Cosmic Indifference

Hmm. I've recently finished reading Greg Egan's novel Diaspora, and I honestly can't recommend it. It reminded me of why I dislike hard sf so much, in fact.

(NB: For sf novices, "hard sf" is science fiction where the fiction appears to be in service to the science, rather than vice versa. It's a subtle distinction, but a vital one.)

It's not that the ideas in Diaspora aren't remarkable -- they are. By the end of the novel, humanity has discovered an infinite number of universes bordering ours via nanoscopic wormholes whose mouths form subatomic particles. It has fled the destruction of Earth by downloading itself, in software form, into a neighbouring universe with five spatial dimensions. It has discovered alien species including eco-engineering five-dimensional hermit crabs, and a software ecosystem "running" on an accidentally-evolved biological computer. The final sequence sees the protagonists spend ninety billion years exploring an artefact which spans twenty-seven trillion universes, and finaly realising it's a remarkably big statue, which is obviously jolly impressive.

It's just that the way it's presented is so sodding dull. The novel actually does a lot of similar things to Olaf Stapledon's classic novels Last and First Men and Star Maker, which are among the greatest things sf has ever produced. But Stapledon was primarily a writer, aware firstly that many of his readers would be far more interested in the philosophy of his multiple universes than their science, and secondly that incorporating believably human characters (even if they're only rather nebulous narrator-figures) does wonders for the reader's tolerance levels.

By contrast, Diaspora begins with half a chapter describing the mathematical algorithms by which a notionally human software sentience is derived. It's the hard-sf equivalent of a Victorian novel's "I was born", and it's astonishingly tedious. It's twelve pages before the emergent personality even gets to interact with anyone: everything up to this point has been network formation and co-ordinate sets. There's very little of what I would have found interesting -- the subjective experience of being an entity descended from humanity, but with barely even the illusion of physical existence.

Throughout the novel, personalities are seen as far less interesting than ideas (the more abstract the better), and emotions -- while their existence is acknowledged -- seem to be something of a distraction from the vitally important business of doing maths. The only people in the novel I could remotely identify with are the individuals who foolishly choose to live on in their doomed biological bodies, rather than migrating to the welcoming software environments, and they're extinct well before the halfway point.

It's not that I have any ideological objections to extropianism. It's that the lives Egan depicts for his software people are so inhumanly uninvolving. I'd rather die than live that kind of artificial afterlife, and the novel is fairly unequivocal in its view that this makes me profoundly stupid. Hey ho.