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Diaspora

Greg Egan

15 readers recommend it across 13 discussions

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Original Hacker News comments, in the readers’ own words.

hesdeadjim
* Greg Egan’s short story collections, Diaspora, and Permutation City. Fair warning, Egan puts the “hard” in “hard sci-fi”. * Haven’t finished the Expanse final trilogy, but I really enjoyed the first two. * The Wool series * Project Hail Mary, for story reasons I’d recommend the audio book. * We Are Bob trilogy, fourth book is garbage. * Old Man’s War * The Culture Series by Ian Banks * If you enjoyed Seveneves, and thus can tolerate Stephenson’s consistent habit to drop the ball in the last 20% of his books, Diamond Age is enjoyable.
Jotto999
You're right, it's the wrong book for the OP. Let them be warned: Greg Egan's Diaspora is diamond-hard scifi. If you aren't well-read in a variety of scientific concepts, aren't comfortable doing on-the-fly physics thought experiments while reading a novel, or won't be comfortable reading an extremely high vocabulary, then Greg Egan is not a good fit. But if you can read it, the reward is great. Magnificent, alien, profound. It made me realize I don't like soft-scifi.
adamch
1: Diaspora (Greg Egan). Brilliant sci-fi where computer science concepts like cellular automata, computation complexity etc are major plot points. Starts with a highly detailed explanation of AI personality creation. Super geeky and a brilliant plot. 2: High Performance Browser Networking. Really explained a lot of modern networking. I was already familiar with the basics of the OSI stack, but this explained a lot of newer ideas, optimizations, and HTTP2. Really comprehensive guide to how the internet works. 3: The Shock Doctrine (Naomi Klein): A history of how the CIA has shot down democratic regimes to enforce small-government-free-market policy in developing countries when these policies are rejected in polls. Explains a lot of the crises in Latin America and Russia.
Udik
You mean yourself or the plot? I think that in the third act Egan added some weaker elements both as a corollary of the idea being explored and as a way of introducing some traditional action, in a novel that is otherwise mostly the setup of an elaborate thought experiment. Nonetheless, I think the result is extraordinary, because the problems posed, the paradoxes highlighted, and some brilliant insights, are new and valid outside the fictional world created in the novel.
db48x
Almost anything by Vernor Vinge. "A Deepness in the Sky" in particular is amazing. I was/am particularly impress by how he handles the idea of fundamental limits on the scope of human achievement, and by how he weaves that into the story so that it's there at all levels. "Diaspora" by Greg Egan has a great story, huge ideas, and probably the most cogent explanation of sentience/sapience ever written. "The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" and "Accelerando" have already been mentioned. "Reteif!" Made me laugh out loud. Larry Niven's "Destiny's Road" points out the difficulty of interstellar colonization. "Ringworld" blew my mind. Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Syn" taught me to pay attention; "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams reinforced the lesson. There are a lot of good ones; I could go on for ages...
brotchie
1) Diaspora - Greg Egan. Absolutely changed my world view regarding our place in the universe, the nature of conscious minds, and the potential for post-biological life. 2) Paul Wilmott Introduces Quantitative Finance. Pulled this off the shelf at random in a book store 3-4 years ago and found out that modern Finance involves a bunch of mathematics and programming. Started me on a course of learning everything I could learn about the subject and changed my "life arc" very much for the better.

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anatoly
I got myself a Sony Reader mid-2009 and started reading about twice more than I had been before. 2009 was also the first year in which I wasn't too lazy to document which books I read (I'm really glad I wasn't). Here're some of the favourites this year: Classics: Kafka's The Process and America - both stunning novels that deserve to be read as much as his most famous, The Castle. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - a trippy collection of tales organised in multiple nested frames. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago. Science Fiction: Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe, whom I hadn't read before, turns out to be in a class of his own. It's literary SF, overwhelmingly masterful and beautiful in its prose and characters, yet it could give any hardcore SF novel a run in terms of its ideas. It demands and richly rewards a close reading. I'll be reading more Wolfe in 2010.…
aoeuid
I can't imagine why nobody even mentioned Greg Egan so far. Reading Permutation City left me in a dazzled state for days because of the sheer number of reality-altering concepts it throws at you in such a short span. If by inspiring, you mean something that will give even the most ardent SF addict future shock, then his books are absolutely what you're looking for. His BS in Math and background in programming give him a great perspective on some of the most challenging mysteries of the universe -- and his work still manages to be the hardest SF I've read. Check out Diaspora if you like what you see in Permutation City.

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