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“No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren’t reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything. Still,”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“He was a bridger. He created you to touch other cultures. He wanted you to reach as far as you could.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“No one objects to the notion that every technological civilisation might undergo its own Introdus.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardized subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for incoming data—one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the orphan's two-hundredth iteration, the channels themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed.
Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred meters beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fiber and satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The first problem of perception was learning how to choose from this superabundance.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“There’s been a revival of the old debate: with the failure of the wormholes, should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the lightspeed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local contingencies dealt with by non-conscious systems. I don’t think the idea will gain much support, though �� and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. We can watch the stars from a distance, as ever, but we have to make peace with the fact that we’ve stayed behind.

I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can’t guide us. Evolution can’t guide us. The C-Z charter says ”understand and respect the universe”�� but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all �� and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ”conquer�� Earth, to steal their ”precious�� physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ”competition”�� as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. ”Conquering the galaxy�� is what bacteria with spaceships would do �� knowing no better, having no choice.

Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That’s why we need to find another space-faring civilisation. Understanding Lacerta is important, the astrophysics of survival is important, but we also need to speak to others who’ve faced the same decisions, and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“A citizen who spiralled down into insanity could spend teratau in a state of confusion and pain, with a mind too damaged to authorise help, or even to choose extinction. That was the price of autonomy: an inalienable right to madness and suffering, inseparable from the right to solitude and peace.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“The Transmuters had built a structure that dwarfed universes, but touched each one only lightly. They hadn’t turned whole worlds to rubble, they hadn’t reshaped galaxies in their image. Having evolved on some distant, finite world, they’d inherited the most valuable survival trait of all. Restraint.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“The environment was full of birds and insects, rodents and small reptiles - decorative in appearance, but also satisfying a more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of view-points. Ontological guy lines.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“She said, ‘I want sharp borders, right now. I want to deal with this myself.�� ‘I understand.�� He let the partial model of her which he’d acquired as they’d made love fade from his mind, leaving only an ordinary, guesswork-driven Elena-symbol, much like those he possessed for everyone else he knew. Paolo took the responsibilities of intimacy seriously; his lover before Elena had asked him to erase all his knowledge of her, and he’d more or less complied �� the only thing he still knew about her was the fact that she’d made the request.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“Maybe it seems strange to you, all the trouble we’re taking to catch a glimpse of what you’re going to see in close-up, so soon. It’s hard to explain: I don’t think it’s jealousy, or even impatience. Just a need for independence.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganised. It looked like a flesher embryo �� though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Yatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted dark; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicled neurotransmitters against a radio-frequency MRI chirp.

There were two bodies now. Twins? One was larger, though �� sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum.

One flesher child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibres. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink and grey muscles working side by side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, flesher and gleisner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a flesher's womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen's mind embedded in the same woman's brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of grey dust.

Two flesher children walked side by side, hand in hand. Or father and son, gleisner and flesher, citizen and gleisner... Yatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through ver. The figures strode calmly along a city's main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated.

The artwork, unbidden, sent Yatima's viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses �� and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger on to vis shoulders �� then the passenger's height flowing down to the bearer like an hourglass's sand.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions. “We’d”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?�� ‘Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?�� ‘Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving?”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“He turned back to face them. ‘I do make sense to you, don’t I? I’m not just imagining that communication is taking place?”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“Taken together, the artifacts comprised a giant sculpture, spanning more than a quadrillion dimensions. The Transmuters had built a structure that dwarfed universes, but touched each one only lightly. They hadn’t turned whole worlds to rubble, they hadn’t reshaped galaxies in their image. Having evolved on some distant, finite world, they’d inherited the most valuable survival trait of all. Restraint.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“The wonderful thing about hope is that it has absolutely no effect on anything. Just throw the switch.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“Polis citizens, Yatima decided, were creatures of mathematics; it lay at the heart of everything they were, and everything they could become.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“Yatima’s mind was reeling. The Transmuters hadn’t indulged in any of the spectacular acts of astrophysical monument-building that a bored and powerful civilization might have gone in for: no planet-sculpting, no Dyson spheres, no black-hole juggling. But by tailoring a few neutrons on this obscure planet, they’d hitched the entire universe into synch with the time stream of an unimaginably larger structure.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“I don’t believe their minds were so different from ours that we’re in danger of wildly misinterpreting anything that looks like a simple message. So far, the worst mistake we could have made would have been to give up too soon on trying to interpret the isotopes.”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora