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Diaspora Greg Egan 9780752809250 Books

Download As PDF : Diaspora Greg Egan 9780752809250 Books

Diaspora Greg Egan 9780752809250 Books

What an incredible book. I was intimidated at first and a little turned off by some of the reviews, but I am so glad I read this book as it is possibly my favorite sci-fi book ever. Yes, it is challenging and some of it I didn't understand, but its written in a way that you don't have to understand all of it to understand the story. It is probably necessary to have some basic knowledge of modern cosmological theories and AI speculation, and yes you will have to pay attention and think about some things, but that's part of the great pleasure of reading this book.

Diaspora is written in a mostly straightforward manner, but it almost feels avant garde just because the concepts are so mind-blowing and Greg Egan goes so far with them. This is a story of scientific discovery, of pushing the boundaries all the way, of surviving the ultimate catastrophe. Yes, the characters are not the focus of the story, and yet I felt more connected to them than characters in many other books. I wouldn't trade a single sentence in this book for more "character development". Greg Egan pushes the limits of the imagination so far that I was left speechless in awe and wonder at the worlds being described... which gave me a taste of what the characters might be experiencing, and thus I connected to them strongly.

His descriptions of universes with more dimensions than ours got me closer to being able to imagine those higher dimensions than anything else I've read. The way he imagines life on other planets stimulates my imagination beyond the traditional earth-bound imaginings of other books I've read. The AI and virtual reality settings blew so far past my usual thinking that just about anything else seems tame. This is what sci-fi should be, to my tastes - pushing the limits of imagination so far it overwhelms my connection to this reality and I end up fully absorbed in the world being created by the writer.

The biggest drawback to this book, for me, is that it has forever shifted my standards for appreciating sci-fi. Fortunately Greg Egan has written several other books, and I'm already looking forward to reading Diaspora again. This book is written for a particular kind of reader, and if you think you might be such a reader, read this book immediately!!!


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Diaspora Greg Egan 9780752809250 Books Reviews

There's this one scene in this book where a small society of AI and humans who migrated their consciousness into computer programs are traveling in an intergalactic space ship/super computer and they find this one star system with a planet that has life on it. It's the first time these sentient programs have discovered life outside their own species/ancestors. This life is giant tiles of algae floating on the ocean of the planet, which they deem carpets.

The AI spend decades trying to figure out if the carpets are at all sentient, until one of the AI's realizes that the carpets are actually growing and moving in patterns that is computer code... Upon further investigation the the carpets are just one slice of a sixteen-dimensional sentient species...

This is just one amazing part of this crazy book. If you're at all into futurism, physics, AI, math and or programming, you need to read this.
I'm giving it 3 stars for now because I've barely begun and don't want to be unfair - but what I have read so far was a real struggle, mainly to understand WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?! Do these people have, like, physical bodies? Or are they all just versions of people, existing only on a giant server?

The detail of how Yatima comes to be "born," if that's the right word, gets numbing - page after page after page of extraordinarily - and I think unnecessarily - detailed description of exactly every minute step of the way. It's made more difficult to wade through by the author's refusal to give us a break and tell us - is this all happening in a computer? Is there any flesh and blood? Is everybody in this society just an icon, an avatar? And is all this mind-numbing detail absolutely vital to the story unfolding?

I hope not, because large parts of it are incomprehensible to me, and I'm not a novice in sci-fi or computerese or the English language. As it is, there is very little "action" - unless you think action means apps or coding or pixels or GUIs or CPUs or mainframes or servers or whatever interacting or syncing or issuing commands with each other (it's hard for me to think of anything less interesting), with no breaks, like, what do they call those things again? Oh yeah, CHAPTERS.

Greg Egan may be a good or even great writer, but I haven't seen evidence of that yet, though I have seen plenty of evidence of what amounts to authorial self-indulgence, as if he's writing to please himself instead of readers, and also trying to show us how smart he is.

Well, for now, I'll keep plugging away, but it's not enjoyable at all, yet - rather it's a slog. I hope I get to a point, sooner rather than later, when Egan reveals to me exactly what is going on. And oh yeah, why I should care.
What an incredible book. I was intimidated at first and a little turned off by some of the reviews, but I am so glad I read this book as it is possibly my favorite sci-fi book ever. Yes, it is challenging and some of it I didn't understand, but its written in a way that you don't have to understand all of it to understand the story. It is probably necessary to have some basic knowledge of modern cosmological theories and AI speculation, and yes you will have to pay attention and think about some things, but that's part of the great pleasure of reading this book.

Diaspora is written in a mostly straightforward manner, but it almost feels avant garde just because the concepts are so mind-blowing and Greg Egan goes so far with them. This is a story of scientific discovery, of pushing the boundaries all the way, of surviving the ultimate catastrophe. Yes, the characters are not the focus of the story, and yet I felt more connected to them than characters in many other books. I wouldn't trade a single sentence in this book for more "character development". Greg Egan pushes the limits of the imagination so far that I was left speechless in awe and wonder at the worlds being described... which gave me a taste of what the characters might be experiencing, and thus I connected to them strongly.

His descriptions of universes with more dimensions than ours got me closer to being able to imagine those higher dimensions than anything else I've read. The way he imagines life on other planets stimulates my imagination beyond the traditional earth-bound imaginings of other books I've read. The AI and virtual reality settings blew so far past my usual thinking that just about anything else seems tame. This is what sci-fi should be, to my tastes - pushing the limits of imagination so far it overwhelms my connection to this reality and I end up fully absorbed in the world being created by the writer.

The biggest drawback to this book, for me, is that it has forever shifted my standards for appreciating sci-fi. Fortunately Greg Egan has written several other books, and I'm already looking forward to reading Diaspora again. This book is written for a particular kind of reader, and if you think you might be such a reader, read this book immediately!!!