Diaspora [Mass Market Paperback]

Greg Egan (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 3, 1999

The boldest and most wildly speculative writer of our time, Greg Egan has envisioned a quantum Brave New World -- a masterful saga of a time when not only human life, but fleshly reality itself, will be nothing but a memory...

It is the thirtieth century.The "world" has evolved into a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knitting the solar system into one scape from the outer planets to the sun. Humanity, too, has reconfigured itself. Most people have chosen immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others have opted for disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world. A few holdouts stubbornly remain fleshers struggling to shape an antiquated existence in the muck and jungle of Earth.

And then there is the Orphan, a genderless digital being grown from a mind seed.

When an unforeseen disaster ravages the fleshers, it awakens the polises to the possibility of their own extinction from bizarre astrophysical processes that seemingly violate fundamental laws of nature. It is up to the Orphan and a group of refugees to find the knowledge that will save them all--a search that will lead them on a quantum adventure to a higher dimension beyond the macrocosmos....

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the 30th century, few humans remain on Earth. Most have downloaded themselves into robot bodies or solar-system-spanning virtual realities, escaping death--or so they believe, until the collision of nearby neutron stars threatens life in every form.

Diaspora, written by Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner Greg Egan, transcends millennia and universes in the tradition of Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix Plus, Camille Flammarion's Omega, and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. Diaspora is packed with mind-bending ideas extrapolated from cutting-edge cosmology, physics, and consciousness theory to create an astonishing hard-SF novel inhabited by very strange yet always believable characters. Diaspora is why people read SF. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly

By the year 2975, humanity has wandered down several widely divergent evolutionary paths. "Flesher" life is that which resides in a basically human body, though genetically engineered mutations have created communication problems throughout the species. In the "polises," meanwhile, disembodied but self-aware artificial intelligences procreate, interact, make art and attempt to solve life's mathematical mysteries. Then there are the "gleisners," which are conscious, flesher-shaped robots run by self-aware software that is linked directly to the physical world through hardware. Throughout, Egan (Distress) follows the progress of Yatima, an orphan spontaneously generated by the non-sentient software of the Konishi polis. Yatima gains self-awareness, meets with Earthly fleshers and, when tragedy strikes, becomes personally involved in the greatest search for species survival ever undertaken. Though the novel often reads like a series of tenuously connected graduate theses and lacks the robust drama and characterizations of good fiction, fans of hard SF that incorporates higher mathematics and provocative hypotheses about future evolution are sure to be fascinated by Egan's speculations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Eos (November 3, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061057983
• ISBN-13: 978-0061057984
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #586,051 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am a science fiction writer and computer programmer. You can find information, illustrations and interactive applets that supplement my books at www.gregegan.net

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Full of Fascinating Ideas, but Flawed April 1, 1998

By Jim Mann

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm sometimes not sure exactly how to react to the works of Greg Egan. Diaspora, while a good book, generated the same react as other Egan I've read. Sometimes his works seem brilliant. At other times, Egan seems too clever for his good, intent on showing off lots of details about new ideas. Sometimes the work moves right along. At others, it stops with the old hack of "tell me again professor exactly how wormholes work." (This one really happens in Diaspora.) Sometimes the novels seems driven by an interesting story. At other times, it seems like a loose collection of events, a travelogue, the plot of which is only there to allow Egan to explore wonder after wonder. Parts of Diaspora had me saying, as I read, "this is brilliant and belongs on the Hugo ballot." Other parts had me saying "OK, so he wants to show off with more future physics/math" or "OK, he dreamed up yet another universe, so our characters have to go there so he can write about it."

In the end, I still think that Diaspora was a good book, with flashes of brilliance and ideas that in and of themselves are exciting and interesting. But overall, it's impact is lessened by its rambling nature and by Egan's tendency to go into information-dump mode.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An epic that spans time and space to the INFINITE degree June 6, 2000

By Beachie

Format:Hardcover

Once again, Egan has struck a chord across many disciplines--the non-fiction studies of AI, multidimensional geometry, mathematics, astrophysics, and others are woven into a novel of pure, hard, sf.

Have you ever read a sf book and thought, "That was a great concept... but the author could have gone farther"? You can NOT do that with Egan's work. He explores and pushes back the outer boundaries of the comprehensible with his stories. Diaspora, particularly, spans as far as one can go--at least, as far as its own concept of the future can be pushed.

The book develops from extremely small beginnings--the "womb" of one of Earth's virtual-reality cities called "polises"--where Yatima (the artificial-intelligence protagonist) is born. From there, Yatima grows in a quest for understanding of the world around ver (neuter for "his" or "her"). From ver polis, to the realms of the other lifeforms inhabiting Earth, to the questions of "Who is out there? Who came before us? Why are we HERE?" Yatima struggles and discovers, traveling faster and faster through space (and time). The urgency of the pitch accelerates as ve nears ver goal. Without spoiling the ending, I'll say this: have you ever hiked a "strenuous" trail to reach a peak, and then stood by yourself at the very top and listened to the wind whistle around you? It's amazing how deeply you can look into yourself when you know you're at the pinnacle of experience.

For those who hate Egan's copious (and admittedly rigorous) studies within the text: maybe adapting your style of reading would help. I'm not telling you to do anything difficult or that would detract from the story; just learn to skim over the heavy details the first time you read the story.... I guarantee you'll come back again for them ... for in Diaspora, as in Quarantine and others, Egan uses high-technology magic to restate our own questions: "Who is out there? Who came before us? Why are we HERE?" Read more ›

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Ingenious but... December 20, 2000

By Dr. Zoidberg

Format:Mass Market Paperback

First, let me tell you this: Greg Egan is a genius. His ideas are unparalleled by any other science fiction writer I know of. I have read several of his books, and his novels/short stories are the most unique stories I have ever read. Having said that, I have to say he has a bit of a problem with writing long novels and tends to lose focus and drift away. He shines with short stories, though. This book has the same problems. It actually seems like 2 books, really, the first and the second part are so different. The first half of the books tells the story of Yatima, an artificial intelligence being who lives inside a "polis", which is the equivalent of a city of AIs. The story details how Yatima was "born", how did he evolve, and elaborates on his experiences. The background of the story is complex and detailed - yet still remains believable: most of what is left of humanity chose to turn themselves to digital beings, others turned themselves to Gleisners (Robots). But a few chose to remain human, albeit genetically modified humans. This part is *awesome*, *amazing* - it is very, very good! Then, roughly in the middle of the book the story takes a turn: after an unexplained phenomena which occured and wiped the remaining human population, one of the polises decides to go on a "Diaspora", clone itself and explore the galaxy. This part elaborates on the journey. The thing is, there is very very little story, most of it is complicated scientific theories. I'm sure Greg Egan knows his science, from what I understood (I couldn't follow everything), he got it right to the point. But it gets way too complicated. Seriously, I had university courses easier than this part of the book!... And it is not really necessary, most of the time, a theory is introduced, and then the story moves on to the next theory. In the meanwhile, there isn't much left of the original story - the scientific background seems to be much more important than the plot! I would give 5 (or more!) stars to the first half of the book, and 2 to the second part. But overall, the second part really ruined a lot of the book for me. Nonetheless, I'd still recommend it - just be prepared for a very high level of physics! And check out "Axiomatic", this is truly one of the best short science fiction stories of all time - Greg Egan at his best. Read more ›

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Speculative Fiction February 10, 2006

By Jeremy P. Hamilton

Format:Mass Market Paperback

I've been looking for a book like this for a long time. Anthropomorphism has always been a pretty pervasive feature of sf-- it makes for better drama, but really bad speculation. For once, the ideas described here aren't restrained by what people find familiar- the aliens aren't simply alternate earth biology, the human societies are actually more then just variances of what you'd read in a history book, the underlying science is as essential to the story as the events of the novel, and the storyline is about intellectual discovery, almost exclusively.

Despite what some reviewers have written, the society the author describes clearly wasn't intended as a dystopia. Whether you see it as such depends on how you define human identity (the author, a programmer, seems to believe that the core of human identity is some sort of mathematically perfect function, and the rest is extraneous extrapolation-- I couldn't disagree more, but my own motivations have nothing to do with tissues and neurons (except as a means to an end), so I personally found the incorporeal society pretty cool). In any case, the idea is both plausible and interesting-- good speculation.

If you read sci-fi for escapism, I wouldn't recommend this book-- it offers little in the way of relatable characters or drama, and the only fantasy it fulfills is that of a physicist or programmer. If, on the other hand, you read sci-fi for interesting ideas and speculation, then this book is a godsend, a breath of fresh air in a stale room.