Diaspora

384 pages

Published March 9, 2008 by Gollancz.

ISBN:
978-0-575-08209-0
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4 stars (5 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.

12 editions

Good exploration of physical versus various virtual living

4 stars

Another interesting "explore an idea" novel from Greg Egan around physically embodied versus reality simulating virtual versus no bounds virtual living. But this one didn't engage me as strongly as Egan's books usually do. Mainly I think because the discussion of the differences between the two virtual modes of living went on to long for me. I understand why that length and depth was needed for reasons critical to the plot, but it was too much for me.

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 …

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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rated it

4 stars