Diaspora
Egan, Greg. Diaspora. London: Millenium-Orion, 1997.
Diaspora features cyberscapes with software beings inside (virtual) computers. Rev. Russell Blackford, Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature #40, 14.2 (1997): 46-50. See GE's Permutation City and P. F. Hamilton's Mindstar Rising; see also John Sladek's 1970 novel, The Müller-Fokker Effect. (Maly, 02/07/02; RDE, 15/08/02, 22Oct16)
Diaspora. New York: HarperPrism, 1998. Available in various editions[1]; we have used New York: Night Shade Books, 1998, 2015; and the Audible audiobook narrated by Adam Epstein[2]. "Part of this novel is adapted from the story 'Wang's Carpets', which was first published in the anthology New Legends, edited by Greg Bear [with Martin H. Greenberg (New York: TOR, 1995)]" (Acknowledgments).[3]
An important book, discussed passim in Karen Burnham's Greg Egan and very usefully put into figurative dialog with Arthur C. Clarke's The_City_and_the_Stars. For background on Egan's opus generally, see "Roundtable of Greg Egan," posted by Karen Burnham, Sunday, 4 March 2012, on Locus Online.[4].
As summarized in the Wikipedia entry for the novel, as of 2975 CE, the characters in the novel derived from H. sapiens are various kinds of "fleshers" — biological humans ranging from "dream apes" incapable of speech to highly enhanced and "exuberant" forms — gleisner robots: "individual software-based intelligences housed inside artificial anthropoid, or flesher-shaped, physical bodies"; and "the citizens": posthuman "intelligence as disembodied computer software running entirely within simulated reality-based communities known as polises [from the Greek for city-state]. These represent the majority by far of 'humanity' in the novel, followed in a distant second place by the gleisners. Together with vast networks of sensors, probes, drones[,] and satellites throughout the Solar system, they collectively make up the Coalition of Polises, the backbone and bulk of human civilisation. They interact primarily in virtual environments called scapes, through the use of avatars or icons."[5]
Diaspora, then, both foregrounds the question of "What is human?" and embeds it in the cast of the novel, and it centers the story in a group of people long-removed from uploaded human minds and personalities and has at the very center a protagonist not only of no woman born but not derived ever that indirectly from embodied humans. After a brief, untitled prolog, we get Chapter 1: Orphanogenesis and the brief opening paragraph, "The conceptory was non-sentient software, as ancient as Konishi polis itself. Its main purpose was to enable the citizens of the polis to create offspring: a child of one parent, or two, or twenty — formed partly in their own image, partly according to their wishes, and partly by chance. Sporadically, though, every teratau or so" (ca. 32 years "real time"),[6] the conceptory created a citizen with no parents at all" but formed via a "Shaper programming language" which can "recreate the essential processes of neuroembryology in software" and, more generally, a "digital genome" (p. 5).
We follow in detail the genesis of "the orphan," who eventually comes to consciousness, develops a theory of mind and self-awareness, and names verself — gender is a choice and a rare one among citizens — "Yatima."[7] Cf. and contrast the Unique Alvin parthenogenetically born into the City — called Diaspar, in one sense the last human city — in Clarke's The City and the Stars (1956). Pure Mind (sic on the capitals in through here) is a goal in The City and the Stars, but a dangerous one, and getting humans out from solipsism and to the stars is a worthy goal. Diaspora deals with similar themes but more radically, and in a story set in a radically dangerous multiverse of immense energies, where pure sentience seeking scientific knowledge may be the only way to preserve sentience or life.
(The parallel between Diaspora and The City and the Stars has been noted by Matt McIrvin in his on-line journal, and possibly by others.)[8]
Usefully discussed by Daniel LoPilato in "In Praise of the Info Dump: A Literary Case for Hard Science Fiction," 11 August 2021, Lit Hub on-line at link.[9]
RDE, finishing, 12Aug21
