Ambitious work that weaves narrative across highly abstract concepts that I would have thought impossible to sustain for a whole novel.

The characters are somehow thin, missing psychological development. ( )

(...)

And even though parts of the physics are fictional, and Egan’s brand of advanced transhumanism is a science fictional pipe dream, Diaspora offers an overarching, fundamental lesson: our existence is shaped by our perception and processing of information. As such a certain degree of solipsism is inescapable, and our struggles with that very notion are one of life’s continuous calibrations. Plato has written about a cave too, but Egan explicitly adds the element of identity: getting additional data changes one’s personality. It’s obvious, but I hadn’t thought about it like that, and so Egan changed my perspective, yet again.

Diaspora won two awards, the 2006 Seiun, a Japanese award for best translated novel, and the 2010 Premio Ignotus – basically the Spanish Hugo – for best foreign novel. I myself am unsure about what to award this novel: there are 5-star parts, and 5-star ideas too, but some parts couldn’t grip me at all, having me skim too much to speak of a fully successful read. But even though I didn’t put in the full effort, the ending was somehow very emotional – no mean feat. I hope one day, if I can anticipate it, my own death will not feel as a death either, but rather as completion. What more can one wish for?

So let’s leave it at: ymmv.

Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It ( )

As much as I admire hard science SF, Diaspora was as much a dense treatise on incomprehensible physics as much as it was an SF novel. Parts of the book were just unreadable. I had to force myself to finish it, despite the multiple times I wanted to toss this into my just couldn’t finish pile. ( )

This early morning I had this dream where I was playing an old side-scrolling type videogame, a bit like Super Mario Bros. I was speed-running it, so I must have played the game many times before. The creatures I encountered were unusual, or at least unfamiliar. They were alien creatures. I must have gotten the inspiration for these creatures from this sci-fi novel I’m reading right now: Diaspora by Greg Egan. It’s an amazing book. So I speed-ran through all these weird creatures, just jumping and avoiding them. Then the perspective shifted to the first person. It was me jumping and avoiding these obstacles in this alien jugle setting. I remember falling back first onto this raging river. It was so intense I could feel the moment the water closed in on me. The next scene in the dream I’m talking with this academic guy. I think in the dream he wrote a book, I remember the title because I thought it was super-interesting: The Psycho-pathology of Ontology. He was explaining it to me, and I was really impressed and amazed. It explained so much, I thought in the dream, especially the current dilemma with PRRD.

I am about eighty percent finished with Greg Egan’s Diaspora. It’s an amazing book. This book has the vastest scale in a sci-fi novel I’ve ever read, time-wise and geographic-wise. It covers billions of years, and the geographic scope is so vast I can’t even explain it (I literally can’t. The science is too complicated for me). That’s another issue with this book: it’s hard science fiction, which means it uses actual scientific theories to explain things. It’s difficult to understand most of the time if you’re unfamiliar with the science, at least with me. Nevertheless it isn’t all science and explanations, there’s also character and pathos. I especially love how the concepts of consciousness and identity, psychology and personality are explored in the context of post/trans-human conditions. There were some really intense dramatic moments scattered all throughout. I love how time and memories play so much of a role in creating pathos. Overall, this book is definitely my best read of the year. ( )

This book is fundamentally an exploration of what it might mean to be human, if the "pointless, arbitrary restrictions" of the ordinary human condition were loosened or removed.

It's also about how beings who are profoundly different from each other might still communicate in a meaningful way.

There's also a great deal of cosmology and physics in the novel. Its exposition isn't the greatest - it really feels like infodumps and some diagrams would help - but it's essential to the shape of the novel: because once you remove all the ordinary restrictions of the human condition, what's left? The restrictions imposed by the physics of the universe(s), that's what.

This is science fiction by the strongest definition of the genre: the science is an essential component of the story that it tells. I don't see novels like this very often anymore.

At the end of the book, the breadth of the canvas had become the entire age of the universe, & I lost interest as I usually do when that happens. But there were a lot of good ideas, or really well expressed ideas, throughout - I did much more (kindle) highlighting on this book than I usually do.

I find Greg Egan to be uneven to my tastes, but this one's a goodie. ( )