[ajmurmann]

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.

[QuackingTheQ]

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

[ajmurmann]

Oh, that sounds wonderful. None of that has really come up yet. Thank you! I'll give it another shot.