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Diaspora Mass Market Paperback – November 3, 1999

by Greg Egan (Author)

169 customer reviews

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In a new world of digital beings, an Orphan is born, and humans have chosen to be forever digitized, have selected renewable robotic bodies, or remain flesh on Earth, until a devastating event occurs, causing the Orphan go to Earth to protect the Fleshers from beings that can reshape subatomic particles and transcend time. Reissue.

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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 the Hardcover edition.

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Product details

Mass Market Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Eos (November 1, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0061057983
ISBN-13: 978-0061057984
Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1 x 6.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
Average Customer Review: 169 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,303,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4322 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Hard Science Fiction

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Incredible mind-blowing hard sci-fi

September 17, 2015

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

What an incredible book. I was intimidated at first and a little turned off by some of the reviews, but I am so glad I read this book as it is possibly my favorite sci-fi book ever. Yes, it is challenging and some of it I didn't understand, but its written in a way that you don't have to understand all of it to understand the story. It is probably necessary to have some basic knowledge of modern cosmological theories and AI speculation, and yes you will have to pay attention and think about some things, but that's part of the great pleasure of reading this book.

Diaspora is written in a mostly straightforward manner, but it almost feels avant garde just because the concepts are so mind-blowing and Greg Egan goes so far with them. This is a story of scientific discovery, of pushing the boundaries all the way, of surviving the ultimate catastrophe. Yes, the characters are not the focus of the story, and yet I felt more connected to them than characters in many other books. I wouldn't trade a single sentence in this book for more "character development". Greg Egan pushes the limits of the imagination so far that I was left speechless in awe and wonder at the worlds being described... which gave me a taste of what the characters might be experiencing, and thus I connected to them strongly.

His descriptions of universes with more dimensions than ours got me closer to being able to imagine those higher dimensions than anything else I've read. The way he imagines life on other planets stimulates my imagination beyond the traditional earth-bound imaginings of other books I've read. The AI and virtual reality settings blew so far past my usual thinking that just about anything else seems tame. This is what sci-fi should be, to my tastes - pushing the limits of imagination so far it overwhelms my connection to this reality and I end up fully absorbed in the world being created by the writer.

The biggest drawback to this book, for me, is that it has forever shifted my standards for appreciating sci-fi. Fortunately Greg Egan has written several other books, and I'm already looking forward to reading Diaspora again. This book is written for a particular kind of reader, and if you think you might be such a reader, read this book immediately!!!

8 people found this helpful9 people found this helpful

adam likes to cook

My new favorite book.

September 1, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

There's this one scene in this book where a small society of AI and humans who migrated their consciousness into computer programs are traveling in an intergalactic space ship/super computer and they find this one star system with a planet that has life on it. It's the first time these sentient programs have discovered life outside their own species/ancestors. This life is giant tiles of algae floating on the ocean of the planet, which they deem carpets.

The AI spend decades trying to figure out if the carpets are at all sentient, until one of the AI's realizes that the carpets are actually growing and moving in patterns that is computer code... Upon further investigation the the carpets are just one slice of a sixteen-dimensional sentient species...

This is just one amazing part of this crazy book. If you're at all into futurism, physics, AI, math and or programming, you need to read this.

4 people found this helpful5 people found this helpful

The best "Futurism as Fiction" book I can recall reading

November 13, 2013

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

As other reviewers have noted, this book is full of fascinating ideas. Is the "information dump" to which reviewer Jim Mann refers a bit much at times? Perhaps. Is the story at times slightly contrived around an idea? Probably(I'd say the best example of this is the end of the story, which gets a bit repetitive and seems to perhaps only be there to showcase the idea that there are infinite dimensions).

But, flaws aside, here is why I cannot give this book less than 5 stars: The fascinating ideas are REALLY FASCINATING.

If you want a glimpse of well fleshed out future societies (many of which which seem quite plausible, assuming that science eventually allows "uploading"), including their philosophies surrounding what life is, what the purpose of life is, how one interacts with those who choose different paths (or different physical forms), and what it might mean to live as a digital entity (and even to never have known anything else), you have to read this book.

This book, along with Egan's "Permutation City," (also an excellent book, and probably one to read before Diaspora to absorb its concepts, though the two have nothing to do with each other plot-wise) are the pinnacle of such speculation, woven into story form. It seems to me that Egan isn't just a writer of science fiction. He's obviously thought long and hard about these topics and that he is just as much a philosopher and a futurist who uses science fiction as a vehicle to convey his beliefs and speculations as he is a writer.

5 people found this helpful6 people found this helpful

A staggeringly epic work of science fiction

February 13, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

You don't have to have a physics degree to enjoy this book, but some passing familiarity with the terminology of relativity, particle physics and curiosity about the nature of consciousness certainly amplifies the experience. I can think of three separate parts of the book that would qualify among the best short stories I've read, but woven together into an epic of discovery and self-preservation by an advanced and more civilized form of humanity, it is truly a gift. I can't wait to read more of Egan's work. And I must disagree with another reviewer's panning of the ending -- which is not, in my opinion, a spoiler; but they should be more careful as a reviewer -- the last page of the book was both beautiful and satisfying to me.

One person found this helpful2 people found this helpful

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