Diaspora

Forty pages in, Diaspora is doing the thing I always half hope for and half dread from Egan, watching an artificial mind get built from nothing, in enough mathematical detail that I found myself wishing I remembered more of my college physics. The opening chapter on Yatima’s birth is genuinely the best writing in the book, careful and strange and moving in a way that made the rest feel like a comedown.

The pronoun substitution, ve and vis instead of he and his for the polis citizens, bugged me more than I expected going in. Not because I object to the idea, but because it’s one more piece of vocabulary layered onto a book that’s already asking you to hold fiber bundles and multi-dimensional spaces in your head, and by the halfway point I was skipping the math to keep the plot moving instead of the other way around, which felt backwards for a book this proud of its rigor.

Where it clicks, and it does click for real stretches, is the sheer scale, the book eventually spans multiple universes and treats the age of the cosmos as a plot device instead of a backdrop. I’ve seen it compared to Stapledon’s Star Maker, and that’s fair, it has that same cold vertigo to it. My problem is that the characters, being post-human software constructs by design, never gave me anything to hold onto emotionally while all that scale was happening around them, and a book this committed to its own physics needed something warmer to counterweight it.

Three stars, genuinely fascinating in pieces, exhausting as a whole. I’d hand this to someone who wants their science fiction to actually be about the science before I’d hand it to someone looking for a story.