Diaspora

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Diaspora (2015, Wydawnictwo Mag)

Published Sept. 14, 2015 by Wydawnictwo Mag.

ISBN:
9788374805285

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3 stars (1 review)

Diaspora is a hard science fiction novel by the Australian writer Greg Egan which first appeared in print in 1997. It originated as the short story "Wang's Carpets" which originally appeared in the Greg Bear-edited anthology New Legends (Legend, London, 1995). The story appears as a chapter of the novel.

14 editions

reviewed Diaspora by Greg Egan

A hard sci-fi milestone – for better or worse

3 stars

If I had read this book 10 years ago (or even 5), it might have felt like a revelation. Reading it today feels like entering a cul-de-sac.

Looking around it helps me understand a couple of things, though: How hard sci-fi works (or why it doesn’t), for one; what makes transhumanism so repulsive (and profoundly boring), for another.

Hard sci-fi is more science than fiction – or at least it tries to be. Equipped with enough knowledge about math, physics or whatever science of choice to go above the reader’s head, but not enough to enter scientific discourse itself, hard sci-fi is, I think, best understood as playing with potential scientific theories without ever having to spell them out. As such it’s not so much an exploration of a few wild ideas but the exploitation of some narrow ones.

This can be very interesting (in Egan’s case, the idea of …