Permutation City has a brilliant premise but I found sections of it mostly unreadable and I can't say I enjoyed it very much. Egan would have been better served presenting the content in an essay format.

Egan's more unforgiving stories are an acquired taste IMO. I started out with his short stories and found them enjoyable when there wasn't so much pretentious info-dumping and preaching. Permutation City felt like one of his harder to parse short stories stretched to the length of a novel.

Blindsight is on my Kobo right now, but after reading Permutation City I'm scared to start reading it because I don't want to reach halfway and want to chuck it like I did Permutation City.

On a more positive note, I just want to say that I liked how prescient the novel was in foretelling AWS.