It was interesting in that much of the story was about the diaspora journey much more than the destination. Much of the writing style is say what happens without elaboration, and there were only a few brief descriptions of it, but it leads you to imagine entire other books about the idea. Was a storyline I hadn't really considered before. The concept of AI cloning itself into separate instances that later can reabsorb, if they want to,

Wow, I've read some plausible doomsday scenarios but that one, in theory, is definitely a killer. The gamma ray burst being a key example of a slog. The birth of Yatima was the first slog, and while it was a tough one to power through, it was a nice introduction to the AI intelligence. While reading, I began to think of them as 'slogs,' that is, 'I know there will be a reward to make it through this slog.' ) was oddly prophetic, too bad his forms haven't taken hold.Īfter time, I became accustomed to the highly theoretical (and often quite boring) descriptions of science and math that may or may not exist which all of a sudden reveals a very important plot point in relatively clear language. The use of non-gender specific pronouns ( vis, ver From noting that humans would selectively evolve, or not, into different sub-species, or sentient software would choose to remain in a virtual reality or inhibit robots, it was a pleasure to see the hypothetical evolution of sentient life I could figure it out, but man it made reading the book take longer.

Was by inference because he had very sparse descriptions in the text. So it was kind of hard understanding what, for example, a megatau or polis

I generally don't like to read Tables of Contents because they often have story elements (or even time passing) in them and I'd rather be surprised completely. The book would have been much easier to read if I was aware of the Glossary at the beginning. That those types of mathematical details can be included in a story in any fashion is a testament to the world building. I must give credit that it takes the most fundamental physics into account, and considering it was written in 1997, it does a lot with the state of physics at the time.Īs a person who has done some high power math in Euclidean geometry, I felt a little humbled by my lack of knowledge in Riemann manifolds and such. I'll use a lot of spoiler tags while writing these musings, but some plot details may be intrinsically revealed.

I just finished Greg Egan's Diaspora today as it's one of the regular 'hard science' fiction books that comes up here from time to time.

Diaspora egan