Diaspora

What a terrific an wildly imaginative book! Enjoyed this much more than I was expecting, particularly given the very slow and difficult start.

At core this book is an exploration of transhumanity, what it might mean to transfer consciousness into artificial environments with far fewer limits and the ability to self-modify your own personality. Lots of interesting sidelines mentioned here; the people who choose to live with flesh constraints, the people who choose to live as embodied robots, and then the main characters, the fully virtualized intelligence living in a tiny and largely irrelevant computer infrastructure. I love the various decadent dead ends along the way; the dream apes who have severed all language abilities, the solipsists rabbitholing on some intense but ultimately meaningless pleasure.

And that's what the book is for, an exploration of meaning and self-actualization. What it means to be human and have goals in life, how that might be altered once freed from physical constraints and a limited lifespan. It's kind of awful, really, but fascinating. My usual complaint with books like these is they aren't emotional or humanistic enough. And yeah, this book doesn't have great examinations of social relationships or love or the like. But it does have a fantastic exploration of the search for meaning. Also a really intense section about grief and catastrophe. I found the middle crisis of the book really moving.

My main complaint is I had to read past some of the imagined physics explanations from time to time, particularly in the macrosphere discussion. They got tedious. I admire Egan's highly technical world building but sometimes it was too much, particularly that first chapter that put me off at the start. But the plot and character development those imagined physics create are fantastic and Egan takes the conceit to really interesting places.