Diaspora
In the 30th century, few humans remain on Earth. Most have downloaded themselves into robot bodies or solar-system-spanning virtual realities, escaping death--or so they believe, until the collision of nearby neutron stars threatens life in every form.Diaspora, written by Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner Greg Egan, transcends millennia and universes in the tradition of Poul Anderson'sTau Zero, Bruce Sterling'sSchismatrix Plus, Camille Flammarion'sOmega, and Olaf Stapledon'sLast and First Men.Diasporais packed with mind-bending ideas extrapolated from cutting-edge cosmology, physics, and consciousness theory to create an astonishing hard-SF novel inhabited by very strange yet always believable characters.Diasporais why people read SF.--Cynthia Ward