Teranesia - Hardcover

Egan, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 057506854X ISBN 13: 9780575068544

Publisher: Gollancz, 1999

Synopsis

TERANESIA is set in 2012. Prabir Suresh is nine years old and the son of two scientists specialising in entomology. They live on an otherwise uninhabited island in a remote part of the Indonesian peninsula. The island has no real name, but Prabir calls it Teranesia and populates it with imaginary creatures even stranger than the evolutionarily puzzling butterflies that his parents are studying. His world falls apart when civil war kills his parents and leaves him to look after his infant sister. Eighteen years later, rumours of bizarre new species of plants and animals being discovered in the peninsula that was their childhood home draw Prabir's sister back to the island - Prabir cannot bear for her to have gone out alone and he follows, persuading a pharmaceutical researcher to take him along as a guide. Prabir's sister and the researcher succeed in isolating the gene responsible for these new mutations - the T-gene promises that any form of life on Teranesia will out compete those in the outside world. When Prabir himself is infected with a virus carrying this T-gene the bulk of the scientists on Teransia want him dead - the ultimate quarantine that will safeguard humanity as they know it.

About this title

Review:

In the new millennium, Prabhir spends his childhood on the small Indonesian island where his biologist parents are investigating anomalous butterflies:

"The butterfly--a female twenty centimeters across, with black and iridescent-green wings--clearly belonged to some species of swallowtail: the two hind wings were tipped with long , narrow "tails" or "streamers". But there were puzzling quirks ... the pattern of veins in the wings. and the position of the genital openings ... How could this one species of swallowtail been isolated longer than any other butterfly in the world."

A childish prank leads to Prabhir's blaming himself for the violent deaths of his parents and he devotes the rest of his life to protecting his young sister; aged 9, he sails with her to safety and later abandons his education to give her a home. Maddie becomes a biologist, and takes an interest in the strange creatures now proliferating in the islands; when she goes on a field trip, Prabhir feels obliged to follow... Greg Egan's recent books and short stories of the near future--Distress and Luminous --have combined their intellectually challenging scientific speculations with a good deal of human drama, and Teranesia continues this trend in his work; Prabhir's irrational guilt and obsessive protectiveness make him a memorable flawed protagonist. In the end, though, the point is the wonders--Egan comes up with some fascinating speculation on mechanisms whereby evolution could suddenly go into overdrive, and has the good sense not to push conclusions too far; the reader's informed imagination continues well beyond the book's end. All this, and some scathing satire on Critical Theory and Cultural Studies too. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

Cognitive wonder at its challenging best.” Locus

About this edition

• Publisher: Gollancz
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 057506854X
• ISBN 13: 9780575068544
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352