Buy used: $11.95

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Saturday, August 13 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon. Order within 7 hrs 18 mins

Or fastest delivery Friday, August 12

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Lord of the Books LLC

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Share <Embed>

Have one to sell?

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

Follow the Author

Diaspora Hardcover – February 1, 1998

by Greg Egan (Author)

601 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

"Please retry"

—

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$11.95

$66.70

$4.97

"Please retry"

$11.99

$7.10

Mass Market Paperback

"Please retry"

$27.99

$5.47

MP3 CD, Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$8.11

$14.94

In a new world of digital beings, an Orphan is born, and humans have chosen to be forever digitized, have selected renewable robotic bodies, or remain flesh on Earth, until a devastating event occurs, causing the Orphan go to Earth to protect the Fleshers from beings that can reshape subatomic particles and transcend time.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Eos
Publication date

February 1, 1998
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches
ISBN-10

0061052817
ISBN-13

978-0061052811
See all details

Greg Egan
294
Paperback
48 offers from $9.51
Greg Egan
207
Paperback
12 offers from $5.40
Adrian Tchaikovsky
10,405
Paperback
75 offers from $5.58
Greg Egan
56
Paperback
42 offers from $9.99
Peter Watts
1,863
Paperback
15 offers from $10.69
Ursula K. Le Guin
2,805
Mass Market Paperback
93 offers from $3.92

Neal Stephenson
5,498
Hardcover
120 offers from $8.28
Cixin Liu
15,637
Hardcover
64 offers from $9.01
Ananyo Bhattacharya
636
Hardcover
62 offers from $17.77
Alastair Reynolds
1,474
Paperback
63 offers from $4.79
Greg Egan
207
Hardcover
31 offers from $5.00
Greg Egan
79
Hardcover
31 offers from $2.69

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

By the year 2975, humanity has wandered down several widely divergent evolutionary paths. "Flesher" life is that which resides in a basically human body, though genetically engineered mutations have created communication problems throughout the species. In the "polises," meanwhile, disembodied but self-aware artificial intelligences procreate, interact, make art and attempt to solve life's mathematical mysteries. Then there are the "gleisners," which are conscious, flesher-shaped robots run by self-aware software that is linked directly to the physical world through hardware. Throughout, Egan (Distress) follows the progress of Yatima, an orphan spontaneously generated by the non-sentient software of the Konishi polis. Yatima gains self-awareness, meets with Earthly fleshers and, when tragedy strikes, becomes personally involved in the greatest search for species survival ever undertaken. Though the novel often reads like a series of tenuously connected graduate theses and lacks the robust drama and characterizations of good fiction, fans of hard SF that incorporates higher mathematics and provocative hypotheses about future evolution are sure to be fascinated by Egan's speculations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

By the end of the second millennium, the human race has evolved into three distinct groups: conscious software programs known as citizens, sentient robots called gleisners, and unaltered humans or fleshers. When a cosmic accident forces the evacuation of Earth, these three groups form a tentative alliance to explore the known universe in search of unknown?and perhaps unknowable?possibilities. Egan's (Distress, LJ 6/15/97) remarkable gift for infusing theoretical physics with vibrant immediacy, creating sympathetic characters that stretch the definition of humanity, results in an exhilarating galactic adventure that echoes the best efforts of Greg Bear, Larry Niven, and other masters of hard sf. A top-notch purchase for any library.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

One thousand years from now, most of humankind expresses itself as conscious software, although sentient robots and a remnant of Homo sapiens called fleshers are also present. Unknown forces threaten the existence of the fleshers, and Yatima, the central consciousness in Egan's novel, seeks answers. Yatima can assume "ancestral form" but has no gender. Egan even invents personal pronouns--ve and the possessive ver--to refer to Yatima. Yatima was born in an elaborately concentric expression of DNA, and the universe is flying apart in a similar, elaborately concentric fashion. Yatima explores worlds and myriad dimensions in an ever-expanding search for the Transmuters, an ancient, mostly incorporeal race whose search for knowledge explains the diaspora. Yatima at last discovers the Transmuters, dispersed in a high dimension much like the Milky Way, and thus returns the novel to its beginning, suggesting that what is always was. The general reader may find this tough going, but Egan's speculations, brilliantly extrapolated from current science, are a physicist's delight. John Mort

From Kirkus Reviews

This mind-boggling far-future yarn should help awaken America to the formidable talents of Australia resident Egan (Distress, p. 596). By the year 2975, most humans exist only as digital electronic personalities in underground virtual-reality cyber- cities. A tiny minority, the gleisners, occupy robot bodies and insist on real-time physical interaction with the universe, and equally rare are the ``fleshers,'' who survive in enclaves on the Earth's surface. The nongendered orphan Yatima on Konishi polis temporarily occupies an abandoned gleisner body in order to bring bad news to the fleshers Orlando and Liana. The Moon-based gleisner Karpal has studied the inexplicable behavior of a pair of neutron stars that, contrary to all theory, are colliding and whose gamma- ray pulse will destroy Earth's atmosphere and make flesher life impossible. But the fleshers decide to struggle on regardless, and only Orlando is saved. By 3015, the Earth is dying, and the gleisners have launched a fleet of interstellar craft. Yatima creates the Forge group to examine the feasibility of wormhole technology. After a millennium of effort, wormhole technology proves a failure, so the polis uses its nanotechnology to create a thousand clones of itself and send them off at sublight speeds to explore the galaxy. And this is just the beginning of an amazing odyssey that will see Yatima, Orlando, and friends make alien contact, devise new cosmological theories, and pursue the mysterious Transmuters into a series of higher-dimension macrosphere universes. Vast in scope, episodic, complex, and utterly compelling: a hard science-fiction yarn that's worth every erg of the considerable effort necessary to follow. !! KI 12/15/97 !! -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

This is science fiction with an emphasis on science. -- The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Jonas

About the Author

Greg Egan is Australian by birth and lives there today. In addition to being a Science Fiction author he is a computer programmer.

Start reading Diaspora on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Eos (February 1, 1998)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0061052817
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0061052811
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,004,911 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #61,158 in Science Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
601 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Greg Egan

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Greg Egan lives in Perth, Western Australia. He has won the Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Japanese Seiun Award for best translated fiction.

Customer reviews

5 star		60%
4 star		24%
3 star		10%
2 star		3%
1 star		3%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all customer images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Incredible mind-blowing hard sci-fi

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2015

Verified Purchase

What an incredible book. I was intimidated at first and a little turned off by some of the reviews, but I am so glad I read this book as it is possibly my favorite sci-fi book ever. Yes, it is challenging and some of it I didn't understand, but its written in a way that you don't have to understand all of it to understand the story. It is probably necessary to have some basic knowledge of modern cosmological theories and AI speculation, and yes you will have to pay attention and think about some things, but that's part of the great pleasure of reading this book.

Diaspora is written in a mostly straightforward manner, but it almost feels avant garde just because the concepts are so mind-blowing and Greg Egan goes so far with them. This is a story of scientific discovery, of pushing the boundaries all the way, of surviving the ultimate catastrophe. Yes, the characters are not the focus of the story, and yet I felt more connected to them than characters in many other books. I wouldn't trade a single sentence in this book for more "character development". Greg Egan pushes the limits of the imagination so far that I was left speechless in awe and wonder at the worlds being described... which gave me a taste of what the characters might be experiencing, and thus I connected to them strongly.

His descriptions of universes with more dimensions than ours got me closer to being able to imagine those higher dimensions than anything else I've read. The way he imagines life on other planets stimulates my imagination beyond the traditional earth-bound imaginings of other books I've read. The AI and virtual reality settings blew so far past my usual thinking that just about anything else seems tame. This is what sci-fi should be, to my tastes - pushing the limits of imagination so far it overwhelms my connection to this reality and I end up fully absorbed in the world being created by the writer.

The biggest drawback to this book, for me, is that it has forever shifted my standards for appreciating sci-fi. Fortunately Greg Egan has written several other books, and I'm already looking forward to reading Diaspora again. This book is written for a particular kind of reader, and if you think you might be such a reader, read this book immediately!!!

47 people found this helpful

Averie Top Contributor: Photography

Thick, Yet Slick. An Entertaining and Thought-Proving Read

Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2018

Verified Purchase

Really solid stuff. Solid in it's composition and contents. Thick as one could ask for from fiction, yet flows like quicksilver. Imaginative story with a beginning that was so well executed I was recommending the book before page 60. As always, Mr. Egan's theoretical abilities create a thoroughly rewarding experience.

Very Very Hard Sci-Fi

Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2021

Verified Purchase

If you are thinking to yourself, "I love hard sci-fi--the harder the better," this book is a good test of that. I found my limits here. However, if you like books on the extreme end of hard sci-fi, this is the book for you. It's excellent if that's what you're looking for, thus the five stars even though I did not particularly enjoy it.

I loved Egan's Permutation City, so if you like regular hard sci-fi, I would recommend that book over this one.

5 people found this helpful

Hard to read but worth it

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2021

Verified Purchase

The book is super hard to follow unless your a subject matter expert is physics. But take your time. Look up words you don’t know. It’s worth it.

I hope it gets better than the first part

Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2019

Verified Purchase

I'm giving it 3 stars for now because I've barely begun and don't want to be unfair - but what I have read so far was a real struggle, mainly to understand WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON?! Do these people have, like, physical bodies? Or are they all just Kindle versions of people, existing only on a giant server?

The detail of how Yatima comes to be "born," if that's the right word, gets numbing - page after page after page of extraordinarily - and I think unnecessarily - detailed description of exactly every minute step of the way. It's made more difficult to wade through by the author's refusal to give us a break and tell us - is this all happening in a computer? Is there any flesh and blood? Is everybody in this society just an icon, an avatar? And is all this mind-numbing detail absolutely vital to the story unfolding?

I hope not, because large parts of it are incomprehensible to me, and I'm not a novice in sci-fi or computerese or the English language. As it is, there is very little "action" - unless you think action means apps or coding or pixels or GUIs or CPUs or mainframes or servers or whatever interacting or syncing or issuing commands with each other (it's hard for me to think of anything less interesting), with no breaks, like, what do they call those things again? Oh yeah, CHAPTERS.

Greg Egan may be a good or even great writer, but I haven't seen evidence of that yet, though I have seen plenty of evidence of what amounts to authorial self-indulgence, as if he's writing to please himself instead of readers, and also trying to show us how smart he is.

Well, for now, I'll keep plugging away, but it's not enjoyable at all, yet - rather it's a slog. I hope I get to a point, sooner rather than later, when Egan reveals to me exactly what is going on. And oh yeah, why I should care.

7 people found this helpful

Mostly imaginary physics, and generally lifeless characters.

Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2020

Verified Purchase

Diaspora (Kindle Edition) by Greg Egan

Mostly imaginary physics, and generally lifeless characters.

The book started out well enough, I was interested in the plot and the people. But as the story progressed the post humans became increasingly post and decreasingly human. Plus the storyline devolved in mostly ramblings and lecturing about imaginary physics, to no end.
By the time I was finished, I was just glad it was done.

7 people found this helpful

Antony S. Whittaker

Very thought provoking.

Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2017

Verified Purchase

While a difficult read, this is one of the best books I have read in quite a while. As hard science as science fiction gets.

It's a very involved book, but it is amazingly well written.

Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2019

Verified Purchase

At times it is hard to wrap your mind around the physics of the universe, but it is well worth the struggle. By far this is one of my favorite books.

Top reviews from other countries

N. Harpur

Well written but I'm puzzled...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 17, 2022

Verified Purchase

This is well written but I have had to reluctantly put to one side for now.... Maybe start again from the top as after getting about 20% into it... I still am not at all sure what I am actually reading about? I feel like one does when watching a series where one missed a vital episode...

One person found this helpful

treefroghogbog

Stick with it!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 2, 2022

Verified Purchase

I nearly gave up on the book after the first 20 or so pages. The initial story is somewhat confusing, but starts to fall into place as the narrative unfolds. There is a lot of hard science in the book (be prepared to consult Wikipedia on several occasions) and some of the pages devoted to scientific theories (real or imagined) do baffle (well, me anyway) and thus drag on a bit. However, the time and space encompassing aspects of the book, as well as the relationships between the main “characters” pull you in. Two suggestions before reading! Firstly, there is a Wikipedia page devoted to the book which will help explain the first few chapters and, secondly, if you are not aware of the meaning of “gestalt” look it up (I did as I wasn’t too sure)…the author uses the word a lot.

Greg Ashley

Best Sci Fi !

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 18, 2022

Verified Purchase

This is the best Sci Fi that I ever read, by far, by miles.

Muskrat

Confused, confusing and tedious

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 29, 2021

Verified Purchase

Got a few pages in and just lost the will to live.

sandra fox

Ok

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 25, 2020

Verified Purchase

Its alright

See all reviews

Get to Know Us

Make Money with Us

Amazon Payment Products

Let Us Help You

English United States

© 1996-2022, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates