Diaspora - Hardcover

Egan, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061052817 ISBN 13: 9780061052811

Publisher: Eos, 1998

Synopsis

In a new world of digital beings, an Orphan is born, and humans have chosen to be forever digitized, have selected renewable robotic bodies, or remain flesh on Earth, until a devastating event occurs, causing the Orphan go to Earth to protect the Fleshers from beings that can reshape subatomic particles and transcend time.

About this title

About the Author

Greg Egan is Australian by birth and lives there today. In addition to being a Science Fiction author he is a computer programmer.

Reviews

By the year 2975, humanity has wandered down several widely divergent evolutionary paths. "Flesher" life is that which resides in a basically human body, though genetically engineered mutations have created communication problems throughout the species. In the "polises," meanwhile, disembodied but self-aware artificial intelligences procreate, interact, make art and attempt to solve life's mathematical mysteries. Then there are the "gleisners," which are conscious, flesher-shaped robots run by self-aware software that is linked directly to the physical world through hardware. Throughout, Egan (Distress) follows the progress of Yatima, an orphan spontaneously generated by the non-sentient software of the Konishi polis. Yatima gains self-awareness, meets with Earthly fleshers and, when tragedy strikes, becomes personally involved in the greatest search for species survival ever undertaken. Though the novel often reads like a series of tenuously connected graduate theses and lacks the robust drama and characterizations of good fiction, fans of hard SF that incorporates higher mathematics and provocative hypotheses about future evolution are sure to be fascinated by Egan's speculations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This mind-boggling far-future yarn should help awaken America to the formidable talents of Australia resident Egan (Distress, p. 596). By the year 2975, most humans exist only as digital electronic personalities in underground virtual-reality cyber- cities. A tiny minority, the gleisners, occupy robot bodies and insist on real-time physical interaction with the universe, and equally rare are the ``fleshers,'' who survive in enclaves on the Earth's surface. The nongendered orphan Yatima on Konishi polis temporarily occupies an abandoned gleisner body in order to bring bad news to the fleshers Orlando and Liana. The Moon-based gleisner Karpal has studied the inexplicable behavior of a pair of neutron stars that, contrary to all theory, are colliding and whose gamma- ray pulse will destroy Earth's atmosphere and make flesher life impossible. But the fleshers decide to struggle on regardless, and only Orlando is saved. By 3015, the Earth is dying, and the gleisners have launched a fleet of interstellar craft. Yatima creates the Forge group to examine the feasibility of wormhole technology. After a millennium of effort, wormhole technology proves a failure, so the polis uses its nanotechnology to create a thousand clones of itself and send them off at sublight speeds to explore the galaxy. And this is just the beginning of an amazing odyssey that will see Yatima, Orlando, and friends make alien contact, devise new cosmological theories, and pursue the mysterious Transmuters into a series of higher-dimension macrosphere universes. Vast in scope, episodic, complex, and utterly compelling: a hard science-fiction yarn that's worth every erg of the considerable effort necessary to follow. !! KI 12/15/97 !! -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

One thousand years from now, most of humankind expresses itself as conscious software, although sentient robots and a remnant of Homo sapiens called fleshers are also present. Unknown forces threaten the existence of the fleshers, and Yatima, the central consciousness in Egan's novel, seeks answers. Yatima can assume "ancestral form" but has no gender. Egan even invents personal pronouns--ve and the possessive ver--to refer to Yatima. Yatima was born in an elaborately concentric expression of DNA, and the universe is flying apart in a similar, elaborately concentric fashion. Yatima explores worlds and myriad dimensions in an ever-expanding search for the Transmuters, an ancient, mostly incorporeal race whose search for knowledge explains the diaspora. Yatima at last discovers the Transmuters, dispersed in a high dimension much like the Milky Way, and thus returns the novel to its beginning, suggesting that what is always was. The general reader may find this tough going, but Egan's speculations, brilliantly extrapolated from current science, are a physicist's delight. John Mort

By the end of the second millennium, the human race has evolved into three distinct groups: conscious software programs known as citizens, sentient robots called gleisners, and unaltered humans or fleshers. When a cosmic accident forces the evacuation of Earth, these three groups form a tentative alliance to explore the known universe in search of unknown?and perhaps unknowable?possibilities. Egan's (Distress, LJ 6/15/97) remarkable gift for infusing theoretical physics with vibrant immediacy, creating sympathetic characters that stretch the definition of humanity, results in an exhilarating galactic adventure that echoes the best efforts of Greg Bear, Larry Niven, and other masters of hard sf. A top-notch purchase for any library.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Eos
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061052817
• ISBN 13: 9780061052811
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304