Reviews

Diaspora by Greg Egan

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rssulliv's review against another edition

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adventurous informative mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

frasersimons's review against another edition

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challenging informative reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.25

This is a much more successful book, in my eyes, than Blood Music. There is so much more hard science, and the extrapolation so far ahead, that the science does actually buttress the ideas, and are just more interesting to me, personally. Although, again, this is not cyberpunk, it is very squarely post humanism. Egan’s strengths, as one would somewhat expect of the subgenre and time of writing, is in the ideas conveyed, rather than plot, pacing, and characters.

It really depends on how interested the reader is in post humanism and how familiar (or willing) they are to consume a lot of terms and jargon specific to the ideas. I had to Google a lot of them. But I didn’t mind because it was engaging. Books labelled as hard scifi nowadays are not nearly as dense as this, so I imagine this as more niche than his other works.

I only attempted this because I owned it and have my cyberpunk ongoing reading project. I think a lot of works are labelled incorrectly in the subgenre solely based on a few tropes being present, and not assembled altogether. The most predominate is if something has anything like cyberspace, it seems like people just decided it was cyberpunk. Baffling, but seems like the only through line I can see with so many mislabelled in the subgenre, including this and Blood Music. It’s one of the most prevalent consumerists who decided a subgenre was present in a book based on style or nebulous other attributes, rather than was it was codified as.