Reviews

This was a cool concept, but I didn't love the execution. Too many threads that weren't connected well, and that I felt little to no connection to myself.

capnmorgan's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

spitzig's review against another edition

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This has some interesting programming/reality SF ideas. But, I think this book was too heavy for me to properly read as an audiobook.

ldasoqi's review against another edition

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challenging informative mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

I'll say this right at the top, it is perfectly normal to read this book and understand next to nothing about it. There's some science fiction that seems to exist just to hit you with serious brain busters. Like sure there's a story, a premise and characters-all that stuff, but really that's just there to get the point across. Because you're reading a mathematical proof, it's just disguised as a narrative, and it's making some assumptions instead of showing the work. Blindsight was like this, Anathem was like this (but what was the point of this book again?), and Permutation City just might be the best of the bunch.

I normally keep these reviews relatively spoiler free, but it's tough to do that for a book like this. In my review of Anathem I called that book an idea salad, Permutation City is also an idea salad. The plot is tied up around the questions that the book is asking, the developments of the plot are how the book explores the general subject. I think I can give the premise up without spoiling much because I don't think I can get anywhere without outlining what this book is about, but you know, reader be warned.

This book is about the far future Earth of 2050, ravaged by climate change and apparently sporting a nifty one world government. Egan envisions a global network of linked supercomputers providing on demand computing through something called the QIPS exchange (Dude that's cloud computing, in 1994! I love how this idea went from novel to commonplace in my lifetime). This future earth has enough computing horsepower and future tech to make "copies", scans of the human mind, with molecular fidelity. These copies can then be run as programs, the human mind operating on bare silicon living inside lossy virtual environments. This story explores all the implications and complications and *cough* Permutations that arise out of this new tech.

This was written in 1994, it's a contemporary of Ghost in the Shell (1995), ReBoot (1994), and The Matrix (1999, but written in 1994). They all deal in the same techno-spiritual-cyberpunk themes, but where those ideas are expressed at their simplest on the screen, Permutation City evolves the speculation relative to Moore's Law. In a way it's mirroring the genesis of the genre, from Tron (1982), Cyberpunk (1983), and Neuromancer (1984), Permutation city conceptualizes the virtual world but takes it past its those roots, past its implications on human nature, and directly questions the fabric of our reality.

That's the strength of Permutation City, this book takes the speculation farther and further than any other Hard SF I've read. Anathem was thoughtful, but ultimately I felt the point was buried; and Blindsight was a much stronger narrative, but that necessarily limited some of the conceptual exploration. In PC the concepts and delivery are rock solid, Egan the mathematician is right there piecing the logical progression together bit by bit until bam, you're suddenly reading about an imaginary simulation that exists as self-assembling infinite hardware. This is a book that gives you as much as you care to take, you can spend hours diving deeper into the ideas, the theories, the real life science that lends big time credence to the speculation.

As soon as I put this book down, it felt like a 3 or a 4 to me. I wouldn't call this the easiest read, it comes on a lot like Anathem in that it throws you right into a world that you don't fully understand. This book is also highly technical, and unless you deal in cybersecurity or theoretical physics, this is going to send you down a Google rabbit hole. Around the halfway point, I had to put this down and read about 40 Wikipedia entries myself. Does this book go on tangents? Yes. Does this book have entire chapters that deviate from the core plot? Yes. But, each time I sat to do this review, I just kept finding more and more elements to comment on, ideas I didn't fully understand that I just had to explore. Unlike Anathem where the constant flood of ideas choked an already austere and monastic story, the philosophical diversions in PC have that cutting-edge charge that accompanies the cyberpunk genre. Obviously, this is subjective, but I didn't feel anywhere near as bored reading this as I did with Anathem.

Like a fine wine opened to breathe, the best part of reading this book is just how much there is to think about afterward. I fully recommend this to anyone who likes to get lost in big ideas, and this is totally the kind of book I'd love to talk about for hours.

4.5/5, it can't be perfect because it is a chore to read. It's going to wind up on my bookshelf.

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