One of those flaws, perhaps the most destructive, is the vulnerability of the universe to arbitrary and uninformed divine intervention.Įgan lays out a blueprint for how a very different form of life than has been previously known comes into existence. In fact, this is a history of how the defects and design flaws of the original creation story are corrected by hard experience. Only one comparison seems even remotely appropriate - to the biblical Book of Genesis.ĭiaspora is a history of the re-creation of the universe, one in which there is no need for divine power to either start it off or continue its development. The orphan Yatima, a digital being grown from a mind seed, joins a group of citizens and flesher refugees in a search for the knowledge that will guarantee their safety-a search that puts them on the trail of the ancient and elusive Transmuters, who have the power to reshape subatomic particles, and to cross into the macrocosmos, where the universe we know is nothing but a speck in the higher-dimensional vacuum.Īs is usual with everything by Egan, Diaspora is so densely packed with ideas that all summaries are inadequate.
Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive starships.Īnd there are the holdouts: the fleshers left behind in the muck and jungle of Earth-some devolved into dream apes, others cavorting in the seas or the air-while the statics and bridgers try to shape out a roughly human destiny.īut the complacency of the citizens is shattered when an unforeseen disaster ravages the fleshers and reveals the possibility that the polises themselves might be at risk from bizarre astrophysical processes that seem to violate fundamental laws of nature.
Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. A quantum Brave New World from the boldest and most wildly speculative writer of his generation.
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