Distress
Greg Egan
Greg Egan
<p>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.  </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>**</p>Amazon.com Review
<p>After developing a lengthy exposé on "frankenscience," SeeNet reporter Andrew Worth is burnt out. So burnt that he passes up a plum assignment covering the new disease "Distress." Instead, he asks for a lower-key job profiling Violet Mosala, a scientist who earned a Nobel Prize at the age of 25 and who is about to announce her version of the Theory of Everything. The TOE is an attempt to explain how all scientific theories fit together, but it may actually be the catalyst that created the universe, making Violet the "Keystone" of the universe. So much for the quiet assignment ... </p>
From Kirkus Reviews