Author: Greg Egan

Gonna give it a 8.5/10 first, for all the cool things this book proposed, tho I did not understand quite a big proportion of it, mainly the particle physics part.

https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/pdzqnl/just_finished_diaspora_by_greg_egan/
Very accurate review. The story is non-existent, only to serve as a way to concat his imagination, appearing as incoherent mini-sections throughout the book.

For some reason this full-length novel has a higher sci-fi ideas density than Axiomatic, his short story collections. You can probably attribute it to the overhead of a story, since you have to introduce the reader to a story first, and get them engaged, before throwing in your ideas.

I think you need to be a triple major in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science to be able to read Diaspora without having to search for a new thing every few pages. Even hard science fiction is too general as a term. There needs to be theoretical hard sci-fi and applied hard sci-fi. Diaspora is the former while The Three-Body Problem is the latter.

I really want to give this book a 9, but sadly it’s not. Even if I fully understand everything in the book probably, because that would put it on par with The Three-Body Problem, which it’s not. The Three-Body Problem is several magnitudes easier than this book, but the ideas are understandable and much more practical and related to human society, unlike the high-level theoretical abstract things in this book. It also has a much more interesting plotline and relatable (compared to Greg Egan’s) characters.

For a fictional hard science construct, Diaspora obviously wins. But for a hard science fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem is still the pinnacle, the greatest of all time.

This is the kind of book that requires rereading. Wish I’ll do that in the future. I believe it will be rewarding.

I think the most mind-blowing idea in the book is Wang’s carpet, a biological computer simulating lives. It existed as Greg Egan’s standalone short story and later integrated into this novel apparently.

Reading Log

It’s almost as obscure as The Book of the New Sun, provided you’re not a PhD or at least a BS in everything. Actually, I think even with a strong foundation in
every field, this book would still be obscure because there’s some weird social mechanism design and obfuscation layer going on, just as The Book of the New Sun

What makes Diaspora so dry and so hard to read is the information density
and the intentionally weird language comparable to The Book of the New Sun . The Book of the New Sun is archaic, while Diaspora is written to sound like how some future virtual simulative arbitrary lifeform will talk. Very mechanical.

Had I discovered the dictionary at the end of the book earlier, the book would probably be a bit easier to read.

Quotes and Cool Things

Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.

The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.

In Konishi, the whole idea of solidity, of atavistic delusions of corporeality, was generally equated with obstruction and coercion. Once your icon could so much as block another’s path in a public scape, autonomy was violated.

Reconnecting the pleasures of love to concepts like force and friction was simply barbaric.

Yatima suspected that in the end most would discover that they valued familiarity far more than any abstract distinction between real and virtual flesh.

Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to “conquer” Earth, to steal their “precious” physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of “competition”. . . as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do –knowing no better, having no choice.

At times it still felt like a tightrope walk, though, trying to classify every act of simulation into those which contributed to an understanding of the physical universe (good), those which were merely convenient, recreational, aesthetic (acceptable) . . . and those which constituted a denial of the primacy of real phenomena (time to think about emigration).

Paolo took the responsibilities of intimacy seriously; his lover before Elena had asked him to erase all his knowledge of her, and he’d more or less complied – the only thing he still knew about her was the fact that she’d made the request.

The three of them instructed their exoselves to consider the name adopted: henceforth, they’d hear ‘carpet’ as ‘Wang’s Carpet’–but if they used the term with anyone else, the reverse translation would apply.

“Catalysed chemistry”? Why isn’t anyone willing to say the word “life”?’

Paolo brushed the dew from his skin. ‘Can I hold you in my mind? Just below sentience? Just to keep me sane?’ Elena sighed with mock wistfulness. ‘Of course, my love! Take a lock of my mind on your journey, and I’ll carry a lock of yours on mine.’

Yatima felt a wave of grief rush over ver, but Paolo was right; other versions had lived for him, nothing had been lost.

Yatima looked around the jewel-studded tunnel, and sensed the gestalt tags of axioms and definitions radiating from the walls. Everything else from vis life in the home universe had been diluted into insignificance by the scale of their journey, but this timeless world still made perfect sense. In the end, there was only mathematics.