Most helpful customer reviews
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2.0 out of 5 stars
A bit disjointed., Sep 23 2005
Other reviewers have mentioned Egan's emphasis on science and science fiction, and his lack of emphasis on plot and characterization. I would have to agree with these views. I found the first half of the book relatively easy to follow, and interesting to read, up to about the second transition to higher numbers of dimensions. After that I felt that the book more or less completely lost its grip on reality, and turned into the written equivalent of the multicoloured swirling ending of the "2001" movie. In other words it was somewhat of a bizarre experience and didn't leave me with a feeling of having learned anything, or being entertained, or having spent my reading time wisely at all. I kept hoping right up to the end that slogging through ever higher dimensions would somehow eventually lead to a resolution of some conflict, or a final goal that made sense. But that never occurred. I was quite disappointed.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Top notch scifi, Nov 9 2002
It's been a while since I read this, so I'll be a little short on specifics. It was the first Greg Egan book I'd read, and it blew me away. It starts off a little on the strange side, with a new form to represent neutre objects, "ve said that vis arm hurt..." instead of "he said that his arm hurt", which initially put me off. I've read enough bad scifi to expect that this was just a lousy gimmick. But, after wading through the first chapter, including some overly abstract mathy bits, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Egan's real charm is his *ideas* - truly firstrate concepts, taking an esoteric idea from current scientific thought and carrying it to its logical extreme. He's a computer scientist by training, and you can see this in his writing. (I'm a grad student in CS, and it's easy to see where he pilfers his ideas from.) Diaspora carries on with an idea originally presented in Axiomatic: what if your brain could be perfectly mimicked by a computer program (a "dual")? How would "real" people interact with computer-simulated versions of their own brains? And what are the impacts - if you could make a copy of yourself, or save a backup version in case you screw something up?For newcomers to Egan, I'd recommend starting with Axiomatic, which gives you a taste of his originality, and introduces the dual concept. Diaspora is the logical next step, with more firstrate ideas. For the record, I didn't really like Permutation City, the only other Egan book I've read.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
An epic that spans time and space to the INFINITE degree, Jun 6 2000
Once again, Egan has struck a chord across many disciplines--the non-fiction studies of AI, multidimensional geometry, mathematics, astrophysics, and others are woven into a novel of pure, hard, sf.Have you ever read a sf book and thought, "That was a great concept... but the author could have gone farther"? You can NOT do that with Egan's work. He explores and pushes back the outer boundaries of the comprehensible with his stories. Diaspora, particularly, spans as far as one can go--at least, as far as its own concept of the future can be pushed. The book develops from extremely small beginnings--the "womb" of one of Earth's virtual-reality cities called "polises"--where Yatima (the artificial-intelligence protagonist) is born. From there, Yatima grows in a quest for understanding of the world around ver (neuter for "his" or "her"). From ver polis, to the realms of the other lifeforms inhabiting Earth, to the questions of "Who is out there? Who came before us? Why are we HERE?" Yatima struggles and discovers, traveling faster and faster through space (and time). The urgency of the pitch accelerates as ve nears ver goal. Without spoiling the ending, I'll say this: have you ever hiked a "strenuous" trail to reach a peak, and then stood by yourself at the very top and listened to the wind whistle around you? It's amazing how deeply you can look into yourself when you know you're at the pinnacle of experience. For those who hate Egan's copious (and admittedly rigorous) studies within the text: maybe adapting your style of reading would help. I'm not telling you to do anything difficult or that would detract from the story; just learn to skim over the heavy details the first time you read the story. I guarantee you'll come back again for them ... for in Diaspora, as in Quarantine and others, Egan uses high-technology magic to restate our own questions: "Who is out there? Who came before us? Why are we HERE?"
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