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Diaspora

Greg Egan

45 people recommended it in 17 threads, 2008–2024.

2 commenters pushed back on it — worth reading the threads.

What people on Hacker News said

bemmu
In Diaspora consciousness is just a piece of software. Since this software can be run at a much higher speed than wetware can, each moment of real time seems much longer to the uploaded. But when they want to, for example when waiting for an interstellar trip to complete, they can "skip forward" and let the brain emulator run them at a much slower pace to make the trips more bareable.

on HN, 2015

chairmanwow1
He also never thinks small. I thought I knew "the point" of Diaspora about 6 or 7 times, but then he just "zoomed out" and made the last point look small and trivial by comparison.

on HN, 2020

pierrec
It's an incredibly well thought out extrapolation of the future of the human race, much less phantasmagorical and much more grounded in science than pretty much every other SF I know of, while still going off into mind-bending tangents.

on HN, 2015

prepend
I think the opening of that book stuck in my head as that is how digital beings and digital identity WILL BE DONE. It makes so much sense to me.

on HN, 2023

adamch
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.

on HN, 2018

psykotic
If you're a programmer, Permutation City would be my recommendation. If you're more mathematically inclined, Diaspora is a good choice. Just so you know what kind of book you'd be in for, the first chapter of Diaspora has a proof outline of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem.

on HN, 2011

aoeuid
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.

on HN, 2008

philh
Most of the characters are sentient software, and it explores some of the implications of being able to fork oneself, or rewrite your software. On top of that the physics is, to the best of my mildly-educated knowledge, an extension of General Relativity consistent with what we already know; and part of it takes place in a six-dimensional spacetime.

on HN, 2012

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