Diaspora

A dispersal of peoples, due to various factors - colonialism, immigration, slavery, persecution, economics, politics. Usually associated with the Jewish people - they've had, perhaps, the longest history of forced and coerced migrations, from subjugation to foreign empires in Old Testament days, to Eastern European pogroms and Hitler. But there are African and Asian diasporas as well, reaching to every continent, making possible, e.g., a Peruvian president named Alberto Fujimori.

"In 2975, the orphan Yatima is grown from a randomly mutated digital mind seed in the conceptory of Konishi polis. Yatima explores the Coalition of Polises, the network of computers where most life in the solar system now resides, and joins a friend, Inoshiro, to borrow an abandoned robot body and meet a thriving community of "fleshers" in the enclave of Atlanta.

Twenty-one years later, news arrives from a lunar observatory: gravitational waves from Lac G-1, a nearby pair of neutron stars, show that the Earth is about to be bathed in a gamma-ray flash created by the stars' collision -- an event that was not expected to take place for seven million years. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Atlanta to try to warn the fleshers, but meet suspicion and disbelief. Some lives are saved, but the Earth is ravaged.

(This takes place in about the first third of the novel.)

In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors resolve to discover the cause of the neutron stars' premature collision, and they launch a thousand polises into interstellar space in search of answers. This diaspora eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an older group of travellers: a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe."

(And then it becomes strange.)

Di*as"po*ra (?), n. [Gr. &?;. See Diaspore.]

Lit., "Dispersion." -- applied collectively: (a) To those Jews who, after the Exile, were scattered through the Old World, and afterwards to Jewish Christians living among heathen. Cf. James i. 1. (b) By extension, to Christians isolated from their own communion, as among the Moravians to those living, usually as missionaries, outside of the parent congregation.

© Webster 1913