by Greg Egan

Greg Egan is one of my favorite writers and one of the most popular authors of speculative fiction among the transhuman/extropian crowd. Diaspora may be his finest work to date, and that’s saying a lot.

The opening chapters give us a touching, even moving depiction of the earliest learning and orientation of an artificial intelligence, a digital being that only gradually becomes self-aware. From there, the book takes off onto a romp that will carry us across the galaxy, far into the future, and ultimately into alternate universes, some that exist with expanded dimensions!

I’m neither a mathematician nor a scientist, and I’ll admit that some of the long descriptions of multi-dimensional geometry and physics were a little over my head. But I found I was able to skim through those parts and still stay engaged with the story, the characters, and the spectacular ideas. Although this is speculative fiction at its most extreme, Egan has done his homework and keeps us believing that what he‘s writing about is really possible. For lovers of hard SF, this is as good as it gets.