Diaspora (novel)
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Diaspora is a 1997 science fiction novel by Australian writer Greg Egan.
In Diaspora, most human beings have uploaded into virtual reality-based communities, called polises (Greek for city), where they live as infomorphs.
An unprecedented range of possibilities and experiences then opens to humanity, free from the constraints of the physical world. The novel attempts to depict day-to-day life in such an environment.
The novel title derives from the main quest that one of the polises, Carter-Zimmerman, begins in the physical world (much to the amusement of the other polises), to find the reason for a paradoxical acceleration of a cosmic event that threatens to wipe out the remaining body-bound humans ("fleshers") on earth, in the process discovering a message from a previous civilization. This discovery leads to knowledge of an even more threatening problem: the end of life in the Milky Way, together with the means of escaping the coming catastrophe by leaving the universe altogether.
In this novel, Egan deftly invents several new kinds of physics, each stranger than the one before. He also predicts a knowledge repository similar to Wikipedia.it:Diaspora