DIASPORA – Greg Egan (1997)

Before this, I had read 6 Egan titles: 4 novels, 2 novellas. Judged by those, his work is remarkably consistent thematically, even though the reading experiences themselves differ widely – Egan is no one-trick pony.

My seventh Egan, Diaspora, just might be considered as a microcosmos of his oeuvre, and so, surely, the above applies as well. Diaspora consists of 7 parts and 20 chapters, stretching from 2975 to 4953 and even billions of years beyond, and all that in 321 pages.

Given such a scope, it’s not a surprise Egan chose an episodic structure, basically stringing a set of novellas together – all sharing near-immortal, digital characters that complete one overarching story. One of the chapters, Wang’s Carpets, originally appeared in 1995 in the New Legends anthology, and was published separately as an e-book as well.

Taken as a whole, I liked the novel, even though it had me skimming a significant amount. Let’s take a closer look.

Diaspora carries a lot of Egan’s familiar themes: the construction of software brains, like in Zendegi, far future transhumanism, like in Schild’s Ladder, the effect of alternative physical laws on existence, like in the Orthogonal series, and apocalyptic mayhem caused by cosmic disaster, like in the brilliant Perihelion Summer.

Egan starts with a chapter about the birth of a digital mind, and it sets the bar for what is to come: this is no breezy reading. He sets up a hightech utopia and some mystery and had me reading eagerly for quite some time. When the cosmic calamity happens, Egan gets into full post-apocalyptic mode, and I was thoroughly gripped, painting a very intriguing future society in which humans have evolved into a whole lot of different strands. The wealth of ideas in these first parts alone would have other authors fill a 1000-page trilogy.

At about the halfway mark, the focus on physics takes over for quite some time, and while I’m generally interested in these matters, I’m not interest enough for pages and pages of quantum-physics with a fictional twist. For my tastes this was too detailed, a form of “MathFiction” indeed, not unlike parts of Incandescence, which had similar problems. It’s probably worth quoting Egan again, about a negative reaction to that book:

“A few reviewers complained that they had trouble keeping straight the physical meanings of the Splinterites’ directions. This leaves me wondering if they’ve really never encountered a book before that benefits from being read with a pad of paper and a pen beside it, or whether they’re just so hung up on the idea that only non-fiction should be accompanied by note-taking and diagram-scribbling that it never even occurred to them to do this. I realise that some people do much of their reading with one hand on a strap in a crowded bus or train carriage, but books simply don’t come with a guarantee that they can be properly enjoyed under such conditions.”

I always have a pen next to my books, that’s not the problem, it’s just that I simply didn’t want to invest the mental energy to keep up with Egan in these particular parts. Luckily Egan keeps the overall story interesting, and by the end of the novel I was in awe for Diaspora‘s full scope and ideas, even though I have to admit I missed a big chunk of the intellectual creativity Egan invested to come up with the intricacies of his fictional multidimensional worlds. I wish I could say something more authoritative about it, but the line between Hard Science Fantasy and Hard Science Fiction seemed very, very blurry here.

Even though reading his works hasn’t always been a 100% success, Egan keeps drawing me in because he articulates sharp insights in the nature of our reality. In a way, he’s a mystic.

The real world was full of larger structures, and it required a profound myopia of scale and similarity to believe that everything beyond this shallow layer could be ignored.

And even though parts of the physics are fictional, and Egan’s brand of advanced transhumanism is a science fictional pipe dream, Diaspora offers an overarching, fundamental lesson: our existence is shaped by our perception and processing of information. As such a certain degree of solipsism is inescapable, and our struggles with that very notion are one of life’s continuous calibrations. Plato has written about a cave too, but Egan explicitly adds the element of identity: getting additional data changes one’s personality. It’s obvious, but I hadn’t thought about it like that, and so Egan changed my perspective, yet again.

Diaspora won two awards, the 2006 Seiun, a Japanese award for best translated novel, and the 2010 Premio Ignotus – basically the Spanish Hugo – for best foreign novel. I myself am unsure about what to award this novel: there are 5-star parts, and 5-star ideas too, but some parts couldn’t grip me at all, having me skim too much to speak of a fully successful read. But even though I didn’t put in the full effort, the ending was somehow very emotional – no mean feat. I hope one day, if I can anticipate it, my own death will not feel as a death either, but rather as completion. What more can one wish for?

So let’s leave it at: ymmv.

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