Diaspora begins roughly one millenium from now and ends (to the extent it does end) more than 90 billion years into the future. Those numbers tell us immediately that Diaspora is a novel of the far future and that it operates on a vast cosmological time scale--one reminiscent of the works of Olaf Stapedon, among others.
The usual objection to far future novels is Arthur C. Clarke's axiom that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"-and, therefore, any novel dealing with very highly advanced technology is more likely to be fantasy, or at least science fantasy, than science fiction. However, by pushing toward an adamantine/Hal Clementian hardness on the SF Mohs Scale, Diaspora succeeds in largely overcoming this pitfall of the far-future subgenre. Most of the speculation in Diaspora is firmly based in contemporary mathematical, biological, chemical, quantum, information, and consciousness theories. Diaspora plays the far-future game, but plays it hard enough so that we know we are still reading science fiction-unlike, say, Stapledon's Star-Maker which, despite its brilliance, becomes so overwhelmed by its own abstract theorizing that it ceases to be science, fiction, or science fiction.
The lure of abstraction, however, is still very much present in Diaspora. When it comes to big speculative ideas, no one can call Diaspora a timid work. It's filled to overflowing with grand concepts: virtual humans running as conscious software in machine "polises"; individual human consciousnesses downloaded into robots; the destruction of "flesher" civilization on Earth due to a massive nearby cosmological gamma-ray burst occasioned by two neutron stars spiralling into each other; fascinating carbohydrate-computer "ecologies of mind" in the organisms called Wang's carpets; planets rendered artificially heavy-isotoped as "trail markers" and neutron-wormhole gateways into other-dimensioned universes of the "macrosphere," all created by the mysterious Transmuters; a predicted galaxy-killing gamma-ray burster in the Milky Way's core-all grand concepts (and many more) to be found in Diaspora's pages.
This grandness of scale comes at a price, however. At times-particularly in the "Degrees of Freedom" chapter but also to a slightly lesser extent in "Orphanogenesis" and other exposition-heavy sections scattered throughout-Diaspora functions far more as a convenient vehicle for grand theories and Big Ideas than as a tightly plotted narrative. At times more a brilliant "thought experiment" than a novel, Diaspora itself demonstrates an awareness of this problem in the figures of the polis citizens (humanity "virtualized" into conscious software as a result of the inward exodus known as the Introdus). The citizens of Carter-Zimmerman polis, particularly, are constantly fighting the loss of a sense of human-scale physical reality-and the disappearance into abstraction and solipsism that persistently plagues the bodiless.
Diaspora suggests a number of dynamics-between abstract and concrete, quantum scale and human scale, contemplation and action, theory and practice, scientific values and literary values-to which the novel is itself also subject, not always with the most felicitous results. The "literary sins" that can be placed at Diaspora's doorstep are the traditional literary sins charged to hard science fiction: weak or "unrealistic" characterization, weak or disjointed plotting, and heavy-handed expository style.
The usual defenses against these charges are that hard SF is primarily a literature of ideas rather than a literature of plot and character; or that, in a work of hard SF, the created world is the most important character; or that, since hard SF writers must handle so much exposition to plausibly create their worlds (rather than merely parasitizing a given, historical milieu), something -like fully fleshed-out characters-must be sacrificed.
Diaspora, however, points to a deeper disjunction between the values of science and the values of fiction. Characters who are unrealistic and need "fleshing out?" Perhaps, but it is rather hard to write traditional "realistic" characters when most of Diaspora's characters are, by definition and conception, bodiless, essentially genderless, conscious software.
Disjointed plotting? True, Diaspora is told in a rather episodic fashion, but such a narrative style is difficult to avoid when covering over ninety billion years in less than 300 pages.
Heavy-handed exposition? At times, but that is particularly hard to avoid, for the more cutting-edge the science, the less familiar the general audience will be with that science, and therefore the more explicit must be the explanation of it.
This disjunction between scientific and literary values arises from the fact that the universe shown to us by quantum theory is antithetical to the universe that fiction has traditionally shown us. Traditional fiction deals with a universe of human scale, one in which classical Newtonian mechanics "works" because quantum mechanical flucuations are too small and the speed of light too large to affect our everyday experiences. However, the universe of quantum theory--the universe of Diaspora--is one in which the very small and the very large are of overriding importance.
The universe of deep fact, on the other side of the wave function's collapse, is reversible, nonlinear, parallel-superposition of states, "everything all at once." The universe of fiction, however, is traditionally nonreversible, linear, sequential-- "one thing after another," what the conscious observer sees with the collapse of the wave function. These universes require different discourses-explanatory discourse for quantum cosmology, narrative discourse for fiction-in order for us to understand them.
Learning and understanding are key in Diaspora which, plotwise, is an elaboration on H. G. Wells's idea that human history is increasingly a race between education and catastrophe. For "education" substitute "human understanding of the universe" and for "catastrophe" substitute "gamma ray bursts" and you pretty much get the picture of the main plot-driver for Diaspora. Here too, medium and message mimic each other and, given the explanatory and "educational" burden of the text, we shouldn't be surprised that Diaspora is a bit teacherly or even pedantic at points.
It is precisely in this idea of explanation, however, that Diaspora veers away from the diamond-hard boundary walls of quantum theory and mathematics. The idea that "Everything can be explained" is rephrased in Diaspora (several times) as "Nothing is beyond understanding." (p. 225) The reversible, nonlinear, parallel, quantum universe, on the far side of the wave function or beyond the black hole's event horizon, is not so tractable, however--as Heisenbergian uncertainty, the lightspeed limit, and singularities all make clear. The quantum universe, according to current theory, is ultimately intractable, but from this hard science Diaspora shies away.
A similar situation is also found in the mathematical foundation of both the polis citizens' worlds and the world of the novel as well. "In the end," Diaspora (p. 277) tells us, "there was only mathematics"--this statement being a continuation of ideas, found throughout the book, on the primacy of mathematics, particularly ideas emphasizing the notion that consciousness is reducible to mathematical equations (see pp. 42-43 and 77-78, HarperPrism edition).
Diaspora further posits the idea that it is possible to truly understand everything-both the cosmos that is to be understood and the consciousness that is doing the understanding-through mathematics. Unlike science--which deals in better and better approximations to the truth, or with "replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong," as Hawking phrased it-mathematics, according to Diaspora, deals in truth itself. Yatima, arguably the novel's most important character, works in mathematics and ultimately spends eternity in a mathematics virtuality called the Truth Mines. Whether Yatima falls victim to pure abstractionism and solipsism at the end of the novel can be debated, but the relevance of that possible fate to the problems of the novel itself is highly suggestive.
One might also argue about whether a little mathematical chauvinism ever hurt anyone. Einstein himself was fond of saying, "Politics is for the moment; an equation is for eternity"--though some of those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a result of the ephemeral political exploitation of the eternal equation E=mc2 might beg to differ with the Nobel laureate's assertion. Be that as it may, the idea that mathematics yields ultimate truth is undercut by the mathematicians themselves-most notably in Godel's incompleteness theorem. The issue of the "reducibility to mathematical equations" of consciousness also ultimately founders on the rocks of intractability. It is doubtful whether a consciousness that is not embodied in a fleshly human form could be said to be a "human" consciousness in any final sense. I know this smacks of what I think of as the Dualist's Dilemma--"Human consciousness is not just a product of the mechanisms of the human form, but there is also no human consciousness divorced from the mechanisms of the human form"-but I suspect this objection to virtual consciousness still stands.
Diaspora, whether we choose to call it a novel or a thought experiment, is very much like a diamond-hard, brilliant, and somewhat flawed. But even those flaws provide flashes of illumination into the relationships between science, fiction, and science fiction. Highly recommended.
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