Review: Diaspora
Book
Diaspora by Greg Egan was originally released in 1997 [01], but I read the edition from 2008.
A few years ago, I enjoyed reading Axiomatic, a collection of short stories from the same author.
Review
The book follows humanity in a thousand years dealing with a natural disaster, while also looking for other intelligent life in the universe.
To me, the story is exploring a partitioned humanity, leaving the Kardashev Scale for other books and instead focusing on the Barrow Scale as a hard-SF epic thriller.
I enjoyed the themes (communication limits, search for meaning, persistent identity in a digital world, theoretical physics), and the mind bending concepts.
Now, good luck imagining some of the five-dimensional scenes!
The ending made me feel a bit sad, and not as satisfied.
I think I would have preferred it if the story had remained unresolved.
Score
7/10.
Twice in the story I caught myself wondering why some things didn't happen (spoilers):
- Why didn't they ask the Hermits what the Transmuters were like?
- Again, why not ask the same question to the Contingent Handler?
If we knew that they had polises, and maybe even their goals, the last sped-up chase across the universes might be pointless.
I was also puzzled that the long-neutron coordinates and the events centered on the Milky Way were already present in the first macrosphere. That seems difficult to reconcile with the ending, which suggests that the Transmuters come from five-dimensional space.
Yet, I liked this book.
References
- [01] Greg Egan. Diaspora. 1997. ISBN: 978-0-575-08209-0.