Ratings34
Average rating3.7
Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive starships. And there are the holdouts: the fleshers left behind in the muck and jungle of Earth-some devolved into dream apes, others cavorting in the seas or the air-while the statics and bridgers try to shape out a roughly human destiny. But the complacency of the citizens is shattered when an unforeseen disaster ravages the fleshers and reveals the possibility that the polises themselves might be at risk from bizarre astrophysical processes that seem to violate fundamental laws of nature. The orphan Yatima, a digital being grown from a mind seed, joins a group of citizens and flesher refugees in a search for the knowledge that will guarantee their safety-a search that puts them on the trail of the ancient and elusive Transmuters, who have the power to reshape subatomic particles, and to cross into the macrocosmos, where the universe we know is nothing but a speck in the higher-dimensional vacuum.
Reviews with the most likes.
“If you love hard sci-fi and mathematics or quantum physics, then you'll probably love this book”
“Diaspora is the story of Yatima — a polis being created from random mutations of the Konishi polis base mind seed”
If this description excites you, go for it. This book made up of only technical made up “mumbo jumbo”. No literary value.
Read 1:05 / 10:00 10%
I understood like 10% of the science terms and explanations of techno-babble but boy was it an enjoyable book. I had not read anything by Egan before but this has made me start looking into other books by him.
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.
This seems like it was a fun book for Greg Egan to write, but for me it was a painfully boring read. Ultimately i'm less interested in the nuts and bolts of Egan's sci-fi conceits than the psychological impact they have on the characters. Egan's previous works achieve a good balance between high concept sci-fi and psychological drama, but this novel ended up devolving largely into long winded math, particle physics and biochemistry lectures that i had no patience for. From the plot descriptions of Egan's later works I suspect this trend gets even worse over time. Still highly recommend his early stuff.