I struggled with Dispersion; I wasn't able to really dive into the story through the barriers of Egan's writing style. His prose felt dense, with sentences and ideas seeming to go on for lines. There wasn't anything wrong with the story, but it's definitely something that likely appeals to a niche audience.

Very high concept sci-fi, there was a lot of math concepts I didn't understand here. However, Egan has crafted an interesting world, and I loved how scholarly our protagonists were. I was actually caught off guard by the ending, and wished there was more. I'll pick up more Egan in the future.

Greg Egan is someone that I've seen, but not read. Then I got the opportunity to read a Novella of his, which seemed a good place to start. Since novella, enjoyable to read. Will need to read some more of Greg Egan.

Good, solid, high-concept science fiction novella. This is set in a place where different villages are all out of sync with each other; they can only perceive and interact with each other when their cycles align. Think China Miéville’s *The City and the City*, or the one episode of ST:TNG where a transporter accident (never can trust that damn thing, almost as bad as the holodeck) left LaForge and Ro in a similar situation. Eat food from another village, your body will absorb it, and then you’ll be in for some significant discomfort when the cycle passes and those helpful proteins you absorbed just kind of fade away. The different villages have been cheerfully sort-of-co-existing for a long time, but a new disease has appeared that some people are blaming on exposure to the other villages. The story follows a researcher working in collaboration with scientists from other village (no mean feat) to try to trace the disease and find a cure. The ending is ambiguous, which some hate but I find I adore.

I like Greg Egan, but this one didn't quite work for me. The premise is interesting, but the execution is a bit muddled. I didn't dislike it, but it didn't really connect with me either. 3/5 stars.

I haven’t read anything by Greg Egan before so I hope his other works are better, but I could not finish this novella. The writing is over-analytical and the storyline is rather confusing to the reader. In addition, the characters have zero depth.

It would be an understatement to say that 2020 has been a year unlike any other in our memory. Readers have had, I think, three reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic: those that don't want to read anything pandemic related, those that will read more pandemic fiction now than they ever have in the past - maybe trying to get a handle on what our genre has to say about pandemics - and those that keep right on going reading whatever it is they normally read, as their fiction reading is not affected by everything that's happening in the world around us.

Then there are the writers, who in all fairness are readers themselves and generally fall into the same categories as the rest of us. While it is true that the job of sf writers is not to predict the future, an oddly high number of them have released books in 2020 that deal with pandemics and the like. Heck, even Kameron Hurley's THE LIGHT BRIGADE, a Hugo finalist in 2020, mentions a worldwide pandemic, and that book was published in 2019. And in reality, most books that are being published in 2020 have been in the pipeline since late last year or early this year, before COVID-19 hit. What did they know that the rest of us didn't?

And so we come to Greg Egan's new novella, "Dispersion". Dispersion is both the title of the book and the name of the affliction that is affecting the world in which the story is set. Egan does not tell us where this planet is, how its population got there (if that is even relevant) or much else about the people in the story. What we do know is that there are six "fractions" (nations if you want to put a label on it, but I don't think that's even correct) who are incompatible and in many cases invisible to each other. The Dispersion appears - never explained, but I don't think it much matters in the larger context of the story - and infects members of each of the six fractions. Dispersion manifests itself by dragging detritus (for lack of a better term, I think) from foreign fractions into people and dragging parts of the infected people into the foreign fractions. People die a rather horrible death as a result.

The basic solution? Each fraction self-isolates (now where have we heard that before?) while a cure is sought. Alice Pemberthy is the scientist who is working on trying to figure this all out and come up with a cure. The odd thing about Alice is that her parents are from two different fractions - something which is never really explained, and I'm not sure has any relevance to the story (and if it truly doesn't have any relevance, why is the fact introduced at all?).

The story, then, is about the search for the cure and how the various fractions act toward each other during the course of the story. One fraction or another brings fires and floods to another fraction, in an effort to destroy those fractions they deem responsible for the problem. There is basically no trust between fractions, even as scientists from all fractions try to work out a solution to the problem.

Egan weaves a tale that in many respects is eerily like our own today. The world building is not expansive, nor does it need to be. Egan tells us what we need to know in order to understand what is going on, and not more. Alice, like the scientists of our day today, is doing what she can in order to come up with a cure to the Dispersion. As is usual with a Greg Egan story, the science is meticulously laid out; it's clear that, as with his other books, he's given a lot of thought to the situation. And the ending sure isn't what I was expecting, and I'm still trying to work it through in my mind.

While I liked Egan's previous story, "Perihelion Summer", better than this one, it's still a good read. And I really do want to know what writers knew that we didn't when they gave us stories like this that so eerily predict the situation we're in. I'll never know, and it really doesn't matter. What matters is the story, and it's a good one.

I've read other Egan books, and liked them much better than this one. I read the other reviews and agree with them. I suspect it's too late to do some more editing to improve the execution from this talented author.

I really appreciate the ARC for review!!

Dispersion by Greg Egan- As with most of Greg Egan's work, there's a big chunk of Math sitting in the plot and little is done to illuminate it's significance only that it shadows what is going on. The writing is, as always, smooth and well done, with engaging characters and modest movement forward. In a society divided in six fractions, states of being, a disease is invading and the only safe way to deal with it is each community faction must isolate themselves from the others(sound familiar?). A young woman, Alice, is out to prove this approach is wrong and its adherents are misguided. It's all rather confusing and a bit of a slog when you're trying to understand what parameters are being discussed and how to get a handle on this disease. I think if you have a mathematical curiosity, this might be smooth sailing for you, but for the rest of us, it's just too confusing.

Greg Egan is a name in the SF field as you probably know if you're reading a science fiction review. He has written a lot of stories and books over the years and is known for writing hard SF at its hardest (not difficult; hard science). That often leaves him with the challenge of thinking up a story to display and explore a world that demonstrates the concept (e.g., a universe where the speed of light is not constant). In this effort we have a world where six races of people are made of different, incompatible types of matter. They can only interact with the two races next them at brief but regular intervals as the world cycles through its routine. Early on some characters speculate about how and why this is, and the ideas are interesting and promise a new way to talk about race relations. Unfortunately, the story itself isn't all that engaging and doesn't really offer anything in the way of addressing the relations between the races. There are also some inconsistent rules about how matter interacts with the different races. I would say "4" for concept, "2" for execution.

I was given an ARC through Netgalley. I am thankful for this opportunity to give my honest opinion about this novella. This review will contain no spoilers for the actual plot of the book.

My first thought when reading the synopsis was that this was a world that I was excited to know. The "six fractions" that were the basis of creation seemed interesting, and the disease based on these fractions was fascinating. I loved how this was a "low-tech world" and was eager to see how this very disease would be solved.

Once I got into the story, however, I was sorely disappointed. I did not know where I was half the time as there was little-to-no description of the settings. This is particularly true between chapters when the settings change. When we finally got to the discussion of the disease, what it was, and what it did, I was confused. I also had a hard time looking past the fact that this was an info dump of a chapter. The writer gives the reader no breaks, even structurally. Sentences are ridiculously long and overcomplicated.

I was not drawn in by the characters, either. The way people speak has no nuance or characterization. Their vocabulary is ridiculously high for a low-tech (undereducated?) society. Our main protagonist, Alice, doesn't feel her age, and her characterization is fragmented. This is true for almost every other character in the novella. I can't tell you what these characters look like or how these characters are different from one another. They are vehicles for the story.

Often I found myself wondering what the author meant. I only have a vague understanding of how the "fractions" work, and I had to go back several times just to understand that much. This lack of understanding extends to small details of the world as well. I ended up skipping over the sentences that I had questioned, and frankly, it didn't matter in the end.

The work as a whole is fast-paced, leaving no room for reader misunderstanding. Additionally, there are tonal changes that feel as if the story has been patched together from different drafts. The first few chapters are polished (even if I have issues with the sentence structure), and then that polish drops off.

While I understand that I received a digital advanced copy of the work, the formatting was atrocious. It made some chapters painful to read. I sincerely hope that this is fixed before it goes to retail.

I also feel that the retail value of $40 is severely overpriced for a novella of this size. Even the name attached to the work does not justify this price. If I were to just take into account the quality of the work, I would say it's shameful to be charging that much.

"Dispersion" is set for publication August 31, 2020.


Overall rating: 2 stars
Would not recommend

I love novellas. An absolutely terrific format, especially so for discovering new authors. Greg Egan is a pretty huge name in science fiction, one I was definitely familiar with, but have never read, so when this novella showed up on Netgalley, I requested, got approved for and read it right way. And walked away hugely disappointed. At this time Goodreads has no official description for this book and mine is the first review. For the former, I can try, but it was so muddled. And so the latter…well, I wish I had nicer things to say about it, really I do, but it just didn’t work for me at all. You can tell the writing was objectively decent, but the story…Ok, so it’s set in a world where everyone is born into one of six fractions that are incompatible with and are often invisible to each other. Somehow. At any rate, the have coexisted amicably enough for some time, but now the fractions are being ravaged by Dispersion wherein some of their bodies are dragged into other fractions. Somehow. No one quite knows how it works, so everyone is suspicious of each other and the situation is devastating to both individuals and their communities. Well, so far that sounds pretty intriguing, doesn’t it? But it’s so oddly liminal and intangible in structure, that it really relies on execution to work and here (for me, anyway) the execution really didn’t. The official description says it’s a world wildly imaginative and plausibly described, I didn’t find that to be the case. To me it was a very muddled opaque scenario, which didn’t exactly cohere. Somewhat reminiscent of The City and The City, only that one (weirdly enough) worked. But here the dimensions were juggled oddly. And the entire thing, the writing too, was peculiarly dispassionate and very difficult to engage with. You can try, you can draw social parallels to what’s going in the world today, it isn’t difficult, but in the end it just wasn’t that good of a read, not that interesting, not that exciting, not that fun. The overall effect was that bleak greyness vanishing into the fog that’s on the cover. Though it’s much nicer as artwork as opposed to literary work. I didn’t care for it at all and it certainly didn’t serve as a great introduction to a new author. The best thing about it was that it read quickly. It might sing for others, who knows. Thanks Netgalley.