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If I had read this book 10 years ago (or even 5), it might have felt like a revelation. Reading it today feels like entering a cul-de-sac.

Looking around it helps me understand a couple of things, though: How hard sci-fi works (or why it doesn’t), for one; what makes transhumanism so repulsive (and profoundly boring), for another.

Hard sci-fi is more science than fiction – or at least it tries to be. Equipped with enough knowledge about math, physics or whatever science of choice to go above the reader’s head, but not enough to enter scientific discourse itself, hard sci-fi is, I think, best understood as playing with potential scientific theories without ever having to spell them out. As such it’s not so much an exploration of a few wild ideas but the exploitation of some narrow ones.

This can be very interesting (in Egan’s case, the idea of biological, i.e. physical computers “running” completely alien and hermetic forms of life existing in non-physical dimensions is really fascinating) or extremely boring (again in Egan’s case, using an imaginary fundamental physics based on wormholes just to stack trillions of universes on top of each other becomes really tedious really quickly).

But without a strong fiction component, the whole thing gets boring either way – whether we race through universes (Egan) or centuries (Vinge), whether there’s a mystery to understand or a puzzle to solve, the plots tend to be extraordinarily simple, the stories (and characters) extraordinarily flat.

And this connects to the problem(s) with transhumanism: Instead of embracing our socio-biological nature in all its random gore and glory as the source of meaning and purpose (and ideally exploring the contradiction inherent in this), it denounces everything biological as accidental and limited, just to get stuck with the abstract, ungrounded and thus limitless quest for some form of disembodied knowledge which we, limited creatures that we are, can’t ever reach.

The only way to justify this quest is to ignore the nature of complexity, and the only way to implement it is to remove the limits of time – hence the “rushing” (Egan) through eons and universes, enabled by consciousness uploads, nanomachinery and negentropic plot devices like fractal universes.

At the end of this race there’s primarily one thing: limitless boredom – not the readers’, in this case, but the protagonists’. And the few moments of happiness or fulfilment we glimpse are, oh wonder, when they give in to their “ancestral” nature and sacrifice themselves for others, fall in love, or just have some plain old fun. (All of which a true, fully implemented transhumanism would destroy.)

(That the nature of consciousness is the one question left open after the eons Diaspora’s protagonists spent rushing and researching is rather ironic: The best and easiest explanation, not only IRL, but also in the context of the story, would be that consciousness is part of the simulation the protagonists are running to make sense of the world – that it isn’t real, that there isn’t even a question to begin with. This is made more ironic by the fact that Dan Dennett, one of the most prominent proponents of such an “illusionist” account of consciousness, is one of the two sources on the topic named in the references.)

So I’ll rather stick with stories that explore ideas instead of exploiting them, expand my mind instead of enclosing it, let me empathise and be angry, laugh and weep, wonder and wander – and generally enjoy and suffer our limited and accidental existence, the source of and obstacle to all meaning.

As to Diaspora specifically: Egan was surely groundbreaking in establishing the by now well-known tropes of transhumanist fiction (uploads, nanomachinery, contempt for biology and fear of existential threats to humanity). But this not only comes at the cost outlined above, but also bypasses the opportunities for deeper ontological reflection (e.g. taking life existing in non-physical dimensions as a starting, not an end point) in favour of semi-weird physics and semi-abstract math.

Recommended as a historical document; as as work of art, not so much.

This is basically the starting question of the book (which thus forms one of Vinge's quite different explorations of the concept he coined in 1982), but that only becomes clear as the larger story comes together in the last third of the book. (Sorry if this a spoiler…)

On the way there, we follow a post-civilisational whodunnit through several centuries, compressed into short bursts of subjective time, slowly understand that the difference between the "low techs" and "high techs" that make up the small community of surviving humans populating the book is smaller than we thought, and get thrown a few plot-twist curveballs. Vintage Vinge, so to speak.

Which is also the book's drawback: The political agenda a little too clear, the dismissal of alternative world-views (e.g. an ecological one) a little too quick, the psychology a little too shallow.

But as always: a fun, inspired and at times inspiring read.

Vinge is a master craftsman. The first few chapters are among the best constructed I've ever read – how he manages to start three separate narrative threads and timelines, slowly weaves them together in just the right tempo and level of explicitness so that the reader has the first revelatory "aha" moment just before the timelines actually converge, switching imperceptibly between mystery and suspense to keep us hooked, how all of this is mirrored in the spatial setup of the plot, and how it makes us feel empowered as readers – this is truly great storytelling.

But Vinge is also a libertarian in love with hacker culture, and this suffuses the rest story of the story to a degree that makes it a little flat and boring. Good (individuals, hackers, small-time heroes) and evil (state authority, bureaucrats, big-time posers) are little to easy to discern, and apart from one or two protagonists torn between loyalties there's not a lot of psychological depth on offer.

Nonetheless, a fun read – and a good reminder of how cyber- and counter-culture were deeply connected in the early 1980s through a shared libertarian ethos.

Alien intelligences that are truly alien, perception as simulation, subjective vs objective time, category theory as a universal tool for traversing the layers of reality, progressive politics between party ruins and personal life, multiperspectival storytelling and a few plot twists – what could possibly go wrong in a book that has all this?

Basically that Dath puts all of this into it – and has to try too hard to make it fit. The voices don't seem authentic, category theory gets a mix of overly theoretical introductions and silly practical "applications", and the political perspective is kind of tacked on, while the plot isn't strong enough to hold it all together, especially as it kind of loses its thread two thirds through the book. I reads a little like an experiment: "What happens if I write a novel about category theory?" But Dath is neither daring nor focused enough to really pull it off.

To be fair, it has its moments, and Dath really expanded my notions of memory, intelligence and life in general, but that would have comfortably fit into a novella. In its present form, it took me a month (and two other novels on the side) to get through. If only that time would have been as compressed as story-time has been for the protagonists…

(As a friend of mine called it.) Not quite, in my opinion:

The ontological queasiness the book generates is considerable. Its disorienting shifts between dreams and realities did in fact spill over into my own dreams, including the in-dream realisation of my dreams being dreams – and the anxiety that they might also be alternate realities that could in turn spill over into my "main" reality. So on one level, Pelevin's novel was quite effective.

On another, however, I kept stumbling: The language often falls into the slightly naïve, bucolic and dated sound that Russian literature tends to take on in more conventional German translations; the narrator's perspective is often quite reactionary (and the author's afterword suggests he shares this tendency); the use of Buddhist ideas sometimes borders on misuse; and one of the book's main jokes, the reversal of the protagonists' characterisation compared to Soviet-era lore about them, was completely lost on me until I read said afterword.

Overall an enjoyable and impactful read, but a few notches below masterpiece level.