Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Millennium (London, 1994). 1st edition, 1st printing. 304 pages.
Description
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?… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member JanetinLondon
I haven’t read many books like this before, so I don’t really know what to say about it, but I’ll try. It’s a book where the ideas are more important than the story, and, while this can be mind expanding, it’s also ultimately very frustrating, because, for me, good fiction is about human
Imagine what would happen if our whole personality could be “scanned in” to a computer and encoded as a piece of software, to the point where it could actually make decisions about how to interact with its virtual world. Think avatar, but to the nth degree. In this near future, that is possible, but requires such immense computing power that, as yet, only a handful of dying super billionaires have done it, and they “live on”, enjoying any virtual worlds they like, and still controlling their vast wealth, to ensure they continue to be able to afford this forever. Of course, the future is never certain – will there be a political backlash? Will computer time become too expensive? Will the earth be destroyed, or abandoned? One of the protagonists devises a scheme that will create a virtual world with molecules that can mutate, hoping that eventually (as in, billions of years) this will develop to the point that natural selection starts to work, evolving a “world” independent of any computer (the science got way beyond me at this point, I’m afraid). As well, people can create copies of their software to live in different virtual worlds, as a sort of insurance. There’s a lot of this sort of thing, including what would happen if you lost your wealth – would you just get less and less computer time? – could you “hide” your software code in the cracks, sort of like those annoying ads that pop up if your browser is slow in getting to its destination, in effect becoming an unseen “squatter”, and so on. All very imaginative stuff, which I did find fascinating to think about even though I had to skip over quite a bit of it.
The problem comes when the author tries to build in human/moral/emotional stories. One character was an unexposed killer in “real” life – can he escape his guilt? Is it even “his” anymore? Another is desperately trying to raise money to allow her dying mother to be scanned, which the mother is resisting – what are the emotions involved? What will “people” actually do with all that time? What do “self” and “identity” mean if you can’t be sure whether you are the original or a copy? And how could you tell? All these interesting questions are introduced, via potentially interesting characters, but none are fully developed or resolved. I found that very frustrating, and it knocked down what could have been a great read to just okay for me. If I want to read about the potential for AI I can read a science book, but a novel needs to do something different.
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issues (or human substitutes – animals, aliens, whatever). I think those get very lost here, principally because the author doesn’t actually care about them.Imagine what would happen if our whole personality could be “scanned in” to a computer and encoded as a piece of software, to the point where it could actually make decisions about how to interact with its virtual world. Think avatar, but to the nth degree. In this near future, that is possible, but requires such immense computing power that, as yet, only a handful of dying super billionaires have done it, and they “live on”, enjoying any virtual worlds they like, and still controlling their vast wealth, to ensure they continue to be able to afford this forever. Of course, the future is never certain – will there be a political backlash? Will computer time become too expensive? Will the earth be destroyed, or abandoned? One of the protagonists devises a scheme that will create a virtual world with molecules that can mutate, hoping that eventually (as in, billions of years) this will develop to the point that natural selection starts to work, evolving a “world” independent of any computer (the science got way beyond me at this point, I’m afraid). As well, people can create copies of their software to live in different virtual worlds, as a sort of insurance. There’s a lot of this sort of thing, including what would happen if you lost your wealth – would you just get less and less computer time? – could you “hide” your software code in the cracks, sort of like those annoying ads that pop up if your browser is slow in getting to its destination, in effect becoming an unseen “squatter”, and so on. All very imaginative stuff, which I did find fascinating to think about even though I had to skip over quite a bit of it.
The problem comes when the author tries to build in human/moral/emotional stories. One character was an unexposed killer in “real” life – can he escape his guilt? Is it even “his” anymore? Another is desperately trying to raise money to allow her dying mother to be scanned, which the mother is resisting – what are the emotions involved? What will “people” actually do with all that time? What do “self” and “identity” mean if you can’t be sure whether you are the original or a copy? And how could you tell? All these interesting questions are introduced, via potentially interesting characters, but none are fully developed or resolved. I found that very frustrating, and it knocked down what could have been a great read to just okay for me. If I want to read about the potential for AI I can read a science book, but a novel needs to do something different.
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LibraryThing member Lyndatrue
It isn't as if there were no other reviews, and normally, I don't review anything that has a bunch of reviews already. I'm just poleaxed by the book, and the ending. I almost started reading it again, but stopped after the first few pages. Life is short, and there are other books. I'll still return
It's excellent, and believable.
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to this, sometime down the road, just for the pleasure of reading it, all over again.It's excellent, and believable.
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LibraryThing member macha
whew. it's a lot easier now, to extrapolate the world this book invents and then extend it outward as it develops, than it was in 1994 when Egan wrote it, so it's quite a feat. very exciting for its futurist ideas, but it's all hard science, not so much of a novel involving like characters, events,
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and stuff. still, a great read on its own terms and a total sf classic. Show Less
LibraryThing member fpagan
An important fictional exploration of mind uploading; I should have read it long before 2007. Complicated, and a whale of a tale.
LibraryThing member mentatjack
I read this when it was released in 1995 and still have my copy. It unerringly makes my list of top 10 speculative fiction works.
At this far of a remove, I don't remember the details beyond modeling a slightly simpler universe inside of a computer, but It opened up a new world of science fiction
At this far of a remove, I don't remember the details beyond modeling a slightly simpler universe inside of a computer, but It opened up a new world of science fiction
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for me. This was one of the first science fiction books that I read the year it was published, and thus the first without the "past looking forward through a present not my own" feeling that Asimov and Heinlein and many others gave me. Show Less
LibraryThing member ohernaes
Mind-boggling novel about personal identity and artificial life and evolution. Complex and difficult to follow at times, but recommended nonetheless.
LibraryThing member Cheryl_in_CC_NV
I didn't particularly care for the book - too much complexity in the plot and too little understanding of characters and motivations.
LibraryThing member antao
(Read originally in 1994).
I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me"...
">Learning to be me
With this starts off one of the most astonishing short stories I've ever read. If you haven't read it, I urge you to do so. Egan
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questions what it really means to be human in a way that it's quite unsurpassed in my mind.I've just finished "Permutation City", and the feeling I got from reading it now is the same I got in 1994 when read it for the first time.
Is it possible to write a book exploring the dichotomy between a computer simulation of a person and a "real" person? More specifically, is it possible to focus on exploring one possible model of consciousness and reality? (YES, It's possible!!!)
The Dust Theory upon which the book works is based on Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH). The assertion states that our external physical reality is a mathematical structure. Without going into much detail, the following article is great to start grasping the concepts that underpin the book:
MUH
Without the proper conceptual framework, I admit it's difficult to get into the book. But as one understands the questions lurking behind it, it's one hell of a ride.
Other Computer Science concepts needed to deeply appreciate the book:
1 - The assumption that human consciousness is Turing computable, ie, all aspects of genuine consciousness can be produced by a computer program. Egan tries successfully to deconstruct not only some standard notions of self, memory, and mortality, but also of physical reality;
2 - Cellular automata. In this book VR assumes the form of The Autoverse, which is basically a deterministic chemistry set, internally consistent and vaguely resembling real chemistry;
3 - VR making extensive use of heuristics to simulate completely immersion and convincing physical environments, but at a maximum of seventeen times slower than "real" time.
The three ideas above are at the core of the book. Not even William Gibson nor Neal Stephenson explore these concepts the way Egan does. His ideas are way, way bigger than Gibson's or Stephenson's. He's thinking way bigger. He's asking questions that start in the real world and run right past the border to metaphysics and philosophy using Computer Science constructs. I look back and wonder if there was ever a line at all.
Despite the fact that it makes some demands on the reader, namely Computer Science Literacy, the book feels absolutely real.
Greg Egan is really one of a kind. He deserves a wider readership, not being pinned down to SF.
Computer Science apart, his work is so pure that it resonates. I'm going to reread all of his work. I'm in for a ride.
"
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LibraryThing member jakecasella
This book is a blast. Classic Egan: huge, complex, and ultimately--well, plausible, if plausible is when you can't really refute it.
It's almost completely irrelevant to the main plot of the book, but the extent to which Egan was able to guess at the general shape of the early-21st century internet
Like a few other of his books, I find myself having to squint sideways a bit and do some handwaving for a few of his ideas--observer-effect kind of quantum woo. In this case, it's the idea that internally self-consistent narratives are basically self-sustaining, "computing" themselves across any arrangement of matter, anywhere in space-time, that matches up.
Even setting that giant idea aside, there's tons going on here. Egan blows Conway's Game of Life up to a really interesting "artificial life" that is a constant counterpoint to merely "virtual" reality; and he starts delving into what post-humanity could really look like in a virtual world. That's even before he starts getting into a kind of epistemologically warring Platonic-forms plot played out on virtual Von Neumann/Turing machines.
Characters here are...odd, a bit disjointed, solipsistic, really. Of the four major point-of-view streams (Dunham, Maria, Peer, Riemann), only Dunham & Maria have any overlap. Riemann's self-imposed hell is an odd narrative choice in such a relatively short novel that's already trying to cram a lot in, and something to ponder. Peer's is the only timeline that feels like much of a genuine arc, as he genuinely embraces the possibilities of his situation.
The gutsy way that Egan spins really abstract concepts into concrete plot twists is a delight. Qua novel, this book is weak in a lot of ways, but it has stuck with me in a strangely affecting way. Recommended.
It's almost completely irrelevant to the main plot of the book, but the extent to which Egan was able to guess at the general shape of the early-21st century internet
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& related economy is quietly awe-inspiring.Like a few other of his books, I find myself having to squint sideways a bit and do some handwaving for a few of his ideas--observer-effect kind of quantum woo. In this case, it's the idea that internally self-consistent narratives are basically self-sustaining, "computing" themselves across any arrangement of matter, anywhere in space-time, that matches up.
Even setting that giant idea aside, there's tons going on here. Egan blows Conway's Game of Life up to a really interesting "artificial life" that is a constant counterpoint to merely "virtual" reality; and he starts delving into what post-humanity could really look like in a virtual world. That's even before he starts getting into a kind of epistemologically warring Platonic-forms plot played out on virtual Von Neumann/Turing machines.
Characters here are...odd, a bit disjointed, solipsistic, really. Of the four major point-of-view streams (Dunham, Maria, Peer, Riemann), only Dunham & Maria have any overlap. Riemann's self-imposed hell is an odd narrative choice in such a relatively short novel that's already trying to cram a lot in, and something to ponder. Peer's is the only timeline that feels like much of a genuine arc, as he genuinely embraces the possibilities of his situation.
The gutsy way that Egan spins really abstract concepts into concrete plot twists is a delight. Qua novel, this book is weak in a lot of ways, but it has stuck with me in a strangely affecting way. Recommended.
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LibraryThing member slplst
The whole thing strikes me as preposterous—wish I could call a contingent of analytic philosophers to rip apart the "dust theory," which, to my mind, is an evasion of the real problems one might encounter in considering what makes a "system" sentient. Egan seems to be trying to reconcile
A kind of tiresome self-assuredness runs through the book as well, the confidence of a devotee of the natural sciences who throws a sundry assortment of analogies to cellular automata theory, differential geometry and relativity into a hat and with a wave of the hand claims to have said something interesting about "consciousness."
As a novel: the prose is rather tedious—neither the characters nor the scene really seem to come to life—and the plot strikes me as flimsy.
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structure and subjectivity (whatever that is) by suggesting that the former, once specified, will simply pop into existence complete with its own inner states by hijacking some material substratum: a programmer's idea of metempsychosis? A kind of tiresome self-assuredness runs through the book as well, the confidence of a devotee of the natural sciences who throws a sundry assortment of analogies to cellular automata theory, differential geometry and relativity into a hat and with a wave of the hand claims to have said something interesting about "consciousness."
As a novel: the prose is rather tedious—neither the characters nor the scene really seem to come to life—and the plot strikes me as flimsy.
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Awards
John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (Winner — 1995)
Philip K. Dick Award (Nominee — 1995)
British Science Fiction Association Award (Shortlist — Novel — 1994)
Gigamesh Award (1999)
Ditmar Award (Winner — 1995)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1994
Physical description
304 p.; 8.3 inches
ISBN
185798174X / 9781857981742