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Doug's Reviews > Diaspora
Diaspora
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Maybe I'm just too mathematically and scientifically challenged, but I just couldn't get into this one, though I had high hopes based on the reviews.
Somewhere in Egan's verbose and detailed scientific musings is a rather bland and boring story with flat characters and a dull plot.
If you love hard sci-fi and mathematics or quantum physics, then you'll probably love this book, I don't doubt it.
I just couldn't enjoy the plot and characters while having to make my way through sentences like this one every page:
This solution has positive mass. In fact, if GR held true at this scale, it would just be a pair of black holes sharing a singularity. Of course, even for the heaviest elementary particles the Schwarzschild radius is far smaller than the Planck-Wheeler length, so quantum uncertainty would disrupt any potential event horizons, and perhaps even smooth away the singularity as well. But I wanted to find a simple, geometrical model underlying that uncertainty.
It’s probably a brilliant work from a purely hard sci-fi and scientific perspective, but from a literary perspective, it fell completely flat for me.
Somewhere in Egan's verbose and detailed scientific musings is a rather bland and boring story with flat characters and a dull plot.
If you love hard sci-fi and mathematics or quantum physics, then you'll probably love this book, I don't doubt it.
I just couldn't enjoy the plot and characters while having to make my way through sentences like this one every page:
This solution has positive mass. In fact, if GR held true at this scale, it would just be a pair of black holes sharing a singularity. Of course, even for the heaviest elementary particles the Schwarzschild radius is far smaller than the Planck-Wheeler length, so quantum uncertainty would disrupt any potential event horizons, and perhaps even smooth away the singularity as well. But I wanted to find a simple, geometrical model underlying that uncertainty.
It’s probably a brilliant work from a purely hard sci-fi and scientific perspective, but from a literary perspective, it fell completely flat for me.
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Ed
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rated it 3 stars
Jan 14, 2020 07:36PM
I had a very similar reaction to you, Doug. While I did enjoy the thought experiments, I think they would have been better presented in an essay than a novel.
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Of course, even for the heaviest elementary particles the Schwarzschild radius is far smaller than the Planck-Wheeler length...I mean, of course.
