Greg Egan: Diaspora
Diaspora: A Novel, from Matt Webb’s review: “This is a book about what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, and the nature of distance. On the second day, I finished the book in the morning. Egan has the concept of bridgers – a long chain of translators, each pair having a way to communicate, so two mutually unintelligible ends are bridged, able to communicate. That’s what day two was: extending the bridge of consciousness, of being human, of being itself. Stretching to extremes these things, probing in all directions to distill being to its purest form.”