I loooove diaspora! Egan was inventing neopronouns 25 years ago and it totally works in the context of the story, reader doesn’t even bat an eye seeing ve/ver/vis so consistently and casually after a few pages. Just one of the many forward-thinking aspects of that story.
When this book came out I'd previously seen ze/zir which sounds less jarring in legacy English. I think this was from a few people in the sf world in online discussions rather than in fiction, though I can't really remember anymore.
Either way, it scales better than having everyone publish an individual pronoun policy and every else remember it, O(1) vs. O(N^2).
I went to a small rural school on the east coast and circa 2005 or so I recall getting a mass email from an acquaintance explaining their new pronouns of ze/zir. That was the first I had ever heard about someone preferring different pronouns, and it was probably close to a decade before I heard those particular ones in any other context. All that is to say that it makes sense if it had made its way out to a rural college in 2005 it was probably being used a bit more widely in the SF a few years prior.
I loved Permutation City and his short story collection, Axiomatic and really liked Distress. However, I stopped reading Diaspora 30% in. If it hasn't click yet, should I still keep reading?
> I loved Permutation City and his short story collection, Axiomatic and really liked Distress. However, I stopped reading Diaspora 30% in. If it hasn't click yet, should I still keep reading?
It depends on what doesn't click. If you're waiting for it to get more down to earth, it doesn't (either literally or figuratively). But I do remember it as starting out very dry, and getting, while not less dry, considerably more absorbing as it went along.
I am totally fine with dry. What usually pulls me in with Egan and hard scifi in general, is cool technological ideas and seeing how they play out societal (example: floating island state in Distress). Egan sticks out to me that he also will apply or combine existing concepts in mind-warping ways (example would be the infinite cellular automata in Permutation City). So far non of that has really happened for me in Diaspora. AI existing at a faster speed than the physical reality is cool, but feels like table stakes.
I'm not sure how far into Diaspora you made it, but the further you go the more mathematical or physics-based it gets. Computability/complexity theory show up later, there's a large portion of the book dedicated to an alternative physics model, etc