Rating: 
Summary: Welcome To Cosmological Mind-stretching Wonderland
Review: With his latest novel, Greg Egan has created a cosmo-anthropological adventure that will take you till the limits of 'humanness' in a constant fulfilling of space-time searching urges. In Diaspora you will find human beings in the most strange, natural, peculiar and logical 'disguises'; organic or inorganic, software or brain, Egan manages to fill his characters with generous doses of what we call the human condition, and by doing it he always makes us feel close to them. Whether they are fleshers (homo sapiens), Gleisner robots, freakish exuberants or solipsist Ashton-Laval polis citizens, Egan's characters always question and analyze their world and their human (or whatever) condition, their being a part of this universe. This almost obsessive questioning of the 'world around us' and the search for an invariant of consciousness are some of the trademarks of this intellectually awesome writer. As in previous novels, as for instance in Distress, Egan seems to flow his ideas (and he has plenty) into the text with unusual ease, allowing you to swallow all this knowledge without effort. There are some parts of the book, though, that are a little bit hard to get through (another Egan trademark) but these parts are filled with mind-stretchers so incredible that it becomes almost impossible to convey them in an easier way. It's worth the effort, believe me. Diaspora seems to establish the Australian genius at the front line of the hard SF field, leaving his namesakes far behind. Now that critics complain about a lack of ideas in the genre which was born to create them, proclaiming that mainstream offers more SF ideas than SF itself, and with 'SF is dead' as the most employed slogan in the highbrow circuits, Greg Egan seems to be closing some mouths and demonstrating that the important thing is writers and not the field they seem to fit into. In a way, Diaspora, thanks to his adventure-like structure, is more accessible than Egan's previous works, and if readers are bright out there, it will earn him the definitive recognition as the most interesting SF writer working today. My qualification? Read the book and judge by yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Inwards and Upwards
Review: Diaspora has rapidly become one of my favourite books: here's why. A fabulous book, Diaspora is simply so dense, filled with invention, with mind-expanding discovery. At his worst, as in his disappointing recent mainstream sci-fi novel, Terranesia, Greg Egan can be overly didactic, dull and sluggish. But here, at his best, he can do what no other contemporary 'hard' science fiction writer can do: he can turn scientific speculation into sheer wonder. When he concentrates on letting loose this amazing flow of ideas, an almost stream-of-consciousness expanding of whole universes out of the tiniest and most unexpected cracks like endless fractal flowers, his writing can be an almost mystical experience, a celebration of what the human mind can conceive. Yet it does not rely simply on this stunning and fertile scientific speculation: Egan's characters are real; despite being virtual people, citizens of a computer polis, they are human, they grow, change and develop in comprehensible ways, even if their abilities and situation are beyond us. I have never come across another writer who can convincingly describe what it is like to see in five dimensions, and then equally comprehensibly portray the sheer emotional and physical shock of being restricted to three again. It is this combination of emotional maturity and ever unfolding wonder that makes Diaspora more like Attanasio's baroque masterpiece, Last Legends of Earth (another favourite of mine), than any other conventional hard sci-fi. Diaspora's only disappointment is that it has to end.
Rating: 
Summary: My brain is falling out
Review: Definitely one of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read. The ideas and viewpoints in this book are truly unique. I found myself wondering if I would choose to become immortal as a being of pure thought. Does mortality define our existence or is it simply an obstacle to be overcome by evolution? Obviously, we are all afraid of death or at least the state of non-existence. But would that fear really drive most people to live as sentient software? I think an extended lifespan as a regular human would be sufficient for me. Immortality would seem to be infinitely boring in my opinion. I'm definitely a fan of hard sci-fi and 'Diaspora' is without a doubt one of its best examples. A book that challenges you to think about difficult questions using plausible scenarios is the whole point of science fiction anyway. Looking forward to reading more from Mr. Egan.
Rating:
Summary: As good as it gets
Review: Greg Egan is one of my favorite writers and one of the most popular authors of speculative fiction among the transhuman/extropian crowd. Diaspora may be his finest work to date, and that's saying a lot. The opening chapters give us a touching, even moving depiction of the earliest learning and orientation of an artificial intelligence, a digital being that only gradually becomes self-aware. From there, the book takes off onto a romp that will carry us across the galaxy, far into the future, and ultimately into alternate universes, some that exist with expanded dimensions! I'm neither a mathematician nor a scientist, and I'll admit that some of the long descriptions of multi-dimensional geometry and physics were a little over my head. But I found I was able to skim through those parts and still stay engaged with the story, the characters, and the spectacular ideas. Although this is speculative fiction at its most extreme, Egan has done his homework and keeps us believing that what he's writing about is really possible. For lovers of hard SF, this is as good as it gets.
Rating: 
Summary: What do ve think ve are doing?
Review: This is a far-flung futuristic blast that fails to deliver. I consider myself a scifi fantatic and have experienced a taste of it all - punk, hard, visionary, fantasy, time travel, end of world. But in this one I could never really identify with the characters. Perhaps it was their almost alien existence, so radically different from ours, that made the connection difficult. First of all, one had to wade through the new creatures - both biological and artificial. There is the writing- cautious, certainly not lyrical or poetic. Then there is the language, meant to be representative bof a future Earth but coming off hokey. Finally the plethora of new terms and abbreviations boggle the mind and are hurled at the reader so fast that simply absorbing and remembering them was a task unto itself. The (biological) beings here seem almost placid, curiously non-human in their incredible strangeness. Maybe another read would have improved my evaluation but why should reading be a burden?
Rating:
Summary: A mind-boggling blast of a book
Review: In Egans "Diaspora" things are going great for humanity
in the late twenty-first century: A lot of us are living
in computers or networks of computers. New citizens are born
by running mind seeds, or by assembly and customization of
preexisting components.
All in all an ersatz "Garden of Eden" for humanity. But not all is well. Gamma Ray bursts (caused by
colliding neutron stars) is not something humans
or computers wants to witness close-up.
And if thats not bad enough, Egan is the man to frigthen
us with even worse disasters, lurking out there in
the night sky.
One such Egan invention is the "core blast".
A blast that is followed by extreme temperatures.
Temperatures that breaks up nuclei within a radius of fifty thousand light years and effectively destroys
good old Milky way. And off we are to other universes. Re-configurating our
(computer) minds on the way, in order to deal with
5 dimensional worlds and more.
What a brilliant book! What a tour de force! -Simon
Rating:
Summary: A deeply flawed but brilliant novel
Review: The problem with Diaspora is that it should have been two novels. Fans of social SF, negative utopias, extropianism, philosophy, or cognitive science would love one book. Hard-SF types who like to think about physics would love the other. However, as it is, you need to fall into both categories to really enjoy Diaspora, and that's a shame. I've forced this book on everyone who's had interesting conversations with me about transhumanity, and every one of them skimmed over the last half of the book, or just got bored and put it down. This is a shame, because the entire point of the first half of the book is buried within the second. Starting with the physics story: If it weren't a distracting side story within a different novel, it would have been the first successful attempt since Flatland to break new ground in higher-dimensional storytelling. Unfortunately, it's within the wrong novel, and therefore won't have the effect it should. Back to the transhumanity story, Diaspora is a brilliant negative utopia--a direct answer to Vernon Vinge's utopian vision of the technological Singularity and to Vinge's own depressing books. After espousing the idea of the Singularity, Vinge claimed that he'd made all far-future SF obsolete, except for tales about people who missed the Singularity (Across Realtime) or societies whose internal limitations prevent them from reaching it (A Fire Upon the Deep). In Across Realtime, the characters missed their chance to transcendence, and now have to live knowing that they've missed it. The idea of a complete posthuman transcendence arising automatically from the technological Singularity is incredibly optimisitic, while the idea of being able to miss your chance and be stuck forever without hope is incredibly depressing. Egan challenges both of these ideas. The polis citizens of Diaspora's future have transcended mortality--they never have to die if they don't want to. They've transcended morality--they can't harm or control anyone else. They've even transcended identity--they can create clones and remerge with them, share any part of their identity with anyone else, even reprogram the line between their conscious and unconscious. And yet, they haven't transcended humanity, because they do nothing with this freedom. Apparently out of fear of becoming inhuman, they refuse to become transhuman. They live with an identity more consistent and less flexible than that of any modern-day human. Living as humans for millenia, with no conflicts beyond the melodramas they create for themselves, has left them stagnant, decadent, and worthless. In this, Diaspora is a brilliant negative utopia. Like We, 1984, Brave New World, Logan's Run, or the Matrix, Diaspora is about characters trapped in a slightly distorted version of a popular utopian vision, which turns out to be a nightmare. Unlike those other works, however, Diaspora has no sinister oppressive force keeping them there--any one of these characters could escape at any time simply by choosing to do so. During the course of the book, each of the freedoms that the citizens have ignored is faced by one of the characters, and most grow as a result (even if they often simply become stagnant at the next stage). You can speculate that during the first few weeks, a minority of humanity (the extropian types) transcended to the point where they're no longer relevant to the rest of humanity--or drove themselves to death or insanity. We're seeing only those (possibly the vast majority) left behind. It's probably worth it for the mass of humanity to be trapped in this dystopia if it means that they have the chance to transcend it, and that a few of them will (especially given that things are not worse for the citizens than for the fleshers, or for us today, even if they're not much better). But this is certainly not the rosy future that Vinge and the extropians postulate for transcendence. In fact, Diaspora is remarkably similar to the various Christian Apocalypse novels, which generally follow characters who've missed the Rapture and now have to face the Tribulations. These characters still have a chance to attain the City of God, if they make that choice and act on it. (I have no idea if Egan intended to write a post-Rapture story, but he did.) Greg Bear's Eon and Eternity try to find ways to make transhuman characters comprehensible, but ultimately those characters are less satisfying, because they simply shouldn't be as comprehensible as they are; with Egan's characters, we feel we understand them better than they do themselves, and this feels right. The Matrix dealt entirely with this issue. Humanity was unable to deal with infinite freedom, so they're given a dystopic 1999 forever, until someone can show them how to break out of it. In Diaspora, each citizen has given himself that same dystopia forever, until he can figure out on his own how to break out of it. Unfortunately, while the majority of the book should deal with how these characters face freedom when it's forced on them, too much of it is spent in meditations on higher-dimensional physics, not to mention throwaway subplots with interesting ideas about cognitive science and metaphysics (in what sense do the "creatures" in the ribbon exist) that could have made interesting stories on their own, but instead prevent most readers from ever becoming engaged with the characters.
Rating:
Summary: The Far Future
Review: Diaspora is an amazing, futuristic adventure. Egan provides a realistic description of what it might feel like to embody your mind in software and what other dimensions might be like, including higher spatial dimensions. How might we communicate with such beings? Egan answers this question. (People who like Diaspora will also like Heinlein's Job and Number of the Beast, and Pickover's Liquid Earth and The Lobotomy Club. Philip K. Dick books would also be interesting.)
Rating:
Summary: antihuman
Review: It's the 30th Century and "people" have mostly become robots or computer programs, though some "fleshers" remain. But then a physics-defying cataclysm
wipes out the fleshers and sends a couple of virtual beings (polises) searching for answers to what happened. Given infinite time they are able to explore the
entire universe and beyond into thousands of new dimensions and so on and so forth... Samuel Johnson once said that "the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind". Well, so does the prospect that the characters you're reading
about could die. Our mortality forms the fundamental tension of our existence--remove that tension and you drain away much of the drama of life, and of
literature. Of course, the other great source of tension in our existence comes from our quest for knowledge. Here Mr. Egan succeeds a little better, with
speculation that's at least interesting, though spectacularly confusing (at least for the non-scientifically minded) and not particularly appetizing. During a discussion of Leon Kass's assignment of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Birthmark to the incoming Presidential Bioethics Council, Glenn "InstaPundit"
Reynolds suggested that those of us who advocate for humanity as currently constituted would not much like Greg Egan's vision of the posthuman future. He
was right. Whatever the beings in this book are they aren't human. And besides the problems presented by their eternality and their ability to achieve
omniscience, there's one far bigger problem : they don't love nor are they lovable. In fact, they're quite off-putting. You don't much root for them because you
just can't care about them. Some folks might argue that it would be worth sacrificing all that makes us human if in exchange we were to receive the eternal life that's held out here. But
if we aren't going to be the ones to receive this life, if instead it's going to beings that are not human and who won't use that life in pursuit of the things that
make us human, then what stake do we have in such a future? Does it make any sense for us to root against our own species? I'm glad my computer has a
large memory bank and a couple of the programs are fairly neat, but I'm not willing to exchange my life for them. Why would someone hope for the day when
we exchange all of humankind for nothing more than such computer memory and programs? There's just something creepy and antihuman about this kind of
desire and it makes Mr. Egan's imagined future seem awfully cold and uninviting. This is a future worth fighting against, though it's mildly diverting for a few
hundred pages. GRADE : C
Rating: 
Summary: Bold, fascinating, and lousy fiction
Review: I freely admit I had trouble wrapping my mind around some of the concepts in this novel (real, wholly fictional, and quasi-fictional). That is my failing, not the author's. Indeed, while they will satisfy no pure liberal arts major, the math & science explorations are terrific, the best parts (and most of) the novel. It is a strange book, truly: it starts off with a blunt assault of difficult though perhaps moving theory of the birth of the main character, then moves into more humanistic territory for the first half and back to serious mind-work for the remainder. Oddly, I can find no real fault with any of it (except the ending--see below) except that it doesn't ever *gel*. Diaspora, a powerful word well lived up to by the content, which is perhaps the ultimate possible diaspora, dodges all the soap opera of the older SF novels covering similar ground, and in many way improves upon them. There is none of the sodden soap opera that made George Zebrowski's Macrolife (I'd have to double-check the title; my appologies if I have it wrong)such a trial, and none of the whiff-of-the-lab that has crippled other books (whiff-of-chalk-dust in this case?). Perhaps the problem is, ultimately, the length of the novel. Compressed to two hundred or even three hundred pages it might have worked. Perhaps with a touch more of the soap opera woven in--just a touch. Or, perhaps, some more *opera*. The ending of the novel has no thrill at all: it drops dead. This is largely seperate from the other issues & problems. I've no difficulty with the (arguably) nihilistic, arguably realistic (though it directly runs counter to some of the characters' beliefs), certainly fatalisic finish, but it could have had a *zing* of some sort. I find myself in the uncomfortable position of arguing for more "sense of wonder". Had the remaining character pulled out some half-arsed "slingshot" (to use the Clute/Nicholls phrase)I would have been as annoyed... ...ok. I would not have. Which has a lot about me and SF both. It'd've still not been satisfying fiction on any level, but.... Perhaps giving more play to the Transmutors' final artifact/statement would have helped (me). Something was off, as is often the case in life, but art either need make that neat or revel in the lack thereof, and as a result I can not recommend this novel. Do seek out other works by Egan. Those I have read (mostly those prior to Diaspora) have been very good indeed.
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