Diaspora

I read Diaspora on a week I was mostly reconstructing a heron’s wing feather by feather, patient work, and this book asked for the same kind of patience but rewarded it a lot less consistently. Egan opens with the creation of sentient software described in exhausting, almost lecture-hall detail, and that opening tells you exactly what kind of ride the rest of the book is. This is a lot more science than it is fiction in places, and I mean that as description more than complaint, though there’s a real cost to it.

Egan handles genuinely epic ideas, a story that spans more than one universe, digitized descendants who’ve shed the “pointless, arbitrary restrictions” of ordinary embodiment, as casually as building blocks, which is impressive on a pure ideas level and a little cold on a character level. The pronoun substitutions, ve for he, vis for his, are the kind of choice that reads as thematically necessary and still lands as jarring on the page, a real plod in stretches even as the ideas underneath keep working.

What holds the book together for me isn’t the plot so much as the central question underneath it: once you strip away everything that makes ordinary human life ordinary, what’s actually left of being a person. The early chapters, the math-versus-art tension between two of the characters, do the best job of making that question feel lived-in rather than argued. The later stretches, when the book widens out into cosmology and physics I mostly needed the glossary to follow, lose some of that. A few readers have called Egan arrogantly anti-spiritual here, and I understand where that lands even though I don’t share the objection myself.

This is a book I respect more than I loved, chewy in the way its own reviewers keep calling it, genuinely mind-expanding in stretches and genuinely exhausting in others. Worth it if you’re already a committed hard SF reader. A rough introduction if you’re not.