Customer Reviews

Diaspora

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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?"

Diaspora has rapidly become one of my favourite books: here's why.

A fabulous book, Diaspora is simply so dense, filled with invention, with mind-expanding discovery. At his worst, as in his disappointing recent mainstream sci-fi novel, Terranesia, Greg Egan can be overly didactic, dull and sluggish. But here, at his best, he can do what no other contemporary 'hard' science fiction writer can do: he can turn scientific speculation into sheer wonder. When he concentrates on letting loose this amazing flow of ideas, an almost stream-of-consciousness expanding of whole universes out of the tiniest and most unexpected cracks like endless fractal flowers, his writing can be an almost mystical experience, a celebration of what the human mind can conceive.

Yet it does not rely simply on this stunning and fertile scientific speculation: Egan's characters are real; despite being virtual people, citizens of a computer polis, they are human, they grow, change and develop in comprehensible ways, even if their abilities and situation are beyond us. I have never come across another writer who can convincingly describe what it is like to see in five dimensions, and then equally comprehensibly portray the sheer emotional and physical shock of being restricted to three again. It is this combination of emotional maturity and ever unfolding wonder that makes Diaspora more like Attanasio's baroque masterpiece, Last Legends of Earth (another favourite of mine), than any other conventional hard sci-fi.

Diaspora's only disappointment is that it has to end.

With his latest novel, Greg Egan has created a cosmo-anthropological adventure that will take you till the limits of `humanness' in a constant fulfilling of space-time searching urges. In Diaspora you will find human beings in the most strange, natural, peculiar and logical `disguises'; organic or inorganic, software or brain, Egan manages to fill his characters with generous doses of what we call the human condition, and by doing it he always makes us feel close to them. Whether they are fleshers (homo sapiens), Gleisner robots, freakish exuberants or solipsist Ashton-Laval polis citizens, Egan's characters always question and analyze their world and their human (or whatever) condition, their being a part of this universe. This almost obsessive questioning of the `world around us' and the search for an invariant of consciousness are some of the trademarks of this intellectually awesome writer. As in previous novels, as for instance in Distress, Egan seems to flow his ideas (and he has plenty) into the text with unusual ease, allowing you to swallow all this knowledge without effort. There are some parts of the book, though, that are a little bit hard to get through (another Egan trademark) but these parts are filled with mind-stretchers so incredible that it becomes almost impossible to convey them in an easier way. It's worth the effort, believe me. Diaspora seems to establish the Australian genius at the front line of the hard SF field, leaving his namesakes far behind. Now that critics complain about a lack of ideas in the genre which was born to create them, proclaiming that mainstream offers more SF ideas than SF itself, and with `SF is dead' as the most employed slogan in the highbrow circuits, Greg Egan seems to be closing some mouths and demonstrating that the important thing is writers and not the field they seem to fit into. In a way, Diaspora, thanks to his adventure-like structure, is more accessible than Egan's previous works, and if readers are bright out there, it will earn him the definitive recognition as the most interesting SF writer working today. My qualification? Read the book and judge by yourself.

Imagine Asimov's whole Foundation series compressed in 400 pages. I bet you can't. Diaspora is a greater story, and still it fits in one standard paperback volume.

Egan has no mercy toward the science-horrified types. Math and physics on the introductory graduate school level in a fiction? Yes, way to go! Finally, something for the educated readership. The author has actually studied the subjects he's talking about, and studied them well. The horrified crowd of literary critics can't even imagine that, they automatically assume that his knowledge should be as shallow as theirs. But you don't need to be a scientist to read this book, just keep an open mind and be prepared to use it.

The ideas are so detailed and so well thought through that they all seem simply within reach. Diaspora picks up where Distress left off, and developes an alternative vision of the Universe, without any mentions of anthrocosmology. The original genderless pronouns make a comeback to describe asexual inhabitants of the virtual home in the real world.

The characters are believable and real, solidly defined with just a few strokes of a master's pencil. The imagery is blindingly rich. Space travel at legal light-limited speeds, actual experiments of the quantum physics, existing mathematical theorems combine with alien worlds, galactic catastrophes and dual universes to create a saga of the humankind spanning billions of years in the future. The story defies cliches (someone was looking for a climax?) and proceeds at lightning pace through the confrontations between the universe and the people on a hot trail of a sister civilization to the perfect ending of which Lem definitely could be proud.

Diaspora is Greg Egan's most far-out book to date, and that's saying a lot.

The Orphan's awakening within the computer scape is painstakingly evoked, and in the process, the reader himself takes on the viewpoint of one who has never existed in the real world. The process of self-awareness is intuitive in humans because of our connection to our bodies and our biological instincts. For a piece of immortal and incorporeal software, selfhood must be deduced, and Egan rigorously and brilliantly describes how. When the polis-dwellers finally encounter the fleshers, they seem strange, primitive.

I admire Egan's audacity to tackle a subject as vast in scope as this book, and his storytelling is necessarily more than a bit abstract. When your story spans millenia, I think it would be inappropriate to saddle it with a mere "character-driven" plot.

But Egan's zeal in spinning one far-fetched scientific speculation after another is the book's strength and its weakness. Discourses on fermion-boson phase oscillations, lepton waves, macrosphere space-time curvature and wormhole knots take on increasing prominence as the story progresses, even as the reader becomes numb to it all and wishes for some payoff for having stuck it out for 300+ pages.

It's a lot like you're reading a detective novel, and as the hero gets in a car to go somewhere, the writer starts explaining in minute detail the mechanics of the internal combustion engine, its developmental history, its foreseeable future applications-- on and on for pages and pages. Then later, when the detective finds a piece of paper with a clue written on it, the book suddenly goes into a long treatise on the neural processes for deciphering written language, the ongoing evolution of human vision and the latest theories on paper recycling. It's true, it gets bogged down that way in unnecessary and self-defeating textbook passages, even though arguably, they may be the whole point of the book.

SPOILER:

Having said that, I found the ending (when it finally came) to be the perfect way to conclude the Orphan's quest. As only one of countless divergent paths, this fate nonetheless encompasses all the rest. Born of mathematics, for him the epic striving for human self-knowledge was finally nothing but a diversion. (Bothersome question: if the Transmuters wanted those who followed them to recognize their passing and learn from them, why are their artifacts, or polises, so indecipherable in the end?)

I have two favorite writers: Greg Egan who writes mostly science fiction and Cliff Pickover who writes mostly science. Diaspora is an amazing combination of both science and science fiction and contains some of the most mind-stretching concepts that you will ever encounter. Not only does Diaspora describe what life might be like in the future, it also discusses the ways in which we may manipulate higher dimensions and communicate with higher-dimensional beings. Cliff Pickover also discusses these topics in his book Surfing through Hyperspace, which I also highly recommend, but Egan, in some ways, goes further in his surreal explorations.

I recommend this book, because your mind will be warped in wonderfully new ways as a result of your finishing it. You will think about "life" in new ways. You will understand that life need not be made of flesh and blood but can take on forms hardly imaginable before reading this book. If there are a few mathematically difficult areas of the book, don't worry. You can skim through them and still have your mind twisted and rearranged in ways that will make you a fuller human being.

Greg Egan is one of my favorite writers and one of the most popular authors of speculative fiction among the transhuman/extropian crowd. Diaspora may be his finest work to date, and that's saying a lot.

The opening chapters give us a touching, even moving depiction of the earliest learning and orientation of an artificial intelligence, a digital being that only gradually becomes self-aware. From there, the book takes off onto a romp that will carry us across the galaxy, far into the future, and ultimately into alternate universes, some that exist with expanded dimensions!

I'm neither a mathematician nor a scientist, and I'll admit that some of the long descriptions of multi-dimensional geometry and physics were a little over my head. But I found I was able to skim through those parts and still stay engaged with the story, the characters, and the spectacular ideas. Although this is speculative fiction at its most extreme, Egan has done his homework and keeps us believing that what he`s writing about is really possible. For lovers of hard SF, this is as good as it gets.