Hard SF discussion

The book-of-the-month for April 2011 is Diaspora: A Novel by Greg Egan.

Blurb:

In the 30th century, few humans remain on Earth. Most have downloaded themselves into robot bodies or solar-system-spanning virtual realities, escaping death--or so they believe, until the collision of nearby neutron stars threatens life in every form.

And pretty high reviews from all readers, and apprently Hard SF readers as well. Take a look at the group page for the book and you’ll note that most ratings are pretty up there.

               

This is a difficult book to rate. On the one hand, it is a spectacular example of hard science fiction, filled with original speculative science concepts. Charles Stross's handling of the "singularity" that comes when artificial processing power exceeds biological processing is to follow the story of humans living on the fringes of a run-away phenomenon they can no longer understand. But Greg Egan takes us inside the artificial realm and stretches our imaginations to see what it's like. I felt that the concept of life organized only in k-space and unrecognizable in our spatial perception on board the carpets of Orpheus was brilliant. And the experience of a universe with 6 macroscopic spacetime dimensions rather than the our familiar 4, was given with exactly the right degree of difficulty in comprehension.

On the other hand, the characters being the software entities that they are, do not live linear lives. Some were born as human, and choose when and how to copy themselves into software polises buried under the earth. Others are created within a polis, and do not carry baggage such as gender or an affinity for "reality". Some time after the extinction of remaining biological intelligence on Earth, the distinctions have become less important, and citizens chose whether to copy themselves further, onto a thousand spaceships in a diaspora across our galaxy, and then through singularities into other universes of the brane multiverse as Brian Greene would identify this variant. The major characters are not singletons, but exist in branching trees of divergent experiences, and thus are difficult for readers to identify with. That Egan was even able to write this story as a novel is a major achievement, not unlike Stapledon's Last and First Men or Baxter's Evolution.

So I highly recommend this book, but only to those who are inclined to have their imagination stretched to where a conventional plot and characters cannot go.

This novel shows a very singular vision where all future forms of humanity/conscious beings are centred on expressions of maths. Everything is about maths, even the art.

The first part of this book is concerned with the detailed description of the creation of a virtual being using computational mathematics. The 'orphan' created is 'born' of a truly sterile environment without any external nurture which disturbed me deeply. Our current knowledge of human psychology is such that we understand that a child born to a complete lack of attachment /nurture behaviour will die. This alienated me from the seemingly well adjusted character that developed from this process. If true, then these beings were not even post-human as the author contends, but entirely non-human, having lost those impulses and faculties that so many of us require for a definition of 'human'. This realisation made me quite sad for the plight of these beings and ultimately for the author who seems to elevate the notion of isolation and emotional stillness throughout the work. I felt like I was reading an autistic fantasy of the future.

I found it very difficult, also, to accept the proposition that the great majority of future people happily stepped out of their physical bodies and experiences to live as virtual beings with a handful of 'fleshers' left behind; leaving behind the pleasures of touch and cheese. It is a very heavy-handed conceit.

The concept of what it means to be a human might have been a grand theme of the work but the author was clearly more interested in the wonder and magic of maths than the human condition. And the theories and mathematical jargon are certainly densely applied. This is an eye-ball bender and requires full concentration.

Some of the ideas are engaging but ultimately, without empathy, I leave this book having been unmoved.

Oh, dear. I read Distress quite recently and loved it. Apparently I loved it enough to get Diaspora out of the library - because I recognize it from the above comment. Unfortunately, it didn't make enough of an impression that I didn't get it out of the library again this week...

That said, I agree that the "post-humans" described are really non-human. I don't find it either heavy-handed or unlikely though to suggest the majority of people would opt to leave their bodies. We're generally afraid of death - many would do whatever it takes to avoid death. As for being 'more interested in the wonder and magic of maths than the human condition': who isn't? :-)

What about the cheese, Derek?