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
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.