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Diaspora

By Greg Egan

(18)

| Paperback | 9780752809250

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Book Description

Behold the orphan.

Born into a world that is not a world.

A digital being grown from a mind seed, a genderless cybernetic citizen in a vast network of probes, satellites and servers knitting the Solar System into one scape, from the outer planets to the fiery surface of the Sun.

Since the IntrContinue

Behold the orphan.

Born into a world that is not a world.

A digital being grown from a mind seed, a genderless cybernetic citizen in a vast network of probes, satellites and servers knitting the Solar System into one scape, from the outer planets to the fiery surface of the Sun.

Since the Introdus in the 21st 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 bridges 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 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.

Quite simply the boldest and most wildly speculative writer of his generation, Greg Egan has written a quantum Brave New World  for the century's end -- a masterful SF saga envisioning a time when not only humanity but "reality" itself will be but a memory.

It is a novel unlike anything you have ever read. Or even imagined.

Critics

  • Diaspora

    Been awhile since you've read any hard science fiction? I mean, really hard scifi? Well, if your brain is ready for a workout, you must give Diaspora a try. Honestly, if there had been a test at the end of the novel, I would have had no chance. The c ... (read full critics)

    sfsite published on Fri, 3 Sep 2010

  • Diaspora

    Diaspora begins in 2975, when there are three major strands to humanity: fleshers, who retain biological bodies; gleisners, who have moved to humanoid robots; and citizens of the polises, who live as software running on central polis hardware. Within ... (read full critics)

    dannyreviews published on Fri, 27 Aug 2010

2 Reviews

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  • 2 people find this helpful

    Insane

    This might be the most insane science fiction book I have ever read (so far). Greg Egan's ideas are mind blowing. I thought Banks' Culture series pushed the idea of artificial intelligence to another level but Diaspora's "polis" concept just blows the Culture "Minds" out of the water. A warning thou ... (continue)

    This might be the most insane science fiction book I have ever read (so far). Greg Egan's ideas are mind blowing. I thought Banks' Culture series pushed the idea of artificial intelligence to another level but Diaspora's "polis" concept just blows the Culture "Minds" out of the water. A warning though: Diaspora is definitely one for science geeks! Only read it if you don't mind whole chapters describing quantum physics concepts and multi-dimensional mathematics.

    I often wandered if it was possible to describe a higher dimensional universe but now I know it can be done (Egan describes a 6-dimensional macrosphere in Diaspora). And so much better than Lovercraft's "it's so weird I go insane" appoach :-)

    Is this helpful?

    Martin Laine said on Aug 10, 2007 | Add your feedback

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