Greg Egan is one of the newer writers in the field of revamped new hard science fiction.
For his short story "Wangs Carpets" - which is a part of novel "Diaspora", Gardner Dozois (writer and editor of very good and already a bit famous collections of best short stories in SF) says it changed how other SF writers think about the future and science fiction.
The novel began as a short story entitled "Wang's Carpets" which originally appeared in New Legends, a collection of short stories edited by Greg Bear (Legend, London, 1995). Egan later adapted and included "Wang's Carpets" as a chapter in the novel.
Diaspora :
It -
begins with a description of "orphanogenesis", the birthing of a citizen without any ancestors (most citizens descend from fleshers uploaded at some point), and the subsequent upbringing of the newborn Yatima within Konishi polis. Yatima matures within a few real-time days, because citizens' subjective time runs about 800 times as rapidly as flesher and gleisner time. Early on, Yatima and a friend, Inoshiro, use abandoned gleisner bodies to visit a Bridger colony near the ruins of Atlanta on Earth.
Years later, the gleisner Karpal, using a gravitational-wave detector, determines that a binary neutron star system in the constellation of Lacerta has collapsed, releasing a huge burst of energy. Previous predictions portrayed the system's stable orbit as likely to last for another seven million years. By analysing irregularities in the orbit, Karpal discovers that the devastating burst of energy will reach Earth within the next four days.-taken from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28novel%29-but be careful about reading there because its full of spoilers.
And so humanity splits and great Diaspora begins. Most of humans who were digital split into their own Polises and spread through the neighboring stars, many containing multiple copies of main characters.
Polises are never fully explained as to how they look but they seem to be something close to asteroid sized hardware able to maintain thousands of full copies of digital humans, produce new ones completely by itself and has almost unlimited ability to manipulate matter (nano assembler levels) to produce any kind of clone bodies from its reserves of tissue and genetic material data, or create and manufacture any kind of robotic or space vehicle necessary for particular mission.
Virtual reality of any kind, depth and sensory believability is fully available. So much so that the main philosophical split between citizens (and whole Polises) is whether reality matters or there is no difference between virtual and physical.
the citizens[2], intelligence as disembodied computer software running entirely within simulated reality-based communities known as polises.[3] These represent the majority by far of "humanity" in the novel, followed in a distant second place by the gleisners. Together with vast networks of sensors, probes, drones and satellites, they collectively make up the Coalition of Polises, the backbone and bulk of human civilisationIn further story we follow one of them more then others, one which first discovers organic life on one of the first planets they found, a watery world covered in kilometers of oceans and the only life there, recorded from afar with distant probes, are huge organic beings that look like thick carpets, just drifting in the currents in the Oceans, slowly getting bigger then dividing into new ones.
No other life whatsoever.
One of the characters realizes when examining their structure that they follow an old mathematical... theorem, on their molecular structure level and below, when they are growing and dividing. A theorem of old earth mathematician Hao Wang ... so the "decided" to call them Wangs carpets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tileAnd send nano probes into the oceans to map the carpets little deeper.
But that's just the first stop in whole Diaspora, and the search doesn't stop in this universe either, it goes up through the higher metauniverses by order of how many physical dimensions they have in their reality.
They found other life in first few universes with six and seven dimensions but not the answer they were after.
All along they were actually following, searching for some old advanced race that left rare bits of its technologies scattered through universes... sometimes the only clue would be a planet made entirely of some impossible isotopes of atoms. One little planet in that whole universe. Just left there.
So they follow upward and... man... there is some wicked writing there, in nine dimensions and above universes.
Wicked, let me tell ya.
Overall though, first part of the book can be a little slow and demanding of the reader because of numerous hard science terminology and mathematical explanations of certain important events, which can go into some detail. But, its possible to follow the plot even without two or three mathematical encyclopedias by your side.
That level of demand for knowledge from readers side is lessened a little in "other" part of the story.
Dont let that deter you. The story itself is amazing.
When Diaspora itself begins and they leave earth things pick up... and then keep on picking up - until the end in a rather... impressive trajectory.
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