22 April, 2002: Diaspora
Greg Egan writes science fiction filled with great wild intellectual leaps. He posits whole universes, introduces his characters to them, and then throws them away for something new. What he doesn't write, in Diaspora, are characters. Even more so than the first Egan book I read, Permutation City, Diaspora relies solely on its ideas to carry it. There are characters, but for reasons related to both Egan's inclinations as a writer and the plot he has chosen, which involving (as did Permutation City) many on earth chosing to live their lives as intelligent self-aware computer programs, none seem to be fully realized to me. The plot itself features cataclysmic stellar events, the discovery of alien intelligences, fundamental questions about the physics of the universe, and travels to higher dimensions, but without some characters that appealed to me (or at least that I could believe in), Diaspora left me cold.