Diaspora (novel) - The World of The Novel

The World of The Novel

By 2975 CE (Universal Time), the year in which the novel begins, humanity has "speciated" into three distinct groupings:

1. 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 strains.
2. gleisner robots, individual software-based intelligences housed inside artificial anthropoid, or flesher-shaped, physical bodies (from a design by a corporation named Gleisner) who interact with the world in flesher-paced "real time," a trait which they regard as important, as they consider the polis citizens too remote and solipsistic. The gleisners live in space, mostly in the asteroid belt, and in various other places in the Solar System; Egan implies that they long ago agreed to leave Earth to the fleshers to avoid conflict. They eventually implement a program of interstellar exploration using a fleet of 63 ships, targeting the nearest 21 stars.
3. the citizens, intelligence as disembodied computer software running entirely within simulated reality-based communities known as polises. These represent the majority by far of "humanity" in the novel, followed in a distant second place by the gleisners. Together with vast networks of sensors, probes, drones and satellites throughout the Solar system, they collectively make up the Coalition of Polises, the backbone and bulk of human civilisation. They interact primarily in virtual environments called scapes, through the use of avatars or icons. The citizens of the Coalition view the gleisners and their colonial aspirations as puerile and ultimately futile, believing that only "bacteria with spaceships. . . knowing no better and having no choice" would attempt to deface (by means of mass colonisation) the galaxy, especially if virtual realities afford limitless possibilities at a small fraction of the total resource-consumption.

Diaspora focuses in large part on the nature of life and intelligence in a post-human context, and questions the meaning of life and the meaning of desires. If, for instance, the meaning of human life and human desires is bound up with ancestral human biology ("to spread one's genes"), then what meaning do lives and desires have, and what serves as the basis of values when biology no longer forms a part of life?