 diaspora is a hard science fiction novel by the australian writer greg egan which first appeared in print in 1997. ==plot introduction== this novel's setting is a posthuman future, in which transhumanism long ago (during the mid 21st century) became the default philosophy embraced by the vast majority of human cultures. the novel began as a short story entitled "wang's carpets" which originally appeared in new legends, a collection of short stories edited by greg bear (legend, london, 1995). egan later adapted and included "wang's carpets" as a chapter in the novel. an appended glossary explains many of the specialist terms in the novel. egan invents several new theories of physics, beginning with kozuch theory, the dominant physics paradigm for nearly nine hundred years before the beginning of the novel. kozuch theory treats elementary particles as semi-point-like wormholes, whose properties can be explained entirely in terms of their geometries in six dimensions. certain assumptions common to egan's works inform the plot. most of the characters choose a neutral gender; keri hulme's gender-neutral pronouns "ve", "vis", and "ver" are used for them. ==the world of the novel== by 2975 ce (universal time), the year in which the novel begins, humanity has "speciated" into three distinct groupings: # fleshers, biological societies consisting of statics, the original, naturally-evolving race of homo sapiens, and a wide variety of exuberant derivatives, who have modified their genes beyond the static baseline. these include enhancements such as disease-resistance, life-extension, intelligence-amplification, and the ability to allow selected transhumans to thrive in new environments, such as the sea. there even exists a subculture (the dream apes) whose ancestors bred out the capacity for speech and some of the higher brain-functions, apparently in order to attain a primal innocence and rapport with nature. in contrast to 21st-century society prior to the novel's "introdus" event, the vast profusion of qualitatively different types of fleshers has made any sort of global civilisation impossible. this divergence has prompted the development of a culture of "bridgers" who modify their own minds to form a chain of intermediates between exuberant st
1990s_science_fiction_novels 1997_novels Australian_science_fiction_novels Hard_science_fiction Mathematics_fiction_books Novels_by_Greg_Egan Transhumanist_books Virtual_reality_in_fiction