Comment by k__

5 days ago

If you liked that story, you might also like Greg Egan's "Permutation City" and "Diaspora".

Both having slightly different takes on uploading.

9 comments

k__

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candiddevmike  5 days ago

I keep trying to read Diaspora and struggle too much with the concepts presented early on. Very "hard sci-fi", just stick it out and it all gets explained?

  • marcellus23  4 days ago

    The beginning describes the formation of an intelligence and it is indeed very dense. You can figure out what's going on but it takes some slow reading, and probably best to revisit it once you have some more context from later in the book.

    The whole book isn't like that. Once you get past that part, as the other commenter said, it gets much easier.

    • igor47  2 days ago

      I actually love the beginning of Diaspora, and have recommended just that section to people. I found it beautiful and moving. It's starting to learn that people have to "get past" that section...

  • marcusf  4 days ago

    Egan is always dense. It's some mind bending physics/comp sci, but all cooked up in his brain so doesn't really apply to anything productive. I struggled with his books and his writing but toughened it out because I liked the concepts, but he's divisive.

    • killerstorm  4 days ago

      That's not really true. Some of his works are science-heavy, others are not. Particularly, many of short stories require little-to-no context.

  • k__  4 days ago

    lol, that was exactly my thought.

    The whole birth of an virtual identity part is so dense, I didn't understand half of what was "explained".

    However, after that it becomes a much easier read.

    Not much additional explanation, but I think, it's not really needed to enjoy the rest of the book.

killerstorm  4 days ago

Another book by Greg Egan - "Zendegi" - has more overlap with MMAcevedo. It covers a different approach to mind uploading (possibly) more practical in near future: a generic model of the brain is fine-tuned on responses from a specific human. The generic model itself is made by averaging over many scanned connectomes. The other part of the book is VR Shahnameh which, honestly, was a bit too boring.

He also has a whole bunch of short stories on the same topic. Some assume reader is already familiar with concept of sideloading, as it's explained in the passing:

1. Bit Players: https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/BIT/BIT.html

2. 3-adica

3. Instantiation

4. Uncanny Valley (available online)

Other:

1. "Reasons to Be Cheerful"

2. “Learning to Be Me”

3. Closer