Diaspora - Book Review

I recently was suggested Diaspora, by Greg Egan. It is an older book (1997) which is about societies of software-generated sentient entities and uploaded humans, which are called polis.

The beginning of the book goes into an interesting view of how intelligent entities could be generated, and  including how they would be created, learn, and achieve sentience. This was probably the most interesting part of the book.

Most of the rest concerns how the polis decide to spread beyond the solar system after a major cosmological event. It is pretty good at pieces, but Egan seems to get a little carried away explaining the details of the theory upon which the tech on the book depends. Personally this wasn't very interesting to me.

Overall, the book is good and the view of human uploads and how their societies would be is excellent, but the pace is marred by an excess of details. Still very much worth reading if you like th etopic.

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