Permutation City: A Novel by Greg Egan (PDF)

Description

“Egan is determined to make sense of everything – to understand the whole world as an intelligible, rational, material (and finally manipulable) realm – even if it means abandoning comfortable and comforting illusions. This is fundamental to the whole project of SF and it’s why Egan’s Best – and his Rest – is worth any number of looks. —Locus What happens when your digital self overpowers your physical self?A life in Permutation City is unlike any life to which you’re accustomed. You have Eternal Life, the power to live forever. Immortality is a real thing, just not the thing you’d expect.Life is just electronic code. You have been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. A Copy of a Copy. For Paul Durham, he keeps making Copies of himself, but the issue is that his Copies keep changing their minds and shutting themselves down.You also have Maria Deluca, who is nothing but an Autoverse addict. She spends every waking minute with the cellular automaton known as the Autoverse, a world that lives by the mathematical “laws of physics.”Paul makes Maria an offer to design and drop a seed into the Autoverse that will allow her to indulge in her obsession. There is, however, one catch: you can no longer terminate, bail out, and remove yourself. You will never be your normal flesh-and-blood life again. The question then becomes: Is this what she really wants? Is this what we really want?From the brilliant mind of Greg Egan, Permutation City, first published in 1994, comes a world of wonder that makes you ask if you are you, or is the Copy of you the real you?Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Greg Egan is a computer programmer, and the author of the acclaimed SF novels The Arrows of Time, Distress, Diaspora, Quarantine, Permutation City, and Teranesia. He has won the Hugo Award as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His short fiction has been published in a variety of places, including Interzone, Asimov’s, and Nature. He lives in Perth, Australia.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A better analysis of the nature of consciousness and simulation than I’ve seen elsewhere.He explores a great many angles and does go in some very interesting directions… though the most interesting stuff is based on some fairly arbitrary assumptions, which didn’t seem necessary given how well grounded most of the conceptual content was.Some sequences involving deliberate self-modification are especially well written and should be of interest to anyone thinking about transhumanism (or Buddhism for that matter).The proposed insect behavior is super interesting, like an even better version of Vinge’s “Tines”. I wish he’d gone in more depth on that.Very egocentric narrative throughout, basically zero consideration of society and culture.I can’t say it’s a fun read, it’s like stepping into a bleak cold abyss.

⭐I went into this one with such high hopes, it had a very strong beginning and the overall concept is mind-bendingly awesome. Once I hit about the halfway mark I started losing interest fast, but mostly due to the terrible characters. Maria Deluca might be the most annoying character ever created from a pen and not in a “love to hate them” type of way.None of the characters feel developed at all, they are simply there for exposition. Paul plays the super levelheaded character and Maria plays the snippy skeptic. A whole lot of this book is dedicated to Maria never believing in Paul and being an absolute pain in the backside about it, even when faced with direct evidence contrary to her views in any given situation and despite Paul never really giving a strong reason to doubt him. He pays her handsomely and is very upfront, but page after page after page she dunks on him the entire time, doubting everything and being a sarcastic preachy pain. I grew so tired of this schtick that I nearly DNF’d the book.There are a few parallel plot lines going on and really none of them make much of a difference. The entire Kate and Peer thread could have been axed.This whole thing should have been a fun 80 page short story. It would have been way more fun if the whole Kate and Peer plot was completely gutted, the whole Thomas Riemann line was gutted and Maria was along for the journey and together with Paul they could have been a fun dynamic duo. Being skeptical is fine, but SO MANY pages, oh so many pages are simply her complaining to Paul. Gut all of that – it becomes incredibly tedious and annoying.If you read the plot summary on Fandom then you will see how little Kate, Peer, and Riemann matter (I don’t even think Riemann is mentioned in the whole summary despite him having an entire thread in the book). The plot summary on Fandom is more fun than the actual book.I really struggled with rating this novel. It’s not 1-star because the whole Elysium and Autoverse concept is awesome, the whole uploading a copy of your consciousness into a super cloud computer with limited power that runs on a sort of exchange where you’re paying for and competing for precious processing time is super cool and I like how the virtual worlds are approximations (efficiency matters!). I love the questions this book brings forth, like what does it really mean to be *you*? Even if a perfect representation of you is copied and digitized then is it still you? If it is, then is it still you when you make changes to yourself? If you can run a simple routine to forget something painful in your past then are you losing a part of yourself by doing such? There are a lot of really interesting questions raised in this book!But then again, as I have already harped on, this book should have been a romp and not a chore. I grew so tired of the characters and so tired of the exposition, for its few really high points this book sure does have a lot of lows. It’s a 350 page book that feels like 600.3 stars feels a little generous because I was annoyed through a majority of this book, but 2 seems a bit low because I will be pondering over some of the really awesome concepts for a long time to come. In the end I give it an optimistic 2.5 (rounded up to 3).

⭐good book on time

⭐Just reading the back flap of this book doesn’t even really begin to describe the depth of the concepts presented in this story. While the material subjects in Permutation City are firmly planted in sci-fi, it also puts concepts such as what it means to “be” human both objectively and subjectively at the forefront. Whether you are an ardent fan of computer science, biology, physics, or even philosophy, this book will elicit some kind of respect from you for its depth in those regards. This book does lean heavily into both hard science and fiction, but quite honestly it takes the concepts so far that that distinctions between the two are trivial.What this book ISN’T is a flashy science fiction romp with action and adrenaline for just for the sake of excitement. What we DO have is a deeply thought provoking series of events and perspectives that challenge how evolving technology can redefine or completely do away with our current concepts of humanity.My only real cons are that Greg goes to such lengths to explain and take you to each of his thought points and conclusions, that the actual “story” is relatively light. Now, if you enjoy staying in those thoughts and sort of letting them gestate, this won’t be much of a problem. If however, these thoughts don’t resonate with you, you might find yourself waiting for the next “thing” to happen.Sort of on the other end of that, I felt that the conclusion of the book was a bit hasty. When considering the effort that went into making sure that the reader has bought and understood the rules of the world, the end felt a tad rushed and unearned. It’s not to say that it’s bad by any means, it just felt as if SOMETHING that fit a more typical sci fi ending had to happen just for the sake of it, rather than the story logically leading there.The fact that this book was written in 1994 blew my mind, as many of the technologies mentioned seem like logical progressions of things that have only become common in the past 10 or so years, so the foresight alone is incredible. All in all this book is a must read for any hard science fiction fan. While not perfect, enough love and attention clearly went into it to add it to your collection

⭐If you like deep tech and philosophy, read this book. I was taking notes through the entire book. Greg put deep thought into how the technology introduced may shape society and the implications on individuals. Many hard questions are asked throughout. Some are answered, but many are left to the reader to contemplate. What is a life? Who are you? Why do you care? What is really? I was told Permutation City was good, and it surpassed my expectations.That being said, there are some sections that get very slow. Some explanations take multiple paragraphs (or even a full page or two), and some of the story lines can feel slow and unnecessary. Take notes of who is who, because it may be a while before you get back to the perspective of some key characters. I don’t think it’s so long as to warrant removing a star, but others may not enjoy such a detailed look into the minds and histories of some characters.

⭐I struggled to get into this book, which happens to me from time to time so I tend to keep on reading, rather than give up. I’m really glad I kept on with it because I love this book. Maybe I’m not smart enough to get everything they were trying to say, and while I really do like knowing the intentions or meanings an author wanted to convey, I believe what’s important is how it makes an impact on the reader.I honestly don’t know how to describe this book, it has so many layers and brought out so many emotions in me. It was a great story and a great adventure. Really glad my friend recommended this to me.

⭐I really don’t know why Greg Egan is not that famous. In fact, I have recently found a whole article in tor.com with the title: “Why Isn’t Greg Egan A Superstar?” I suspect this is because he focuses on making his stories so scientifically consistent that it becomes a bit difficult for a reader to understand without any background to the related scientific fields.However, myself being a research student in the field of brain-inspired artificial intelligence, this is definitely my favourite scifi book so far and I totally recommend it!It has evoked countless discussions with my friends about various philosophical issues and changed my views on many things.

⭐I found this to be more a philosophical investigation of virtual reality than a story that exposes concepts. Anyone who has already read many stories of virtual reality will find a number of familiar ideas here – not that it’s a copycat book, but you can only do so much with a given theme. What this book does is to explore the area in quite some detail. If you’re interested in the theme in its own right, you’re likely to enjoy this, but, as a philosophical investigation there are large gobs of narrator exposition, rather than telling a story. If you want a good story, this isn’t the book for you.

⭐One of the deepest sci-fis I’ve read. And it left me feeling like an enlightened idiot.This is hard sci-fi. Not the opposite of space opera, just f****** hard to read. Immensely rewarding if you have the patience. I tried to read it again a few years later and realised I didn’t hate myself enough. I keep it on hand, just in case.

⭐This was a thought-provoking book. For the most part I found the imagined future quite plausible, though there were elements towards the end I didn’t find that believable.Definitely one of those books where the ideas behind it stick with you and worth a read.

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