Book review: Diaspora, Greg Egan (1995)

I found this book completely incomprehensible. Egan, an Australian, doesn’t care if you can’t keep up with him. He just powers on regardless into the outer reaches of his own fictional landscape, like a feral pig hunter in western Queensland with a Land Cruiser full of shotguns and jerry cans of petrol, heading out alone, bound for eternity. I had the same problem with Egan’s ‘Axiomatic’ (which disconcertingly also seems to have been published in 1995).

In ‘Diaspora’, Egan looks at a future civilisation where bionics are the norm, and he melds cognates from different strands of science (information technology and biology) to map out how this might look one day, where the margins between the organic and the manufactured are blurred by incorporation into single living beings. In ‘Axiomatic’ he had tried to render a straight-up police procedural with a world where time can be artificially manipulated.

Both of the novels are illustrations of ideas that have merit as predictions and so the impulse behind them appears to go in the right direction, but there are few hooks you can hang your attention on in either case. There’s not much that gets nailed down in the relentless on-rush of words in these books. In ‘Diaspora’, if anything, the problem of opacity is even greater than it is in the other book.

I see Egan’s work as hard-core science fiction, something only for the truly dedicated amateur. I imagine that some might find, say, the Molly Bloom sequence in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (1922) to be equally disconcerting and difficult to navigate. I accept that different people have different tastes. Egan’s books just don’t work for me at all.