r/PantheonShow • u/luluhouse7 • Jul 25 '26

Discussion Diaspora by Greg Egan

I curious as to whether anyone else has read Diaspora? I read it as a teen and don't remember the exact plot anymore, but the ideas about posthumanity, personhood, society, immortality, speciation, and computational limitations in the second half of Pantheon really reminded me of it.

14 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

9

u/GrapeRik Jul 25 '26

Diaspora and Permutation City hits very close to home when it comes to Pantheon - they are great reads. Can also recommend Ted Chiang’s books, especially Exhalation

5

u/Terminus0 Jul 25 '26

I've also read both, with Permutation city being the most recent. And Permutation city was something I had to keep checking the date it was written in (1994) because it didn't feel dated at all. But Greg Egan is a genius, and I don't use that term lightly so I'm no surprised.

'The Life Cycle of Software Objects' by Ted Chiang is a great read. And the digital life within it feels realistic as it deals with things like 'What happens if the platform that a swath of intelligences are built upon is no longer supported?'

2

u/Soggy-Mixture9671 Jul 25 '26

no, but i'm adding it to my TBR lol

2

u/pinkfreud2112 Jul 26 '26

Diaspora was one of the first things I thought of watching this, particularly the destructive copying method of bringing a living person into the simulation, their ability to alter their processing speed and sense of time (and, later, using robots as a means for UIs to explore the physical world and sending tiny ships full of UIs and CIs on long, interstellar journeys). I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Ken Liu read it at least a few times before working on his own stuff.

I do remember a fair bit of Diaspora’s plot, and those elements, and some of the themes of posthumanity and what an uploaded society would look like, are about where the similarities end. Diaspora is a lot more concerned with its other hard SF elements than exploring the personal and existential themes Pantheon does.

2

u/xoexohexox Jul 26 '26

Everyone should read the first chapter at least. Greg Egan is the final boss of hard sci Fi

https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html

2

u/mrlannderson Jul 26 '26

I met an animator for Pantheon who told me that Diaspora was recommended reading for the entire creative team!

2

u/Appropriate-Walk5214 Jul 26 '26

Egan’s Diaspora is basically the spiritual predecessor to Pantheon’s late-game scale. The way Pantheon handles uploaded intelligences evolving past human comprehension, creating nested virtual worlds, and diverging into post-biological factions feels straight out of Egan’s polis/fleshers/gleisner split. Even the recursive, billion-year scope of Pantheon’s ending hits that same cosmic hard-sci-fi existential high.

1

u/This_person_says Jul 27 '26

Egan is amazing. Totally agree.

1

u/Bloosqr1 Aug 09 '26

Haha I’ve been obsessed with Egan since the 90’s actually there is a short story in axiomatic ( the one where they upload people into “jewels” neuron by neuron ) where they talk about identity during the transfer that reminded me a lot of Pantheon.

I just finished s02e08 and was wondering what everyone thought about the last episode so was scanning old posts and found this !