Diaspora.

Paperback, 443 pages

German language

Published Feb. 1, 2000 by Heyne.

ISBN:
978-3-453-16181-8
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Goodreads:
156785

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4 stars (63 reviews)

17 editions

Good exploration of physical versus various virtual living

4 stars

Another interesting "explore an idea" novel from Greg Egan around physically embodied versus reality simulating virtual versus no bounds virtual living. But this one didn't engage me as strongly as Egan's books usually do. Mainly I think because the discussion of the differences between the two virtual modes of living went on to long for me. I understand why that length and depth was needed for reasons critical to the plot, but it was too much for me.

Diaspora

3 stars

1) "The conceptory was non sentient software, as ancient a Konishi polis itself. Its main purpose was to enable the citizens of the polis to create offspring: a child of one parent, or two, or twenty—formed partly in their own image, partly according to their wishes, and partly by chance. Sporadically, though, every teratau or so, the conceptory created a citizen with no parents at all. In Konishi, every home-born citizen was grown from a mind seed, a string of instruction codes like a digital genome. The first mind seeds had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the polis founders had invented the Shaper programming language to re-create the essential processes of neuroembryology in software. But any such translation was necessarily imperfect, glossing over the biochemical details in favor of broad, functional equivalence, and the full diversity of the flesher genome could not be brought through intact. Starting …

reviewed Diaspora by Greg Egan

A hard sci-fi milestone – for better or worse

3 stars

If I had read this book 10 years ago (or even 5), it might have felt like a revelation. Reading it today feels like entering a cul-de-sac.

Looking around it helps me understand a couple of things, though: How hard sci-fi works (or why it doesn’t), for one; what makes transhumanism so repulsive (and profoundly boring), for another.

Hard sci-fi is more science than fiction – or at least it tries to be. Equipped with enough knowledge about math, physics or whatever science of choice to go above the reader’s head, but not enough to enter scientific discourse itself, hard sci-fi is, I think, best understood as playing with potential scientific theories without ever having to spell them out. As such it’s not so much an exploration of a few wild ideas but the exploitation of some narrow ones.

This can be very interesting (in Egan’s case, the idea of …

Once upon a time, there was a neutron star collapse...

5 stars

Neutron stars, gamma rays, curvature, multiverse, Euler, Planck, six-dimensional space and the gang are at it again! This time in a story which, despite not being exactly original, is challenging and captivating. Had to do a ton of googling while reading, physics is not my cup of tea, and have enjoyed myself. Cannot but recommend.

reviewed Diaspora by Greg Egan

Very creative hard scifi

4 stars

A good but demanding read with great concepts for science fiction, but at times it does feel like the author tied several great short stories into one trench coat novel. Mind you, that's not a bad thing, just something to consider.

The first chapter can be seen as its own small and can be read on the authors blog, which i highly recommend! It sets the tone of the story pretty well by introducing a level of "techno-babble" that will be present at other parts of the book. You have the choice to read it and attempt to fully comprehend it or skim through it with the necessary understanding to catch the intent. If you want to understand the techno-babble or broaden your understanding, the author even supplies visual guides and very short explanations on his website, easily findable from the link for the first chapter. www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html

the first half may have stretched me too far, wonderful

4 stars

Similar questions of identity and purpose as Permutation City, again that satisfying hard sharp didacticism, a broader galactic exploration scope for minds to weigh their decisions, but didn't resolve nearly as clearly for me.

Review of 'Diaspora' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

What might a society of uploaded minds look like? We do not know, but I suspect that it would be so alien as to be incomprehensible to static fleshers such as us. Thus, it might be an insurmountable task to write a novel that such beings will find to resemble their own world hundreds of years from now. However, I think Diaspora provides a near-perfect balance between plausibility and readability.
A thrilling story of existential threat, a mind-bending exploration of speculative physics, and an awe-inspiring cosmic adventure. Highly recommended for those who are not afraid of technical language and challenging concepts.

SciFi can't get harder than this

No rating

I've seen it described as "diamond-hard SciFi", it might even be an understatement. It starts off being confusingly abstract. After ~15% it gets more coherent, slightly more corporeal, though never entirely so.

Even through its abstract and detached universe, it revolves around modern issues of reality, subjectivity of perception and even memetic reality bubbles.

There's a lot to get from this, provided you can keep your mind clear enough to absorb the weirdness of it all.

Review of 'Diaspora' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Particle physics and multi-dimensional maths aren't what I'm looking for in my science fiction, and I felt very lost a bunch of times. But even then, it still managed to tell a fine story, once I got used to the idea that every other chapter would go way over my head, and all I could hope for was to get the general idea and what it meant for the overall quest the characters were on.

Review of 'Diaspora' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

Yet another philosophical novel, set in a universe where most humans have uploaded themselves into computers but can also download back into animal bodies or robots. As if not complicated enough, there is a lot of physics. I have a physics degree but still found myself doing little refreshers on quantum mechanics, black holes, fibre bundles and the like, as the "heroes" of the book travel through interstellar space, atomic nuclei and other weird universes.

I think it will be OK if you don't know the details of the physics.

Review of 'Diaspora.' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I think this was a really imaginative book. I'd recommend it just for the 'orphanogenesis' chapter. This book has everything, trans-humanism, wormholes, strange life, mathematics, physics. It's also got a lot of technobabble, but it's nice to know that it all probably mostly consistent and well-researched (just look at Greg Egan's website, www.gregegan.net/). Highly recommend; if you've recently read and liked the Remembrance of Earth's past series (Three body problem), I think you'll like this also.

Review of 'Diaspora' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I'm glad I first read this instead of listening to it. I did not like the performance of this book. Even if I had liked it, Egan is famous for his in-depth physics and what-not in his books, and I tended to kind of skim over those parts, and if I was listening to it first, I'd have felt bad for missing parts of book and thought it was because I was being inattentive.
I still love the very beginning of this book the most, Orphanogenesis. It works well as a short story too.
I'd forgotten most of the rest of the book, and probably will forget it again, but there are ideas there that I fell in love with and love still. Ideas about people, not physics.

Review of 'Diaspora.' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This early morning I had this dream where I was playing an old side-scrolling type videogame, a bit like Super Mario Bros. I was speed-running it, so I must have played the game many times before. The creatures I encountered were unusual, or at least unfamiliar. They were alien creatures. I must have gotten the inspiration for these creatures from this sci-fi novel I’m reading right now: Diaspora by Greg Egan. It’s an amazing book. So I speed-ran through all these weird creatures, just jumping and avoiding them. Then the perspective shifted to the first person. It was me jumping and avoiding these obstacles in this alien jugle setting. I remember falling back first onto this raging river. It was so intense I could feel the moment the water closed in on me. The next scene in the dream I’m talking with this academic guy. I think in the dream …

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