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 ocean. 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.
 
Thirty years into the third millennium, the discovery of bizarre new species on and around Teranesia draws Prabir's biologist sister Maddy back to the island. Prabir has reasons of his own for fearing what she might find there and persuades a pharmaceutical researcher on the lookout for biological bounty to take him along as her guide.
 
Who will get there first, Prabir or Maddy? And what will they find? An evolutionary leap forward, a new humanity or the evanescent ghosts of past lies?
 

In Teranesia, Greg Egan explores the not-so-distant future, one that is not too hard to imagine initially, but which does move into more “speculative” science fiction towards the end, the evolutionary ideas being run to their logical conclusion with some rather startling results.

I was able to follow the biological science in this novel more easily than Greg Egan’s physics-saturated novels, so I was able to become more immersed in it (although he did manage to throw quantum theory into the mix). It was also more character driven than novels such as “Schild's Ladder”, which would make it more approachable than many of his other novels for those who find Egan’s work rather heavy going.

For much of the book, I felt like I was missing out on the many “wow, what an incredible concept!” moments which Greg Egan’s books usually give me. This was due to the nature of the story, which was about the characters discovering these moments for themselves, with us seeing how they got there, via lots of research and dead-ends.

As with “Schild's Ladder”, the left-of-centre developments towards the end of the novel were the most fascinating for me, and I would have been happy with more of that, and less of the journey.

Interestingly, many of the other reviews I’ve read put it the other way around – they enjoyed the story and character developments in the main part of the novel, but found the ending too technobabbly. It depends on what style you prefer I suppose, so combining the two may leave a lot of readers dissatisfied.