Aboriginal Science Fiction, Issues 57–58 — page 36: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

FROM THE BOOKSHELF A Very Good Batch Diaspora By Greg Egan Orion, 1997 295 pp., £16.99 Greg Egan usually comes frus- tratingly close to spectacularly good, but just misses. In Diaspora, he doesn’t miss. Diaspora is a major expansion of his Hugo-winning story “Wang’s Carpets,” but it’s done so well that I don’t think I would have guessed that it was an expansion. By the 24th century, most people live as Als in Polises (virtual com- DIASPORA - The greatest advesture ot ai . is about to begtit "ONE OF THE VERY BEST? munities), with some people still inhabiting the real world as Fleshers, and some as Gleisners: Als in robot bodies. They are all real people, though most of the people of the Polises are getting solipsistic Rating System ok ak Gok a Br ¢ Wu Outstanding Very Good Good Fair 36 Poor and drifting farther and farther from the real world. The story follows several people who emigrate from their home Polises to Carter-Zimmerman, a Polis which is determined not to withdraw from the real world, but to use the advanced computing power of AI life to speed the understanding of the real universe. After a very nicely done section detailing the birth and early “child- hood” of a new AI, the story switch- es to C-Z and discussions about the importance of the real world — as hot a political and philosophical topic among the Als as communism vs. capitalism was to the mid-20th century. While this is going on, a C- Z observatory notices that the orbit of a nearby binary pulsar is decay- ing anomalously fast, and realizes that they are watching the birth of a gamma-ray burster — which will, incidentally, kill most life on Earth, though it won’t affect the Polises. The resulting destruction ends Fleshers as a branch of humanity, and makes C-Z all the more deter- mined to explore space in the flesh .. well, in person, anyway. The next cataclysm might well destroy the Polises, too, if they are all inward- turned and limited to Earth. C-Z decides to put its efforts into wormhole technology, and a long, nicely done section of the book details their ultimately futile efforts to create instantaneous bridges to the stars. A particularly creative part of this section is the good job Egan does in making the physics seem plausible. It’s all too easy to make up some gobbledygook physics fashioned to the dictates of the plot, but it’s much harder to make it seem believable and then to follow its implications faithfully. Egan man- ages that, and the thread he creates in that theory drives the rest of the book. C-Z ultimately builds a thousand clones of itself and sends them off — Aboriginal Science Fiction — Summer 1998 By Mark L. Olson STL — to the Carpets” takes place in this period.) stars. (“Wang's Other clones than the “Wang’s Carpets’ clones discover additional marvels, and one discovers a planet built with “long neutrons,” a perfect- ly logical plot development. The long neutrons were made by some race long ago, and encode both a warning that the entire Galaxy will blow up in the not-too-distant future as well as a means to escape the destruc- tion, by using the long neutrons as a tunnel into a five-dimensional super universe of which our universe is just a quantum bubble. i THE PP MAGALOE BAD DING. © : THE LEGEND ity ; ' WIRING KERG AND WARRIOR { C-Z makes the journey, and there is another remarkably well done sec- tion about living in five dimensions — it’s quite a tour de force of alien- ness. If you think the wonders stop here, you're wrong. There are a cou- ple of more layers of super-sen- sawonder, and both are done beauti- fully. Disapora also has what must be the largest artifact ever described in SF — far larger than the entire universes which have been created Copyright © 1998 by Mark L. Olson Gomichbooks: com