Quarantine: Stories
By Rahul Mehta
4/5
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About this ebook
“An extraordinary book that transcends gender and race and culture and sexual identity to speak to our universal humanity and the quest we all share for a self.” — Robert Olen Butler
Reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and the work of Michael Cunningham, Rahul Mehta’s debut short story collection is an emotionally arresting exploration of the lives of Indian-American gay men and their families.
With buoyant humor and incisive, cunning prose, Mehta sets off into uncharted literary territory. The characters in Quarantine are Westernized in some ways, with cosmopolitan views on friendship and sex, while struggling to maintain relationships with their families and cultural traditions. Grappling with the issues that concern all gay men—social acceptance, the right to pursue happiness, and the heavy toll of listening to their hearts and bodies—they confront an elder generation's attachment to old-country ways. Estranged from their cultural in-group and still set apart from larger society, the young men in these lyrical, provocative, emotionally wrenching, yet frequently funny stories find themselves quarantined.
Rahul Mehta
Rahul Mehta’s debut short story collection, Quarantine, won a Lambda Literary Award and the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction. His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Sun, New Stories from the South, the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, Marie Claire India, and other publications. An Out magazine “Out 100” honoree, he lives in Philadelphia with his partner and their dog, and teaches creative writing at the University of the Arts.
Read more from Rahul Mehta
Quarantine: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Other World: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
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Reviews for Quarantine
329 ratings13 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If you like to philosophize on quantum mechanics then you will love this novel. I enjoyed it but found the internal debates the main character went through too long.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5From the moment I encountered the plot device of eigenstates, I was hooked. Egan doesn't lecture on the physics behind the Bubble, nor provide an explanation of Eigenvalues, expecting the reader to either know the field, or have the intellect to look things up. This is (to my discredit) the first Greg Egan book I'd read, and I acquired three others as well. If the standards remain as high as this one, I'm hooked.Knowing a bit of physics is important to grasp the direction of the story, but it's not integral. It's a good, smart novel, worth the time, and I'm sorry that it's over.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5A gray shield surrounds solar system - no stars - how come? who cares?
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Good hard SF
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5“[character referring to quantum entanglement and wave function collapse] ‘so, what should they call it?’ ‘Oh...neural linear decomposition of the state vector, followed by phase-shifting and preferential reinforcements of selected eigenstates.’”In “Quarantine” by Greg Egan“’So...where’s the problem?’‘The problem is: before you make a measurement in either of these cases, the wave function doesn’t tell you what the outcome is going to be; it just tells you that there’s a fifty-fifty chance either way. But once you’ve made the measurement,a a second measurement on the same system will always give the same result; if the cat was dead the first time you looked, it will still be dead if you look again. In terms of the wave function, the act of making the measurement has, somehow, changes it from a mixture of two waves, representing the two possibilities, to a ‘pure’ wave - called an eingestate - representing just one. That’s what’s called ‘the collapse of the wave function’.‘But why should a measurement be special? Why should it collapse the wave function? Why should some measuring device - itself made up of individual atoms, all of which are presumably obeying the very same quantum mechanical laws as the system being measured - cause a mixture of possibilities to collapse into one? If you treat the measuring device as just another part of the system, Schrödinger’s equation predicts that the device itself should end up in a mixture of states - and so should anything that interacts with it.’”In “Quarantine” by Greg EganWhat’s at play here? Quantum entanglement (quantum entanglement occurs when pairs of particles interact in ways that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently) in one of the best narrative treatments I’ve ever read in a non-SFional setting.If the nature of reality is consciousness then, there are no perfect symmetries, there is no pure randomness. We are in the gray region between truth and chaos. These extremes can only be ideals, not reality. Process only occurs in the gray region, time does not exist at the extremes. If we think of coin tosses, with truth, the coin is either heads or tails as a frozen expression of meaning, and with chaos the coin is always both, it never stops spinning, and contains no meaning. The dynamic tension between the two is where time comes from. Either spin is imparted to truth or the perfect randomness of the perpetual spin symmetry is broken. At each extreme is a different form of symmetry, one is a symmetry in the relationship of meaning and the other is a symmetry of potential.Truth as a static structure vs a dynamic system. To simplify, think of a stack of copy paper with one word on each page. In time, we see each page one at a time, outside of time all of the words, on all of the pages combine to make a single word. This single word is truth, it is the entire story, told in an instant of time. The fractal version of this story has another feature. As each page is presented to us, our intent creates a slightly new meaning that branches out, changing the story, an effect that turns the stack into a tree like structure.The direction of time's arrow is the breaking of the symmetry of the potential of the boundary condition. In other words, if I toss a coin and it has perfect symmetry of potential it will land heads half the time and tails half the time. The symmetry of the potential is broken if the coin tosses are not 50/50. In a perfectly random system, after a sufficient number of tosses, the symmetry for all even number tosses would always be 50/50. Coin tosses are a lot like squaring the circle. You get closer and closer to the true value but you never reach it, like an infinite recursive iteration.With the earlier novels (e.g., “Quarantine”), Egan tends to be more story driven, though there is always a mathematics/physics/computational basis, and the later ones tend to be more bit less driven by the story and more by the maths/physics (e.g., “The Orthogonal Trilogy”). With some writers it takes them a while to fully master their narrative skills but Egan was great from the start, so there is no work to avoid.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fun look at free will, especially the conflict between entities which can shape reality. Who makes the choice?
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Some of the stuff postulated was mind blowing stuff literally, brain mods. That was my favorite part of the novel, the long technical sections about Eigenstates and quantum entanglement were my least favorite parts.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Plus half a star except for the last quarter which just seemed to fade out into repetitions with little of interest. I like a good attempt at hard science and the book is built around the quantum whatsit which is a large part of the plot. None of the characters are very engaging. When reading over reader's reviews I discover there are a couple more books in something of a sequence so I'll be interested to read the next one, Permutation.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Early classic Egan -- the stars disappeared when the solar system was enclosed in the Bubble, but that's many years past when the book starts. Instead the novel begins with a simpler disappearance, that of a young woman of very limited intellectual capacity. Told in full sf-noir fashion, from the mysterious client to the obligatory "knock the hero unconscious" scenes, Egan eventually works his way back to the Bubble and resolves both mysteries but that's not what the story is about. Think Bear's Blood Music rather than Effinger's When Gravity Fails. Two science fictional concepts dominate: the observer effect on multiple quantum states, and behavioral modification technology that enables conscious control of emotions, a theme explored so well in Egan's short story Reasons to be Cheerful. Though the novel became less effective for me as the "quantum catastrophe" of the subtitle played out, this remains a worthwhile read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Egan is one of the few writers who knows enough physics to put the science in science fiction. He does it with enough credibility to make it interesting even to experts. At the same time, he goes to great lengths to make the subject intelligible to casual readers as well.The novel takes seriously a certain scenario proposed to interpret quantum mechanics. At issue is so-called "collapse", which is the process through which the quantum world appears classical to our senses. The subject of interpretations of quantum mechanics is rich with different possibilities for implementing collapse. Egan picks one of the more dramatic ones and logically extrapolates its consequences. A brilliant piece of hard SF, even if the scenario explored in it does not quite correspond to the real world.At the same time, he does not fail to paint a realistic picture of a near future world, where bio- and neuro-technologies have had significant impact on human lives. Sometimes technology makes our lives better, but sometimes it only reinforces some of our pathologies.As usual, there is also a moral point (if it can be called that) tackled by the story. Egan explores the introduction of an unsubstantiated axiom into the human thought process. Anyone familiar with basic logic can realize that simply throwing in an extra axiom (aka assertion or belief) may render the entire logical system inconsistent. In that case, a person can in principle be convinced of anything, no matter how morally reprehensible, with disastrous consequences. Although the situation described in Quarantine is both fictional and somewhat artificial, it is not hard to see a cautionary line of dots pointing to the many very real irrational beliefs held by regular people, including religion and superstition.As always, highly thought provoking.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book started with quite a clever premise, and I would say that the first half is very good reading. But it loses momentum about half way through (just when Egan starts focusing on eigenstates and quantum mechanics). On the plus side, the book piqued my interest in actually learning more about complex physics concepts. I also enjoyed Egan's development of the implications of nanotechnology brain "mods" (software that you load directly into your brain). On the minus side, what started out as a pretty good scifi mystery lost any chance of a satisfying ending.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Greg Egan has taken a very interesting physics concept and worked it into a detective/mystery novel. I was impressed by the realism of Nick Stavrianos, the main character, even as I was befuddled by some of the quantum physics at the heart of the story. Egan envisions a future in which it is possible for some people to control multiple eigenstates to manipulate their reality. Eigenstate modification can make anything possible, but it is not without cost.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I always tell people that this is one of the dullest books I've ever read. It's amost certainly the dullest book I've ever read five times. It's dull in a really interesting way.You may not like it, but I guarantee it won't be like anything else you've ever read.