I enjoyed Permutation City, Quarantine, and some of his earlier short story collections, even at their most difficult. But I quit Diaspora fairly early. I work

I 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.