Diaspora

Science fiction

First published: 1997
Print length: 290 pagesHarperPrism, 1998

Description

Yatima is a newly created digital citizen growing up within Konishi polis, one of the virtual communities inhabited by software-based minds. Drawn to mathematics and exploration, Yatima ventures into the physical world with Inoshiro just as astronomers detect a neutron-star collapse whose energy burst will strike Earth within days. Their efforts to warn embodied humans and offer refuge in the polises meet distrust, confusion, and competing ideas about what survival should mean. The crisis opens into a far larger expedition: a thousand spacefaring copies of a physics-oriented polis spread through the cosmos, seeking evidence that can repair a failed theory of reality. Diaspora combines posthuman questions about identity and embodiment with a mathematically ambitious search for whether the universe can finally be understood.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Descriptive · Technical

Pace

Variable

Tone

Cerebral · Detached · Philosophical · Tense

Structure

Linear

Focus

Ideas · Plot · World

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 5 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 4 / 5

Themes

CommunityIdentityKnowledge and truthSurvivalTechnology and societyTransformation

About Greg Egan

Greg Egan is an Australian science fiction writer and former computer programmer whose fiction brings unusual rigor to questions that are often treated abstractly: what makes a mind continuous, how reality might be constituted, and what rational inquiry can reveal about both. He works chiefly in hard science fiction, using mathematics, quantum theory, computation, and biology not as technical decoration but as engines of narrative and philosophical pressure. Novels such as Permutation City and Diaspora imagine software-based consciousness in carefully developed virtual societies, while Schild’s Ladder turns speculative physics into the basis of a civilization-scale crisis. The stories in Axiomatic compress similar methods into sharper experiments involving altered bodies, engineered inheritance, parallel worlds, and unstable identities. Egan’s prose is typically dense, direct, and technical, with ideas and world-building at its center. What distinguishes the work is the seriousness with which it follows a premise through, testing intuitions about selfhood, embodiment, intelligence, and belief against the implications of science.

Permutation City Apple Books

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: HarperPrism
Language: English
ISBN: 9780061052811

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