Diaspora

The best way to start is by diving in at the deep end, and when it comes to posthumanity you won’t find deeper. Uploaded personalities, clones, advanced technologies, extraordinary developments in biology, a person born with no parents: what can it possibly mean to be human in among all of this? When even humans who have been enhanced so that they can live longer or live under water are looked upon as rather old fashioned, we are in a future where posthumanity has become more established and more diverse than us. The result is a dazzling, at times confusing display of the different ways of being human that technology and biology might open up to us. Why it tops the list: No-one writing science fiction is more alive to the ideas of posthumanity than Egan. He approaches the idea, sometimes tangentially sometimes directly, in a lot of his work, including Permutation City, Distress and Schild’s Ladder; but nowhere does he deal with the subject so directly and with such startling invention as he does in Diaspora.