Diaspora

384 pages

Published March 9, 2008 by Gollancz.

ISBN:
978-0-575-08209-0
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4 stars (13 reviews)

It is the end of the thirtieth century and humanity has divided into three. The fleshers, all that are left of the naturally evolving Homo sapiens, remain in the jungles and seas of Earth, living out their extended but mortal lives.

The rest of humankind have achieved apparent immortality, some as gleisner robots—human minds within machines—and the majority as polises—direct copies of human personalities living out their eternities in communities run by vast supercomputers. Amongst them is Yatima, an orphan, created by a random mutation of the Konishi polis base mind seed.

When an astrophysical disaster threatens to destroy Earth, Yatima sets out to discover a home where random acts of God will never again threaten their existence.

17 editions

Diaspora

3 stars

1) "The conceptory was non sentient software, as ancient a Konishi polis itself. Its main purpose was to enable the citizens of the polis to create offspring: a child of one parent, or two, or twenty—formed partly in their own image, partly according to their wishes, and partly by chance. Sporadically, though, every teratau or so, the conceptory created a citizen with no parents at all. In Konishi, every home-born citizen was grown from a mind seed, a string of instruction codes like a digital genome. The first mind seeds had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the polis founders had invented the Shaper programming language to re-create the essential processes of neuroembryology in software. But any such translation was necessarily imperfect, glossing over the biochemical details in favor of broad, functional equivalence, and the full diversity of the flesher genome could not be brought through intact. Starting …

reviewed Diaspora by Greg Egan

A hard sci-fi milestone – for better or worse

3 stars

If I had read this book 10 years ago (or even 5), it might have felt like a revelation. Reading it today feels like entering a cul-de-sac.

Looking around it helps me understand a couple of things, though: How hard sci-fi works (or why it doesn’t), for one; what makes transhumanism so repulsive (and profoundly boring), for another.

Hard sci-fi is more science than fiction – or at least it tries to be. Equipped with enough knowledge about math, physics or whatever science of choice to go above the reader’s head, but not enough to enter scientific discourse itself, hard sci-fi is, I think, best understood as playing with potential scientific theories without ever having to spell them out. As such it’s not so much an exploration of a few wild ideas but the exploitation of some narrow ones.

This can be very interesting (in Egan’s case, the idea of …

reviewed Diaspora by Greg Egan

Very creative hard scifi

4 stars

A good but demanding read with great concepts for science fiction, but at times it does feel like the author tied several great short stories into one trench coat novel. Mind you, that's not a bad thing, just something to consider.

The first chapter can be seen as its own small and can be read on the authors blog, which i highly recommend! It sets the tone of the story pretty well by introducing a level of "techno-babble" that will be present at other parts of the book. You have the choice to read it and attempt to fully comprehend it or skim through it with the necessary understanding to catch the intent. If you want to understand the techno-babble or broaden your understanding, the author even supplies visual guides and very short explanations on his website, easily findable from the link for the first chapter. www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html

Review of 'Diaspora' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Pour une fois, je vais commencer par abuser des spoilers pour décrire l'intrigue de ce livre dans le détail.

Que raconte ce livre ?

L'histoire commence à peu près en l'an 3.000. Dans ce futur plutôt lointain, l'humanité s'est divisée en trois factions : les enchairés, qui continuent à vivre dans un corps biologique mais avec des modifications génétiques parfois exubérantes, les gleisners, qui sont passés à un corps robotique bien plus durable et résistant, et enfin les citoyens de polis, qui vivent une existence entièrement virtuelle. Ces trois factions ont apparemment connues une guerre, créant des frontières entre ces factions, qu'il est normalement impossible de traverser.
L'histoire commence avec la création de Yatima par une Polis, afin de renouveler la diversité des citoyens. Celui-ci grandit vite, et s'intéresse aux mathématiques avant de se lancer dans une randonnée chez les enchairés (en mettant en place différents moyens astucieux pour passer …

SciFi can't get harder than this

No rating

I've seen it described as "diamond-hard SciFi", it might even be an understatement. It starts off being confusingly abstract. After ~15% it gets more coherent, slightly more corporeal, though never entirely so.

Even through its abstract and detached universe, it revolves around modern issues of reality, subjectivity of perception and even memetic reality bubbles.

There's a lot to get from this, provided you can keep your mind clear enough to absorb the weirdness of it all.

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