On "Diaspora" and the pointlessness of infinity
A review of Greg Egan's "Diaspora" (1997)
Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
Science Fiction: ★★★★★ (5 out of 5)
Literary: ★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5)
Vibe: ★★★★★ (5 out of 5)
[No spoilers section]
While I have read books by Greg Egan, I hadn’t read Diaspora; it was a meditative joy. Like a lot of “hard” sci fi (see my Three Body review for my view of this designation), the characters are more a means to move through Egan’s world building, but they at least hint at character arcs — though disappointingly rarely traversed. However, the flow of grounded but imaginary science — something that I have been happily churning out myself — is hypnotically written. There’s even a piece that may have anticipated a wild conjecture in physics by over a decade (see spoilers below).
We start with coming into existence — a bootstrapping into consciousness for a software citizen. Vast swaths of human sentience is “embodied” in software and most of our characters are software entities at some point. Since software needs no gender, Egan uses Keri Hulme's gender-neutral pronouns “ve”, “vis”, and “ver” — I was curious if it would be distracting as I was considering using them myself1. It’s not — it’s readily understandable and creates excellent temporal distance from our world. I wonder if it will be banned in Florida. Regardless, it does capture a sense of how different the 90s were from today — my hazy recollection was that the choice was considered interesting or different at the time, but not bold as it might today.
What follows is a coherent treatise on existence versus extinction with a “solution” proffered through an appeal to transfinite induction. This is where my college essay would hedge and say I think Egan is trying to tell us that infinity is pointless. And that’s what’s great about this book. It lends itself to an analysis of the author’s themes (though not characters) sufficient to sustain such an essay.
[Spoilers section]
One of the best parts of Diaspora are the parallel themes — between the neutron star collision threatening the extinction of flesh and blood humans on Earth and the central core collapse threatening the extinction of the polises; between the bridgers keeping fleshers from drifting too far apart to communicate and the literal bridging of universes that gets too far apart to return; between the processing underlying the Wang carpets, the polis, and the frozen in time crystal in multiple universes that “temporally” propagates perpendicular to reality. Inoshiro and Yetima tried to save the fleshers on Earth and the never encountered transmuters tried to save the sentient beings in the galaxy. These parallels elevate the material above simple plot points or tracts of fanciful science.
Speaking of fanciful science, Egan’s wormhole physics is not too far off an actually proposed “duality” in physics from 2013 referred to as “ER=EPR” — that entangled particles (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen “spooky action at a distance” quantum entangled pairs) can be described in terms of wormholes in general relativity (Einstein-Rosen bridge). Somewhat frustratingly (per my previous review of Three Body) it does seem to fall for the trope “hard sci fi = no faster than light travel”, but it kind of fudges it by allowing travel to alternate universes that only seem physically distant (but differ in physics). I did enjoy the references to triangulation of manifolds by simplicial complexes (one of my favorite parts of my topology class as an undergrad) — overall, the science in the book is not too far out the norm for published papers today.
As would be expected, the (new at the time!) 10 dimensions of string theory play heavily in the later chapters, but referenced as a dual “macroverse” that performs a kind of T-duality transformation on our universe that expands our curled-up 6 dimensions in the Calabi-Yau space and shrinks our extended 4 dimensions. It’s later discovered to be an infinite tower of different universes — exploring them is what brings us to (IMO!) Egan’s theme of pointlessness. In No Man’s Sky2, there are “only” 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (< ∞) planets but continuously exploring procedurally generated worlds is a pretty good metaphor for Paolo’s journey — one that might make any of us realize the meaning in the finite over the pointlessness of the infinite.
The one hit that spoils this from being a perfect game is the unfulfilled character arcs and missed conflict. It’s not that the character’s actions aren’t believable, just that they are not incorporated into the book’s larger themes. They’re not even seen. I don’t blame Inoshiro for basically shutting down after experiencing the extinction of the fleshers first hand, but we don’t really see the character shut down. Ve’s experiencing it and next we see ver, ve’s taken the GLeeMONEX. Orlando Venetti is forcibly introdus’d against what seem to be his wishes, but next we encounter vis icon, ve’s helping with the diaspora. I can read into the book and say — hey, ve got over it rationalizing it through vis bridger ethos or simply an act of letting go. But that’s me reading into it. We aren’t given the transitions in either Inoshiro’s or Orlando’s case.
It’s definitely not spoiled so much that I wouldn’t read it again! I just think missing out on examining humans (well, sentient post-humans) dealing with events prevents this work from reaching the absolute best of the genre. They clearly are capable of emotion and conflict — Orlando is definitely angry about Paolo accidentally killing an analog of a tide-pool full of alien creatures; Inoshiro is clearly having a hard time dealing with death coming from a world that effectively lacks it. Would a few paragraphs of drama kill the hard sci fi vibe?
Next is going to be Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
I was going to use them for a character that is from the Aotearoa Aegis Region.
Despite this comment, I actually love No Man’s Sky. I’d totally tour an infinite space with no regrets.
