Another star. Lacerta is in Greg Egan’s book Diaspora. I think Diaspora is in my top 5 favourite sci-fi books. This particular image, I found online as a piece of fake propaganda from the same book. It’s a poster from the Introdus Foundation.

Diaspora is a series of progressions of distancing of humans from their environment and from themselves. Oddly, for Egan, it’s geographic distance (it’s regularly not). How far can you stretch being human? I think that’s what he’s asking.

I want to join near the beginning of the book, where a local star – Lacerta – has released a huge burst of radiation which is hitting the Earth. There’s a catastrophe as the atmosphere is burned away, there are huge electric storms, dead flesh humans everywhere, being burnt to death. Apocalypse. Yatima, our protagonist, is a software human running inside a robot, and he’s doing a forced consciousness upload, with nanoware. The nanoware is called “Introdus,” which is what inspired the poster.

Matt Webb, S&W, posted 2006-04-06 (talk on 2006-02-23)