 (pb) (Hebrew translation)
- Qual, Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich, 1999. Translated by Bernhard Kempen. ISBN 3-45315-643-9 (German translation)
- El Instante Aleph, Ediciones Gigamesh, Barcelona, 2000. Translated by Adela Ibáñez. ISBN 8-49306-637-0 (Spanish translation)
- Mondadori/Urania, Milan, 2001. Translated by Riccardo Valla. ISSN 1120-5288 / Number 1437 (The Urania SF line is published as a paperback periodical.) (Italian translation)
- Stan Wyczerpania, Zysk i S-ka, Poznan, 2003. Translated by Pawel Wieczorek. ISBN 8-37298-073-X (pb) (Polish translation)
- Tokyo Sogensha, Tokyo, 2004. ISBN 4-48871-102-2 (pb) (Japanese translation)
- Amazon Kindle (for UK), Amazon Kindle (for Australia), Orion/Gollancz, London, 2010.
- Amazon Kindle (for USA), iTunes Store (for USA), Greg Egan, 2013.
- Night Shade Books, New York, 2015. ISBN13 978-1597805414 (pb)
- Отчаяние, AST, Moscow, 2014. Translated by Catherine M. Dobrokhotova-Maikova and ME Zvenigorodskaya. ISBN13 978-5170853632 (pb) (Russian translation)
Information and illustrations
Distress / created Monday, 7 June 2010
If you link to this page, please use this URL: http://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html
Copyright © Greg Egan, 2010. All rights reserved.
