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Permutation City and Diaspora are excellent books by Egan.
by andyjohnson0 5y ago
Permutation City and Diaspora are excellent books by Egan.
- drclau 5y agoWas wondering what to pick next. I’ll pick Diaspora, thanks to your comment. :)
- mypastself 5y agoI enjoyed Permutation City, Quarantine, and some of his earlier short story collections, even at their most difficult. But I quit Diaspora fairly early. I worked really hard to understand the first chapter’s dense descriptions of ridges, grids and virtual machine elements, all the while thinking how a single picture would have made things far simpler. When a later chapter started describing a torus in great detail I thought, if I’m going to be working this hard, I’d rather be reading a technical book about a topic I was interested in. So I did, and I remember it was way easier, and more edifying.
- andyjohnson0 5y agoI'd broadly agree with your comments about Diaspora. The characterisation isn't great, but what makes it so impressive to me is the colossal (time, space) scale of the thing.