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A review by clivemeister
Diaspora by Greg Egan
3.0
Greg Egan's reach with this novel is huge - the future of humankind, and the variations that it changes into, over thousands of years and huge distances. The core characters are not even quite human - some of them were human, before they were "scanned" into the computer spaces (the "polis") where they live, whilst others are simply computer code from their start. We also see references to other evolutions of "flesher" humans, as those of us with meat bodies are referred to, such as the dream apes, or the cyborg gleisners. This leads to a rapid divergence in desires and destinies:
But after the first quarter of the book, we stop worrying about this: it's all about expansion into space, as the Earth itself comes under deadly threat. So off we go, leaving Earth to head out to the solar system and beyond. As ever with Egan, there are some lovely lines:
And the scope becomes truly vast. However, the road through it gets very thorny; we dive into quite detailed explanations of exotic theories of physics with multiple dimensions and subatomic singularities. It's all very hardcore science:
So if you don't enjoy this sort of thing, this probably isn't the book for you.
For me, there were just about enough very clever ideas to keep me interested, although by the end of it there was quite enough of it.
Overall, three and a half stars: some dazzling ideas and great writing, plot a little too thin to be held up only by them.
"Once different communities start carving up the world into different categories, and caring about wildly different things, it becomes impossible to have a global culture in anything like the pre-Introdus sense."
But after the first quarter of the book, we stop worrying about this: it's all about expansion into space, as the Earth itself comes under deadly threat. So off we go, leaving Earth to head out to the solar system and beyond. As ever with Egan, there are some lovely lines:
"Once you’d seen Jupiter close up, first hand, you began to think of it more as a source of light pollution and electromagnetic noise than as an object of serious astronomical interest."
And the scope becomes truly vast. However, the road through it gets very thorny; we dive into quite detailed explanations of exotic theories of physics with multiple dimensions and subatomic singularities. It's all very hardcore science:
"The elementary particles themselves were the mouths of wormholes. Electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, W-Z bosons, gravitons and gluons were all just the mouths of longer-lived versions of the fleeting wormholes of the vacuum."
So if you don't enjoy this sort of thing, this probably isn't the book for you.
For me, there were just about enough very clever ideas to keep me interested, although by the end of it there was quite enough of it.
Overall, three and a half stars: some dazzling ideas and great writing, plot a little too thin to be held up only by them.