(...)

As for the message: distrust and tribalism indeed will not solve most societal challenges this day and age, but when you invent a specific speculative scientific problem as the problematic setting, it’s obvious only science will get you out – even though the characters don’t necessarily perceive their predicament as scientific. In that sense, Egan is a bit self-serving and his parable doesn’t really work as a lesson: it kinda begs the question. It would have been more interesting to start with a problem that isn’t so obviously scientific in nature to us readers – but that would have taken an entirely different set-up.

Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It ( )

Dispersion is set in a world where something has happened and different people, different villages, have split apart into different 6 different dimensions, and on any given day each group can only see or interact with 1 other group. But, this only seems to apply to living things - houses, roads, clothes, are visible across all dimensions. Or perhaps they accumulate the dimensionality of wherever they are? Its not especially clear.

In any case there is now some sort of disease running through the populations where they have ever-growing wounds made up of material from one of the other groups, which can't actually interact with the rest of their bodies. The story centers around a woman who is trying to organize researchers from all of the factions to figure out the cause, including amongst them her parents, who are from two different factions. Meanwhile one of the towns/factions is convinced that the only way to survive is to completely cut off all contact with the others, and that the best way to enforce that is to kill them all.

If none of that makes much sense, well, that's pretty much par for the course in this novella. It kind of feels like Greg Egan had a nifty "what if" idea about a population that somehow gets split up into sub-groups that can only interact on a rota. And then he tried to turn it into a sort of Pohl-esque hard SF story about multiple higher dimensions. And maybe it is, and maybe he has accurately grasped some way that these dimensions could interact, but he really does not ever communicate that very well to the reader. In the end there are some nice ideas that are completely lost in their own complexity. ( )