boocia's Reviews > Diaspora

god i love science fiction. this was an incredible book and i almost cried like 3 times during it. spoilers throughout.

it has what i've discovered is one of my favorite narrative occurrences, which is individuals confronting enormous timescales - this one on the order of billions of years. and it's not only in this way that this book explores what does and does not endure in a person. in the simulated reality that the majority of humanity lives in, you can change your 'body', you can integrate whatever 'outlooks' you want, and i love how easily egan makes the call that the line between change and death is very very thin. the lack of materiality is a freedom that is also a frightening lack of consequence - if you can become anything you can become not-yourself. if you can clone yourself and make new life and freeze your consciousness, the possibilities to complete lose connections with other humans are an extremely real and easy threat. The people in Egan's world are so beautiful - the lack of scarcity means they have the capacity to be humane without risk; it costs nothing to be giving and curious and vulnerable - and it really purifies these existential tragedies of societies struggling to find meaning, of trying to be connected, of caring about things. on top of that is issues like being able to clone instances of yourself, and what family dynamics are like when you and your child have lived over 1400 years, etc. it's just good!

i really liked how much Egan cares about physics and math; i mean it was heady and sort of 'unstuck' the plot and stakes once the physics Really got away from me; but i love science fiction that feels heavy and real because the author is so dedicated to articulating the world.

i was so romanced by the themes of materialism vs abstraction. i liked how the polises had different cultural attitudes to it, from the Konishi polis who are all about understanding abstract math, to the main POV of the Carter-Zimmerman polis, who look down on the 'solipsism' of the Konishi and are all about studying the 'physical' world. i think there is a thread here where Egan works so hard to build up this complex math and physics, and then ensures that it still has stakes to matter. I really enjoyed going through Yatima's character growth from wanting to be a mathematician in the 'Truth Mines' of Konishi to, after witnessing the brutal destruction of Earth's atmosphere and its last flesh-wearing human inhabitants, immigrating to Carter-Zimmerman to explore the physical universe. in the end maybe the physical world doesn't matter, but people-society-community-sharedhumanity do, right? or that is sort of a realism that always has stakes.

as an aside i love that this book has consciousness-cloning that Matters; you don't just make 1000 copies of yourself on a whim, because each of these individuals are People that are also you, and that existential angst doesn't really go away or stop being difficult. i think at many points i compared this book to Accelerando, and this book has a way more optimistic understanding of sentient life (sentient life is all like humans in that they become wise and generous and chill once they meet all material needs; not like humans in terms of all becoming AI-driven hypercapitalists for some reason) as well as a more realistic understanding that the creation of human life is a big fucking deal; and that is also what cloning is; and each clone is a citizen and their life matters.

orlando - a flesh human who unwillingly joins the uploaded polises when his Earth community is destroyed - was so fantastically sad and noble in carrying the torch that it in some way is important to 'see' the 'real' stars, to have 'biological' children. this cultural gap with his son (created post-upload), who barely understands why physical immolation is a 'threat' also creates this stunning immigrant narrative that really fucking got me. paolo is really threatened by ver father's strong beliefs, and also doesn't really understand fatherly relations in the old-guard way; but feels the pressure and instinct to connect, to understand or get orlando to understand/change his ways; and in the end when ve tries on a few 'human' forms in simulated space before settling on ver normal amorphous icon and then self-deleting ... whew ...

anyway my 15 minutes are almost up so just gonna say the characterization in this book is just so good. it's just so romantic. it's just a lot of sacrifice and kind-of-death-by-change and also loyalty and determination and idk! it's a really rich book and there's a lot going on it wrt to what the purpose of life is (after? without?) mortality. read this book!