Diaspora

Diaspora is a science fiction novel by the Australian writer Greg Egan, published in 1997 and set in the thirtieth century.

Yatima is a citizen of Konishi polis, born without parents from a mind seed, and introduced to a community of software intelligences who can choose their own shape, their own perceptions and their own children. The novel follows Yatima's education and then the event that breaks the settled world: the destruction of the remaining human populations on Earth, killed by a burst of radiation from a dying star, which leaves the polises to work out how to carry on. Egan's characters are mostly mathematical, and their grief is expressed in physics. When the Orphan, a young citizen, uncovers evidence that a theory of matter accepted for a thousand years was incomplete, the polises build starships and set out to learn what happened to the universe and who else might be in it. The book is hard science fiction of an unusually literal kind, in which arguments about gravity, topology and consciousness carry the plot.

The novel grew out of an earlier story of Egan's, and its glossary of invented terms runs for pages at the back.