Status
Available
Call number
Description
Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive starships. And there are the holdouts: the fleshers left behind in the muck and jungle of Earth-some devolved into dream apes, others cavorting in the seas or the air-while the statics and bridgers try to shape out a roughly human destiny. But the complacency of the citizens is shattered when an unforeseen disaster ravages the fleshers and reveals the possibility that the polises themselves might be at risk from bizarre astrophysical processes that seem to violate fundamental laws of nature. The orphan Yatima, a digital being grown from a mind seed, joins a group of citizens and flesher refugees in a search for the knowledge that will guarantee their safety-a search that puts them on the trail of the ancient and elusive Transmuters, who have the power to reshape subatomic particles, and to cross into the macrocosmos, where the universe we know is nothing but a speck in the higher-dimensional vacuum.… (more)
Pages
249
DDC/MDS
| 823 |
Awards
Library's review
This book is fundamentally an exploration of what it might mean to be human, if the "pointless, arbitrary restrictions" of the ordinary human condition were loosened or removed.
It's also about how beings who are profoundly different from each other might still communicate in a meaningful
There's also a great deal of cosmology and physics in the novel. Its exposition isn't the greatest - it really feels like infodumps and some diagrams would help - but it's essential to the shape of the novel: because once you remove all the ordinary restrictions of the human condition, what's left? The restrictions imposed by the physics of the universe(s), that's what.
This is science fiction by the strongest definition of the genre: the science is an essential component of the story that it tells. I don't see novels like this very often anymore.
At the end of the book, the breadth of the canvas had become the entire age of the universe, & I lost interest as I usually do when that happens. But there were a lot of good ideas, or really well expressed ideas, throughout - I did much more (kindle) highlighting on this book than I usually do.
I find Greg Egan to be uneven to my tastes, but this one's a goodie.
It's also about how beings who are profoundly different from each other might still communicate in a meaningful
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way.There's also a great deal of cosmology and physics in the novel. Its exposition isn't the greatest - it really feels like infodumps and some diagrams would help - but it's essential to the shape of the novel: because once you remove all the ordinary restrictions of the human condition, what's left? The restrictions imposed by the physics of the universe(s), that's what.
This is science fiction by the strongest definition of the genre: the science is an essential component of the story that it tells. I don't see novels like this very often anymore.
At the end of the book, the breadth of the canvas had become the entire age of the universe, & I lost interest as I usually do when that happens. But there were a lot of good ideas, or really well expressed ideas, throughout - I did much more (kindle) highlighting on this book than I usually do.
I find Greg Egan to be uneven to my tastes, but this one's a goodie.
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User reviews
LibraryThing member ChrisRiesbeck
Egan as always taking some SFnal idea to its extreme conclusion. In this case, the future of humanity when most people are either uploaded consciousnesses or new consciousnesses created digitally from the beginning. Told as a sequence of linearly connected tales, in full Stapledonian Last and First
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Men / Star Maker mode. Sadly, like its inspirational models, as a story it leaves much to be desired. The opening chapter, with the birth of a new consciousness, is the most abstract and hardest read. Things improve after that, with a very good chapter involving the fate of the remaining "fleshers" on Earth when colliding neutron stars in the galactic neighborhood send a wave of fatal radiation. But, for me, that was the high point of the book, and later chapters were little more than plot advancement. Show Less
LibraryThing member kencf0618
An arterial spray of ideas. Olaf Stapledon on crack, basically. I got it in the first place because of Ken MacLeod's bifurcated opinion which is referenced in an interview in his Wikipedia entry -he admired the book but hated the world!
LibraryThing member rich
This is one of the most mind-expanding books I've ever read. If you're a computer scientist, this will leave you unable to speak. If you're not, you'll still enjoy it.
LibraryThing member Xuenay
The first chapter (which happens to be available for free from the author's website) was something I had to read twice - the way it described the birth and development of an artificial mind up to the point that it achieved self-awareness was so fantastic, smoothly using a dozen different concepts
Some readers found the lack of drama in the book to be a turn-off, but for me, the detailed descriptions of the life and culture of digital entities more than makes up for it. (And the moments when the protagonist achieved self-awareness both made me smile and sent shivers down my spine, especially on the second reading.) That's only for the first third of the book or so, though - after that, the cogsci enthusiasm changes to theoretical physics enthusiasm and there's so much stuff about five-dimensional universes and elementary particles made up of wormholes that the society description becomes a distant second. To me, that's a pity, but the first third is so strong that the book deserves four stars nonetheless.
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from cognitive science and developmental psychology. For a cogsci major, that was a great treat. The rest of the book continues on the same lines - the occasional stuff about astrophysics and four-dimensional geometry went over my head, but I couldn't help but loving the way that Egan describes life inside a computer in an entirely plausible fashion. At no time does he forget that his characters aren't human. Some readers found the lack of drama in the book to be a turn-off, but for me, the detailed descriptions of the life and culture of digital entities more than makes up for it. (And the moments when the protagonist achieved self-awareness both made me smile and sent shivers down my spine, especially on the second reading.) That's only for the first third of the book or so, though - after that, the cogsci enthusiasm changes to theoretical physics enthusiasm and there's so much stuff about five-dimensional universes and elementary particles made up of wormholes that the society description becomes a distant second. To me, that's a pity, but the first third is so strong that the book deserves four stars nonetheless.
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LibraryThing member BobNolin
I didn't like his earlier book Distress, decided to give him another shot. Forty pages in and I'm done. This is not a story, it's a paean to scientism. I know that life after the Singularity is going to be very strange, but there's gotta be a better way to describe life on the other side. This is
The cover art is unfortunate - from a distance (or reduced in size, as here) it looks like a skull with a clown nose.
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barely fiction. No more Egan for me. The cover art is unfortunate - from a distance (or reduced in size, as here) it looks like a skull with a clown nose.
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LibraryThing member bianca.sayan
Holy crap, awesome. This is some of the more compelling, original scifi i've read. There are a bunch of things I love about this book: the interesting history Egan writes for humanity, the lack of an enemy, the exploration of what humanity will be like when they aren't really human anymore. Omg,
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just go read it. Show Less
LibraryThing member Clevermonkey
A community of uploaded (and artificial) human personalities explore the galaxy and beyond, seeking to understand a cosmic cataclysm that has destroyed biological life on Earth. Like most Egan books, light on action, super heavy on the blow-your-mind concepts.
LibraryThing member fractal_oblidisk
One of the most mind-blowing science fiction books... ever. Transhumanism galore here.
Humans have used technology to evolve into a variety of different post-human entities, ranging from full-on robots who live in space, to nonverbal intelligent humans who live on the Earth, as well as software
Humans have used technology to evolve into a variety of different post-human entities, ranging from full-on robots who live in space, to nonverbal intelligent humans who live on the Earth, as well as software
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societies living in computers. When disaster at a distant star promises to wipe out life on Earth, every post-human species responds differently. Who will survive? Show Less
LibraryThing member WilHowitt
This is hard SF, post-Singularity, transhuman. Most of humanity has moved into all-software cities, with some holdouts living in discrete robot bodies, and even fewer "fleshers" still living in biological bodies. Within the software world, the distinction between uploaded human minds and AIs has
Seems like near utopia -- until the robot people discover a galactic disaster that threatens everybody's survival. The on-the-ball software people have to convince the iconoclastic fleshers that the problem is real and imminent, as well as the navel-gazing solipsist cities who pretend the outside world doesn't exist. Neither of which want to deal with it.
Like Wil McCarthy, Egan invents a fascinating pseudophysics to give his characters powerful new tools to use. Like Peter Watts, he introduces alien entities that blur the boundaries of what we call consciousness, reality, selfhood. The universe-stretching finale invites comparison to Childhood's End.
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become irrelevant, and concepts like ego and self become squishy when you can modify your own mind freely, and restore from backups as desired.Seems like near utopia -- until the robot people discover a galactic disaster that threatens everybody's survival. The on-the-ball software people have to convince the iconoclastic fleshers that the problem is real and imminent, as well as the navel-gazing solipsist cities who pretend the outside world doesn't exist. Neither of which want to deal with it.
Like Wil McCarthy, Egan invents a fascinating pseudophysics to give his characters powerful new tools to use. Like Peter Watts, he introduces alien entities that blur the boundaries of what we call consciousness, reality, selfhood. The universe-stretching finale invites comparison to Childhood's End.
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LibraryThing member ohernaes
Forms of post-humanism. I enjoyed the parts that I could follow, which were not too many, due in large part to a crappy audiobook edition.
LibraryThing member bookwormelf
hard sci-fi at its finest
LibraryThing member roguehomebody
This novel is BIG. You may think you've read sci-fi tales played out on vast scales, but compared to “Diaspora,” all those “epic” stories are little more than the churning of anthills.
All the traditional sci-fi concepts are here, but they've been expanded so adroitly, so meticulously, that
The quest of Yatima and his companions goes so far beyond the expected space-time continuum that it's hard to fathom. The end of the novel will leave you gobsmacked. Have they really gone this far? How much further will Yatima go still? Is Yatima's fate a blessing or a curse...or will it flip-flop between the two as the eons pass?
The xenobiology, the celestial calamities, the massive engineering projects, the elusive Transmuters, always just out of reach...it's all exquisitely detailed.
But that detail is a double-edged sword. Reading “Diaspora” is like reading a textbook. All of its concepts are discussed seriously and at great length. There are few summaries or shortcuts. I probably didn't understand half the novel.
If Egan had pulled back just a little, if he'd helped us along instead of dumping esoteric data on us and expecting us to slog through it on our own, this novel would be nearly perfect. As it's written, though, it's nearly undecipherable to the layperson.
Its concepts are still so dazzling that they'll stick with me for a long time, but to absorb the barest understanding of them required a ton of work. Those with scientific expertise may be in heaven if they try this novel, but I can't recommend it to the casual reader.
All the traditional sci-fi concepts are here, but they've been expanded so adroitly, so meticulously, that
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it all feels fresh. The discussions on identity and mental states were so incredible I could feel my own mind changing, in strange mimicry of the characters and their “outlooks.”The quest of Yatima and his companions goes so far beyond the expected space-time continuum that it's hard to fathom. The end of the novel will leave you gobsmacked. Have they really gone this far? How much further will Yatima go still? Is Yatima's fate a blessing or a curse...or will it flip-flop between the two as the eons pass?
The xenobiology, the celestial calamities, the massive engineering projects, the elusive Transmuters, always just out of reach...it's all exquisitely detailed.
But that detail is a double-edged sword. Reading “Diaspora” is like reading a textbook. All of its concepts are discussed seriously and at great length. There are few summaries or shortcuts. I probably didn't understand half the novel.
If Egan had pulled back just a little, if he'd helped us along instead of dumping esoteric data on us and expecting us to slog through it on our own, this novel would be nearly perfect. As it's written, though, it's nearly undecipherable to the layperson.
Its concepts are still so dazzling that they'll stick with me for a long time, but to absorb the barest understanding of them required a ton of work. Those with scientific expertise may be in heaven if they try this novel, but I can't recommend it to the casual reader.
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LibraryThing member Lyndatrue
It's been a very long time since I set a book aside without finishing it, but I just found the book annoying, rather than interesting, and realized that I was doing anything rather than reading it.
I've enjoyed other books by Egan, and I think this one is an anomaly; the constant references to
In this case it was a relief. I'm sure that other people have enjoyed this work, and it's probably just my own peculiarities that keep me from liking it. I may return to it someday. Then again, life is short, and there's so much still to do.
I've enjoyed other books by Egan, and I think this one is an anomaly; the constant references to
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multiple sexes and my inability to remember which was which, finally did me in. When you're spending more time rereading previous pages because thing didn't make sense you start to question your own memory. I am always reading multiple books, and usually have at least two, or three, fiction novels going, as well as technical works.In this case it was a relief. I'm sure that other people have enjoyed this work, and it's probably just my own peculiarities that keep me from liking it. I may return to it someday. Then again, life is short, and there's so much still to do.
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LibraryThing member Paul_S
All the imaginary physics is tedious and adds nothing to the story.
Publication
Publisher Unknown, 249 pages
Subjects
Original publication date
1997
ISBN
1922240117 / 9781922240118