Diaspora
Ratings63
Average rating3.7
Crazy this was written in the 90s. Feels like the three body problem ripped this off a lot, but this is much better written. I think I liked permutation city slightly more than this
This seems like it was a fun book for Greg Egan to write, but for me it was a painfully boring read. Ultimately i'm less interested in the nuts and bolts of Egan's sci-fi conceits than the psychological impact they have on the characters. Egan's previous works achieve a good balance between high concept sci-fi and psychological drama, but this novel ended up devolving largely into long winded math, particle physics and biochemistry lectures that i had no patience for. From the plot descriptions of Egan's later works I suspect this trend gets even worse over time. Still highly recommend his early stuff.
“If you love hard sci-fi and mathematics or quantum physics, then you'll probably love this book”
“Diaspora is the story of Yatima — a polis being created from random mutations of the Konishi polis base mind seed”
If this description excites you, go for it. This book made up of only technical made up “mumbo jumbo”. No literary value.
Read 1:05 / 10:00 10%
Particle physics and multi-dimensional maths aren't what I'm looking for in my science fiction, and I felt very lost a bunch of times. But even then, it still managed to tell a fine story, once I got used to the idea that every other chapter would go way over my head, and all I could hope for was to get the general idea and what it meant for the overall quest the characters were on.
I understood like 10% of the science terms and explanations of techno-babble but boy was it an enjoyable book. I had not read anything by Egan before but this has made me start looking into other books by him.
This is one quite amazing book. Falling somewhere between the lines of a Hard-speculative-SciFi it somehow resembles Jacek Dukaj's ‘Perfect Imperfection'. The story starts in 30th century earth where intelligent life is divided between flesh humans, post-singularity humans and self-aware artificial intelligence. The author took some ideas from astrophysics about possible interstellar events and created whole new physics around that, starting with wormholes and finishing with infinite-dimensions connected universes. The chapters describing how these physics work are simply mind-bending and surprisingly ‘believable' (to an extent where such wild theories can possibly be). I may not call it an exciting or easy read, but i was really delighted by the amount of ideas and how it changes the way we may look at things. The book is definitely an acquired taste kind of experiences, but for me personally a great one.
