Diaspora

Rating:
Summary: Full of Fascinating Ideas, but Flawed
Review: I'm sometimes not sure exactly how to react to the works of Greg Egan. Diaspora, while a good book, generated the same react as other Egan I've read. Sometimes his works seem brilliant. At other times, Egan seems too clever for his good, intent on showing off lots of details about new ideas. Sometimes the work moves right along. At others, it stops with the old hack of "tell me again professor exactly how wormholes work." (This one really happens in Diaspora.) Sometimes the novels seems driven by an interesting story. At other times, it seems like a loose collection of events, a travelogue, the plot of which is only there to allow Egan to explore wonder after wonder. Parts of Diaspora had me saying, as I read, "this is brilliant and belongs on the Hugo ballot." Other parts had me saying "OK, so he wants to show off with more future physics/math" or "OK, he dreamed up yet another universe, so our characters have to go there so he can write about it."

In the end, I still think that Diaspora was a good book, with flashes of brilliance and ideas that in and of themselves are exciting and interesting. But overall, it's impact is lessened by its rambling nature and by Egan's tendency to go into information-dump mode.

Rating:
Summary: I've fallen in love with SF again
Review: I randomly aquired a copy of "Diaspora" last night. From the very begining, with an account of the orphen "birth" of an AI citizen, I was held in thrall until 3:30 this morning. "Diaspora" glories in the possibilitys of non-continuous non-Euclidean programmable "realities" , and also the implications of the multi-bifurcating branchs taken by humanity (broadly into shapers, gleisners, and fleshers; and the into finer strands made possible by bioengineering, physical redesign, and personality rewriting), and in individual AI's cloning themselves, rewriting themelves, and occationally remerging). And then, while too many schocky SF stories end with some varient of "and they vanished into the higher dimensions and never returned", over half this book takes place *IN* those higher dimensions, and it *WORKS*. (If you can follow the math and physics). The "sense `o wonder" I got from Diaspora makes me feel 14 again.

Rating:
Summary: Solid work by Egan, but not his most original
Review: I like Greg Egan, and "Diaspora" makes me wonder why I don't read more of his work.

The story is about how the three different "types" of human (flesh human, cyborg, and AI) in the far future approach adversity. The story was well written and entertaining.

But, it wasn't perfect. Egan wrote about machine resident human personalities in "Permutation City". "Diaspora" to a large extent is a re-spin of this idea. It is well done, but he's been there before. The story also has long didactical passages on quantum physics. Fans of Robert Forward may salivate over these, I was bored to tears. Finally, "Diaspora" addresses 5000 or so years due to time dilation. Anything longer than a week is just "a long time" in fiction's fourth dimension.

Bottom line is I like it. "Diaspora" is good and well worth reading, despite its small faults.

Rating:
Summary: Great ideas, but disjointed plot
Review: Greg Egan definitely has some of the most original ideas that your likely to find in science fiction, and Diaspora is replete with them. Unfortunately, the actual plot feels a bit disjointed, mostly serving as a guided tour through some truely nifty concepts. I recommend reading it, but not particularly for the story.

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of hard sci-fi/distopian literature
Review: I don't read as much science fiction as I used to, but this book is one of the best examples of the genre I have ever come across. Beginning a thousand years in the future and going through to the end of the universe and beyond, it covers a massive amount of time and space within its relatively modest length. It's literally bursting at the seams with thought-provoking ideas, many of which are utterly beyond me but still remain fascinating. The chapter in which the Orphan and a friend download themselves into robot bodies and explore a desolate Earth inhabited by the fleshers (human beings who have chosen to remain in physical form) is brilliant in its execution. Admittedly, though, this book is not for everyone. It's very dense, and not as accessibly written as Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, which deals with similar far future, post-human themes. It also gets increasingly strange and fantastical the further into the story you go. Many people have criticized it as being jumpy and suffering from poor characterization, but if you're writing a book that covers this much ground, it's almost inevitable that you focus more on ideas than people. Diaspora isn't a perfect book, but the scope of its ambition is greater than 90% of the stuff out there.

Rating:
Summary: Mind-Cooking Ideas
Review: This is the best science fiction I've read in years. Egan takes his ideas farther and faster than most authors could dream of, and Diaspora is the wildest journey he's taken yet. At times when reading Egan my head actually gets warmer from my mind being blown continually. I've been tracking down all of his titles but many are hard to find. Grab his stuff while you can and spread the word. This is an author who deserves more recognition.

Rating:
Summary: Hard Consciousness
Review: When it comes to hard science, this novel by Greg Egan is tremendous. A millennium from now, humans will have mastered the arts of digitizing consciousness into infinite networks that stretch across the universe. Through computerized manipulations of relativity and wormholes, "people" now lead "lives" that can transcend space, time, and even the laws of physics. Greg Egan makes use of cutting-edge (for the present) theories of astrophysics and cosmology, and projects current intellectual trends into some fictitious future theories, in order bring these fantastic concepts to life. And fantastic they are, if you merely look at the hard sci-fi aspects of the story. Unfortunately, these giant feats of the imagination are somehow made boring in a novel that is nearly devoid of engaging plotlines or empathetic characters.

The character of "The Orphan" has a rather interesting development through pseudo-birth in the network and socialization with other digital beings; while there are (a few) fascinating explorations of the cultures of old-school humans who demand to stay in the flesh, those who are digitized but maintain robotic bodies for some physical experience, and those who are completely digitized. The problem with the book is that the conflicts between these cultures offer occasionally great ruminations on the present and future state of humanity and what it truly means to be "human," but these intriguing themes are fighting for air beneath an avalanche of hard science. The plot development and climax of this book mostly entail whether advanced scientific theories will be proven, rather than whether events or character development will lead to a moral or message that can sink into the reader's consciousness. So that makes this book outstanding "sci" but problematic "fi." [~doomsdayer520~]

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of hard sci-fi/distopian literature
Review: I don't read as much science fiction as I used to, but this book is one of the best examples of the genre I have ever come across. Beginning a thousand years in the future and going through to the end of the universe and beyond, it covers a massive amount of time and space within its relatively modest length. It's literally bursting at the seams with thought-provoking ideas, many of which are utterly beyond me but still remain fascinating. The chapter in which the Orphan and a friend download themselves into robot bodies and explore a desolate Earth inhabited by the fleshers (human beings who have chosen to remain in physical form) is brilliant in its execution. Admittedly, though, this book is not for everyone. It's very dense, and not as accessibly written as Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, which deals with similar far future, post-human themes. It also gets increasingly strange and fantastical the further into the story you go. Many people have criticized it as being jumpy and suffering from poor characterization, but if you're writing a book that covers this much ground, it's almost inevitable that you focus more on ideas than people. Diaspora isn't a perfect book, but the scope of its ambition is greater than 90% of the stuff out there.

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: Top notch scifi
Review: It's been a while since I read this, so I'll be a little short on specifics. It was the first Greg Egan book I'd read, and it blew me away. It starts off a little on the strange side, with a new form to represent neutre objects, "ve said that vis arm hurt..." instead of "he said that his arm hurt", which initially put me off. I've read enough bad scifi to expect that this was just a lousy gimmick. But, after wading through the first chapter, including some overly abstract mathy bits, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Egan's real charm is his *ideas* - truly firstrate concepts, taking an esoteric idea from current scientific thought and carrying it to its logical extreme. He's a computer scientist by training, and you can see this in his writing. (I'm a grad student in CS, and it's easy to see where he pilfers his ideas from.) Diaspora carries on with an idea originally presented in Axiomatic: what if your brain could be perfectly mimicked by a computer program (a "dual")? How would "real" people interact with computer-simulated versions of their own brains? And what are the impacts - if you could make a copy of yourself, or save a backup version in case you screw something up?

For newcomers to Egan, I'd recommend starting with Axiomatic, which gives you a taste of his originality, and introduces the dual concept. Diaspora is the logical next step, with more firstrate ideas.

For the record, I didn't really like Permutation City, the only other Egan book I've read.