re:mote voices: literature

Title: Diaspora
Author: Greg Egan
Publisher: Millennium

In Quarantine, Egan introduced us to the ideas of permutations, of possibilities - each reality can have so many more edges and dimensions to it than those we can perceive. In Permutation City, he expanded his ideas for human evolution into software - where personalities become data packets and day to day life relies on the processing speed of the hardware. With Diaspora, Egan takes these ideas in evolutionary directions.

The world presented to us is one where humans have taken one of three options - to remain flesh, with varying levels of genetic engineering; to transfer one's singular software translation into a robot body; to load one's singular software translation as a sub programme of a supercomputer. These supercomputers are called Polises - each living by a set of rules or policies, and if the subroutines representing an individual don't accept these then they have themselves saved to another Polis. This plausibly extends the ideas from Permutation City - new developing technology has become the norm. for millions. Mirroring the reality of perceptions shifting from incomprehension and rejection to total acceptance.

The story starts with the concept of a hardware mechanism or operating system following a routine designed to prevent the Polis from becoming stale (or inbred). Like genetic engineering's manipulation of DNA, there are ways of engineering the bit patterns to produce new citizens. To explore the potential variables these patterns can be assigned, the system will create an orphan - a parentless citizen with test genes/opcode. Here we have just that process occurring and we read of the generation of this individual. Following the rise of the orphan from barely formed software protocol to full citizen, Egan provides us with some of his most emotive writing to date. Adapting our own growth to the situation, Egan is giving us an insight to our own learning process - from basic word/image association to cause and effect.

Having grown us a character , Egan then creates a plot on top of that - where, level by level, what the character has is threatened. This starts with the threat to the Earth, then, as they search for a solution, the threat to this Universe. Which leads us into more familiar Egan territory - the concepts of permutations lead us to other dimensions. Here he builds upon these other dimensions, tipping reality askew as the characters find themselves in other universes. For so many others, these ideas would seem fanciful and unconvincing and many of these ideas of other realities and worlds within worlds have been tried before.

But this is Egan's skill beyond all others; he backs everything he tells us with hard fact. Starting so often with chemical or biological or physical or mathematical theories that are real, he extrapolates and expands, creating new theories and new scientists to have discovered them. With care he progresses them incrementally, so that you are utterly convinced that everything you are reading is hard fact. All that despite the fact that it is all speculation, it is all things which may be discovered years from now. The sheer depth of detail here can make Egan's work difficult at times, requiring a great degree of focus - but it is all worth it, as grasping what is happening will blow your mind.

It's not all hard science though - it's about ideas, situations and characters. Here the characters do struggle with situations - they don't take everything for granted. As the story proceeds the number of people willing to take the next step reduces steadily.

In addition we have the growth of this novel from the short story Wangs Carpet, which is a fascinating transformation in itself. As with Permutation City, Wang's Carpet and seemingly a lot of Egan'swork , there is an exploration of solipsism, which, when dealt with by Egan, shows advantages and disadvantages and makes the whole concept intriguing. As are all his ideas- I mean, think about being able to "download" human life/intelligence onto a computer. What will we really have - a simulation ? How will they relate to flesh and blood ? Without the same restrictions as flesh, and capable of evolving at different processor speeds, what will the outcome be? All these questions are asked and answered through the body of Egan's work. The answers are disturbingly familiar yet unfathomably alien. Reinforced with each sign of real alien presence that is encountered. In the same way we are different from our origins, the future we spawn will in time become so mind bogglingly different from us.

RVWR: PTR
August 1998