#hardsf

A political map of the Outer Jovia region of Jupiter. This diagram is an eccentricity/inclination graph; lines represent the apojove/perijove of a given orbit, and the angle represents the inclination of the given body.

Most satellites of Jupiter are divided into groups, which are organized based on similarity of origin and orbital characteristics. While the graph plots group bodies close to one another, they are often separated by millions of kilometres in practice, as they orbit in very different periods.

Most authors of science fiction commit the same cardinal error. They attempt to transplant human passions, hormonal tempests, and the petty logic of everyday life into the distant future. In their imagined worlds, three thousand years hence, people still fall in love, burn with jealousy, and scheme for power—only now they wield lasers instead of swords. Greg Egan, in Diaspora, does something radically different. He mercilessly dismantles the very concept of “human,” stripping it down to its barest essence: a pure algorithm consumed by an unquenchable hunger for knowledge.

Diaspora is not merely a novel. It is an ultimatum—a book that begins precisely where the imagination of most futurologists runs dry.

Birth from Digital Noise

The novel opens with the chapter “Orphanogenesis,” perhaps the most audacious opening in modern science fiction. Egan does not present us with a conventional protagonist. Instead, he describes the spontaneous emergence of sentience inside a virtual city—the Konishi polis—from pure randomness and software libraries. We watch, in real time, as chaos coalesces into perception, as the first fragile notions of “I” and “other” take shape within the newborn mind of Yatima.

In this universe, biological humanity has become a failed evolutionary branch—the fleshers—slowly dying out in their sealed reservations. True life has long since migrated into software. Death, as we understand it, no longer exists. Neither does disease. Reality itself has become a matter of interface selection. At first glance, this appears to be utopia: a digital Eden of eternal self-perfection. Egan, however, wastes no time in shattering that illusion.

Physics as the Sole Adversary

The inciting catastrophe is of truly cosmic scale. The detonation of the double star Lacertide hurls a lethal torrent of gamma radiation toward Earth, a wave that will sterilize the entire planet. Here Egan reveals his singular genius: he refuses to turn the event into a Hollywood spectacle. Instead, he forces both his characters and his readers to confront the terrifying insignificance of any intelligence when set against the immutable laws of the universe.

For the citizens of the polises, this cataclysm becomes the signal for the Diaspora—the great scattering. Yet this is no rocket-borne exodus. It is the simultaneous transmission of thousands of digital polises toward distant stars, a desperate gamble to discover a way beyond three-dimensional space.

At this point the novel enters true “hardcore” territory. Egan does not flatter his audience. If survival demands mastery of noncommutative geometry, he will drag the reader into those abstractions without mercy. He renders worlds of altered dimensionality with such crystalline precision that one half-believes he has walked them himself. Physics is no decorative backdrop here; it is both antagonist and the only possible instrument of salvation.

Loneliness Among Infinite Copies

The most astonishing achievement of Diaspora lies in the emotional resonance Egan creates with almost no reliance on familiar human sentiment. What he evokes instead is a profound intellectual solitude—an aching awareness of mind adrift in an infinite cosmos. When the protagonists finally encounter the traces of another civilization—the Transmuters—they do not meet little green men. They confront architectures so far removed from human cognition that contact feels like trying to comprehend the design of a five-dimensional cathedral.

Egan poses the most unsettling question imaginable: what remains of us once the body is removed? Does morality survive? Does art? His answer is austere, almost cruel: only curiosity remains. A distilled, crystalline passion for unraveling the fabric of reality. The heroes of Diaspora are explorers for whom the pursuit of knowledge outweighs every other value, including the preservation of personal identity. They are willing to rewrite their own mental architecture, to fragment their consciousness, to journey into regions from which there can be no return—physical or psychological.

Why This Book Matters Today

In an age when we argue endlessly about the ethics of artificial intelligence and the possibilities of the metaverse, Diaspora reads like prophecy written in the language of higher mathematics. Egan does not entertain. He expands consciousness through intellectual ordeal. The novel demands effort, a willingness to consult glossaries, and the courage to accept that we—with our protein brains—are nothing more than a brief flare in the long history of matter.

Diaspora stands as the supreme monument of transhumanist literature. It is a book that declares the universe under no obligation to be comprehensible, yet insists that our sole duty is to attempt comprehension—even if that attempt transforms us into something no longer recognizably human. If you are searching for the outermost limit of what science fiction can achieve as a mode of inquiry into existence itself, you have found it. Beyond this point lies only the void—and the equations.

Reflecting on it now, the lesson is probably that politics can made a bastard out of anyone.

The Earth is behind the horizon, and it's black and empty in all directions. The comm link is silent. I can't even hear myself breathe.

I'm charged with telling a story. It should, I am told, be true. It is the story of a man and a woman, of an invasion and an alcohol problem in a closed environment. I am told that we are grateful that everything turned out for the best. I am willing to believe this. I am willing to lie, but for my duty to the dead. For them, I will tell it how it happened, all high-blown drama and miscellaneous weird that it was.

A time comes in life when forgiving your friends' flaws becomes as essential as liking them. If you don't, you're all alone. Most people never think about this, mainly because they've never been to prison.

I think about old friends a lot, about loyalty and solitude and loneliness as only the dark side of the moon can make happen. It's odd how you can cling to it, even the memories of solitary down in that stockade in Birmingham after I stabbed that Specialist in the ass for lying to me.

I'm never alone anymore. Not up here.

I was Navy for fifteen years before being assigned (out of the stockade) to the joint international-corporate operations post creatively-named Highpoint (codename: Mogwai) Station. The chow is worse but the sex unavoidable.

Highpoint occupies a square mile of unclaimable real estate set in the Mare Australe. That's the dark side of the moon, folks. Our base consists of three domes constructed by military personnel using a special epoxy compound mixed with lunar regolith. C Dome is our residential sector, incorporating both military and civilian housing, the hydroponics garden, the cantina, infirmary and Command and Control. The civilian corporate sector is B Dome, and is mainly shared research facilities. The military occupies A Dome, which we use for H3 collection and processing, as well as all other duties under our mandate. The three domes form a triangle connected by airlock-sealed corridors. The Polaris platform is locked in a low, stationary orbit connected to the surface by a piece of tech I won't even try to spell right now. I've also heard that special projects has a hanger just beyond the uplink, but I've never been there.

Assignees to the Polaris Project are selected from a cross-section of the U.S. military to serve as the station's maintenance, security and diplomatic envoy. It is not a plum assignment.

Unofficially: it's like a nightclub in the last half hour before sunrise, when the only things left are staggered drunks, obscene chemical dependents, the lost waifs of a Midwestern town and you. The bartender's gone home and they stagger into the streets in an unfulfilled and futile rage.

I may seem unkind, perhaps even unprofessional or (God help me) unpatriotic, but every officer came here to avoid a court martial, and every enlisted man because he couldn't. This is a place for the people the military didn't need too much, but invested too much in training to just lock up or kick out.

The unofficial official term is "patriotically expatriated". We, the locals, mostly just call it being kicked off of Earth.

Still, those stationed at Highpoint do their duty, defying the expectations of their superiors, the American people, and each other. It's a drinking town, and it has a drinking town's problems.

It was three days into my tour when I saw my first murder on the moon. They're not common, but they happen. The station is mostly automated, leaving ample time for the crew's many picturesque muscle dramas. Men duel in the scrub lands of tractor-pounded regolith with tools we use to knock rocks from the miner treads. A pool is convened to assess and plunder the odds, usually by me.

Ordinarily, I just do document review and referee fights in the cantina. This base has no need for a lawyer.

So how did I end up here?

Dear Lieutenant, we of the Judge Advocate General have deemed you too volatile to keep stateside and too well-aware of things embarrassing and political to let off in one piece. How shall we vanish you? By gun or Afghani death march?

Not a very long story, to be honest...just a very classified one.

There are no MPs on Highpoint. This should not surprise, as we're unofficialy here to fuck international and maritime law. Unfortunately, the lack of MPs and the need for a military justice system, incidents requiring the attention of the courts are assigned to the station's highest-ranking officer thereof. I'll give you a guess who that is.

It should be noted for the record that when I was offered this position in parlay for my release from the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, I was not briefed on this aspect of my duties. Ultimately, I remained ignorant until the day I first stood in an EVA suit, watching an Earthrise illuminate a human corpse.

My name is Lieutenant Peter Caine, Esq. US NAVY (keel-hauled). This is my report on the Aqua Luna Incident, Highpoint Station, DSoM.