Rating: 
Summary: Left hanging in a 6 dimensional universe
Review: This is certainly a thinking persons book. In fact, that's all I got out of it; a lot of interesting things to think about. While Greg Egan's ability to conjure math and physics is one of his strengths, it shouldn't be used to support characters and plot. It should be the other way around; spend more time on character and plot development to support your ideas on physics and math. However, in the scope of this book (serveral million [billion? ] years) I imagine that would be near impossible while keeping it under 500 pages. One big problem with this book is the ending. Did Greg run out of his advance and push the book through publishing? It ends on such an empty and anti-climatic note that I was left wondering why a proper ending wasn't written at the expense of a few pages of worm hole theory? Three stars - mostly for the middle of the book, I found the beginning needlessly long and slow and the ending totally bereft of anything resembling a proper climax. Note to author: A climax should be exciting and interesting, not millions of years covered by two beings who wind up finding nothing of relevance all jammed into 20 pages. 90% of of the last 20 pages can be skipped without any loss of story or character summation.
Rating: 
Summary: more like die-of-boredom-a
Review: I guess there's a story in these pages, but it's hidden in the technical gobbledygook lectures which occur every chapter or so. This book will annoy 2 camps: those of you looking for a meaningful plot or characters, and those of you who have actually studied the math & physics which Mr Egan babbles about. It's sure to please everyone else, though.
Rating:
Summary: FANTASY OR SCIENCE FICTION?
Review: There is a point where science fiction becomes fantasy, and Greg Egan passes that point with a vengeance. The mostly speculative physics is just that, speculation, fantasy run amok! The plot was poor, and character development was atrocious. I could feel no sympathy for, or identify with, any of the characters. The only good parts of the story were where mind transfers took place, this idea was well done here, but for an even better treatment of that read THE FIRST IMMORTAL by James Halperin, a very good novel.
Rating: 
Summary: The most original mind in SF today
Review: Egan's short stories have always been stunning, but until "Distress" and "Diaspora" I thought his novels were lacking. Now Egan turns his own special point of view -- what will happen to the *mind* as technology allows us to map it? -- and creates a breathtaking universe in which all the main characters are sentient software. The unlimited possibilities for such minds are awe-inspiring. Next, his imagined search for intelligence in this and other universes, and the different forms it might take, is mind-blowing. Finally his conclusions about the meaning of immortality are sublime. Gripping, compelling, stupendous!
Rating: 
Summary: pretty cool but no plot or characters
Review: Sometimes I try to get my English-major friends to read what I consider good sci-fi stories - stuff like Mary Doria Russel's "The Sparrow" or (more classic) "Dune" or "Ender's Game". To say "Diaspora" does not fall into this category is the understatement of the year. I would only recommend it to the most hardcore of physics nerds.Aside from that, it's a lot of fun. When I started it I thought, "Wow, all the characters are AI's living in virtual reality. Pretty wierd." By the end that seemed totally normal compared to all the talk of encoding terabytes of data and sub-universes in the twists in wormholes connecting pairs of neutrons through 6-dimensional space, etc etc etc. Still, the author should know that stringing together multi-page lectures on bizarre physics by characters with little personality does not constitute much of a plot.
Rating:
Summary: Turns your brain into subatomic mush
Review: I have two favorite writers: Greg Egan who writes mostly science fiction and Cliff Pickover who writes mostly science. Diaspora is an amazing combination of both science and science fiction and contains some of the most mind-stretching concepts that you will ever encounter. Not only does Diaspora describe what life might be like in the future, it also discusses the ways in which we may manipulate higher dimensions and communicate with higher-dimensional beings. Cliff Pickover also discusses these topics in his book Surfing through Hyperspace, which I also highly recommend, but Egan, in some ways, goes further in his surreal explorations. I recommend this book, because your mind will be warped in wonderfully new ways as a result of your finishing it. You will think about "life" in new ways. You will understand that life need not be made of flesh and blood but can take on forms hardly imaginable before reading this book. If there are a few mathematically difficult areas of the book, don't worry. You can skim through them and still have your mind twisted and rearranged in ways that will make you a fuller human being.
Rating:
Summary: Mostly amazing, occasionally incomprehensible
Review: Diaspora is a great novel, profound in scope and mind-blowing, when my mind can percive its concepts. Egan's captivating yarn delves alternately into physics, biology, mathematics (which lost me, even in the book's more prosaic beginning), and philosophy. Your conciousness will expand tremendously upon reading it. My mind balks at the description in the later part of the book; how is one to imagine and visualize multi-dimensionality? Still, the novel was more than worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: so full of concepts and ideas that the plot can't keep up
Review: Now, first of all: I enjoyed this book. The concepts presented within are amongst the most outlandish and challenging I've ever read and will leave you gasping for breath and wanting to rest your mind quite frequently. However, there's two reasons this doesn't get a full five stars: first, there's not too much plot to tie the ideas together - this is a book based on concepts, not events and second, although I'm loath to admit this, neither my knowledge of physics nor my vocabulary on the subject were fully up to the task of understanding this. You may see it as a sign of how essential I nevertheless consider this book that, armed with a dictionary and hopefully some help from an uncle who'S a physicist, I'll read this again.
Rating:
Summary: enjoyable, technical, and vivid
Review: This is a great book for the hard-core sci-fi fan, and a degree in physics doesn't hurt any. The plot is more of an inner journey than anything, but Egan makes significant use of String Theory and some interesting made-up cosmology as a setting for his plot.
Rating:
Summary: Greg Egan gives his audience what they deserve
Review: At best we are just stolen moments of poorly designed software. That, at least, is the theme of this astonishingly dense book. Egan has spent the last decade showing us how the universe is not just a thing that lurks out there, but is a structure that we are directly responsible for. And now here is something different - we are a trick of the light, as is the underlying world, and both can be transformed to no effect. We will all have to choose whether to give up on this place or just move on. The bleakest novel I have yet read by an extraordinarily bleak novelist.
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