Diaspora by Greg Egan - A far more accurate look at the future than Clarke's "3001"

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 Andersons Tau Zero, Bruce Sterlings Schismatrix Plus, Camille Flammarions Omega, and Olaf Stapledons Last and First Men. Diaspora is 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. Diaspora is why people read SF. --Cynthia Ward

A far more accurate look at the future than Clarke's "3001"
I am a huge sci-fi fan, and this book is far and away my favorite of all the books I've amassed. An easy way to describe why I like it so much would be to compare it with Arthur C. Clarke's "3001."

In Clarke's book, it seems that the author's imagination has run out and he cannot really understand that 1000 years in the future will be nothing like the past 1000 years, and will most likely be so different that a time-traveler from our period wouldn't have a common starting point to work from in understanding the new world. He paints a world only slightly different from our own, as if he can only think 100 years out. "Diaspora" presents a wildly exotic, but still plausible humanity of the next millennium.

Without going into detail, the author describes 3 routes that humans have taken: completely virtual entities inhabiting only the combined computing resources of the solar system, humans still living on Earth either in original form or highly genetically modified but still organic, and robots who form a half-way point between real bodies and virtual entities.

I think Egan's exploration of these three groups and their interactions is plausible, and most of all very exciting and fun to read. There is no "dead zone" in the book, no arid chapters where nothing happens, and his character interactions give a human element without taking a break from the exciting ideas he presents and explores.

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