I went to a small rural school on the east coast and circa 2005 or so I recall getting a mass email from an acquaintance explaining their new pronouns of ze/zir. That was the first I had ever heard about someone preferring different pronouns, and it was probably close to a decade before I heard those particular ones in any other context. All that is to say that it makes sense if it had made its way out to a rural college in 2005 it was probably being used a bit more widely in the SF a few years prior.

I am totally fine with dry. What usually pulls me in with Egan and hard scifi in general, is cool technological ideas and seeing how they play out societal (example: floating island state in Distress). Egan sticks out to me that he also will apply or combine existing concepts in mind-warping ways (example would be the infinite cellular automata in Permutation City). So far non of that has really happened for me in Diaspora. AI existing at a faster speed than the physical reality is cool, but feels like table stakes.