Permutation City (1994)
gregegan.net
gregegan.net
For folks who enjoyed the ideas in it I can heartily recommend qntm's short story Lena (https://qntm.org/lena), which explores some of the same ideas but with a hefty dollop of (implied, but all the more intense for it) psychological horror.
I haven't read Permutation City (on my list) but I really enjoyed Disaspora by the same author (Greg Egan). Similar themes from what I gather.
I'll add Schild's Ladder to the recommendations.
Also, I finally read qntm's Antimemetics division and, while it is a bit lacking in the end, it is one of the most "oh wow this is a crazy good idea" stories I've read in years.
https://www.amazon.com/Ra-qntm/dp/B096TRWRWX
Have this in my personal library as well as a (paperback) of Permutation City. I think it's awesome they're published online but there's something special about having it in print too.
Antimemetics, being SCP-related, comes with a hefty dollop of magical realism.
Ra, to me, felt like a rocket ride as new ideas, twists, and exponentially escalating stakes get thrown at you. The pacing is very jerky, and I can very much understand if people just nope halfway through.
In particular, the characters... suck (my apologies, Sam)
In some ways, it’s even less fantastical than antimemetics, think magic as a sub-branch of advanced physics and in no way mystical.
In "I don't know Timmy" there's a sequence that goes:
"Well, we can't exactly turn it off."
"Why not?" asked Tim, halfway to the door, then stopped mid-stride and stood still, realising.
"Oh."
But you can turn it off without consequence and Permutation City explores the disturbing implications of why thoroughly (with a deus ex machina ending to save causal physics, as expected of an Egan story, physics is what has plot armor).
Absolutely! Very few books have also basically changed my philosophical outlook on something as much as this has (I had the seeds of the idea before the book, but the book really cemented specific concepts around computation and thought/consciousness/identity even mean).
Another book that is fairly different, but has had a big impact on some of my views of things, is the Three Body Problem trilogy (specifically the second and third book).
Can you turn it off? The entire universe is 100% deterministic and the "stack" of universes in question is based on the same seed data. So if you decide to turn the n+1 simulation off, the same decision will be made in the n-1 universe. The simulation isn't running on some self-replicating automaton like in Permutation City. Of course the universe being 100% deterministic also poses the question if you can "decide" to do anything, since all decisions are already made.
qntm is becoming one of my favorite authors as well.
Anyway, I was going to say... I've always thought that folks who enjoyed Permutation City might also enjoy Glasshouse[1] by Charles Stross[2]. The two novels aren't necessarily overtly similar, but I feel like there's a sort of abstract conceptual kinship there.
Do you think Glasshouse is a good place to start with his writing and is representative of his style? I loved Permutation City, one of my favorite books.
(I would've asked cstross himself but that would seem too awkward!)
"Ra" by qntm: https://qntm.org/ra
Well... to me, I'd almost divide Stross' works into two tranches: the "The Laundry Files" books, and everything else. In that regard, I think Glasshouse is fairly representative of the "everything else" tranche. But even then, there's a fair amount of variance in his works. I wouldn't, for example, necessarily compare Halting State and Glasshouse, or Rule 34 and Singularity Sky. I guess that's a way of saying that while Stross has his favored themes and topics, he's far from formulaic and I don't feel like you can pigeon-hole his "style" too narrowly.
That said, I haven't read every other work Stross has written, but I've read a pretty good chunk of them. And almost all of the "The Laundry Files" novels. Me personally, I recommend pretty much all of it. :-)
EDIT: Just realized that there's really a 3rd major tranche of works in Stross' ouvre: the "The Merchant Princes" books. I forgot about those, as I haven't actually read any of them (shame, shame, I know...). All of what I've read of Stross to date is from the "The Laundry Files" series or the "everything else" batch, minus "The Merchant Princes".
mild spoiler
At some point there's a bloody Project Orion-type spaceship taking off the Earth's surface.
It's a really great set of stories, nine in total now, and unlike The Laundry Files, a finalised / completed story arc. They evolve quite radically, from an initial portal fantasy (reporter finds herself in an apparently medieval parallel world), via trans-dimensional techno-thriller, multi-timeline developmental economics, to high-concept space war. Highly recommended.
And the Laundry Files has to be the only series I've read where vampires use agile / scrum techniques to source their blood supplies, and where an Elven combined-arms battlegroup make the Waffen-SS look like soft jessies.
Incidentally, the Laundry Files has its own separate spin-off; the New Management series. Also good fun.
A series that explores similar ideas (although to a much smaller degree) of uploading, artificial life, and transfumanism, I've been enjoying lately is Pantheon. I just wanted to mention it here since I think you guys will enjoy it.
> Reads like a “consciousness and computers are cool” story written by an engineer. A few incredible ideas padded by weak storytelling and philosophical exposition. Probably would’ve been better as a short story.
[0] https://taylor.town/books#permutation-city
If you like this book, I recommend Accelerando, Piranesi, Dick's Ubik, and Ted Chiang's collections.
EDIT: Ooh, that collection includes Disneyland with the Death Penalty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...
Wow, that's spicy.
Will def check those out though.
Although less prescient, Seveneves was a better read than Cryptonomicon.
Actually, if you said the first 2/3 of Seveneves was a better read than Cryptonomicon, then maybe..
To anyone reading this - I'm not saying don't read it - it's a beloved book! I'm just saying, if you read it and don't enjoy it, keep in mind that you might be like me and enjoy his other stuff more.
This book feels more like the deep exploration of a cool idea, which is why I'm recommending it in this context :)
Hard to believe that it was written in 2005 given the one scene where the main character is walking around generating multiple interlocking crypto contracts to store money for his daughter.
There's a line in there that feels like it could pop up in a permutation city sequel:
> ... running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of spacetime itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath...
Does that idea come up anywhere else in your work? If so, I'd go read it.
I should add: every time I hear the phrase "state vector" I think of Accelerando.
This is the novel that introduces the idea that a simulation universe need not have another universe simulating it. Hell, it's the only novel that has that idea. There is more insight here than we could extract from a thousand other authors, philosophers, and thinkers. But who cares, the characters were sort of cardboard and he has the whole r/menwritingwomen thing going on.
Weirdly, I happened to be reading all 3 of these around the same time, not initially realizing they were connected.
Chew on it for awhile. It's worth it. The explanation provided was sparse, but sufficient to justify.
Durham's "dust theory" is basically that every possible universe is simulated an infinite number of times across space and time within our universe as Boltzmann brains (he doesn't call them this but his idea of random bits of dust randomly computing things is equivalent), so actually running a simulation containing mind uploads on a computer ourselves is unnecessary to allow consciousness to exist within the simulation.
Durham describes the theory with a few more steps, like his idea of "launching" which I can't help but think Maria is correct in calling unnecessary. I think the story is trying to communicate that Durham's theory is subtly wrong or incomplete, especially when the surprising event happens at the end. I think the explanation for the surprising event at the end is (heavier spoilers ahead!) that there's a mix of Boltzmann brains running two different versions of Permutation City (one where Permutation City and the A-life universe are artificial simulations with arbitrary complicated physics and starting states exactly as we saw them be designed within the story, and one where the A-life universe is natural with a simple unified underlying physics and starting state and Permutation City is an artificial simulation/construct within it with a complicated starting state) which have been running in parallel and producing equivalent conscious experience, but by the end of the story, the latter version of Permutation City is simpler and therefore simulated in proportionally more Boltzmann brains than the first version. The latter version exists more, so when the conscious experiences of these two versions of Permutation City finally diverge, the story follows the latter version.
(I'm pretty confident in this reading of it. The story makes a regular point in talking about the complexity of the artificial simulations containing mind uploads and how much they're unlike the simple unified physics of our world. The point is brought up in a way as if the author or characters expect it to have significance; the surprising event at the end of the story is this point's significance finally being seen.)
Also, some people actually like well-written characters. I know it sounds strange.
Thanks for the recommendations. I read and liked most of the books in your list, so I'll likely also appreciate the ones I haven't.
EDIT: I would also recommend Watts' Blindsight.
It's ok. You fascinate them too.
Absolutely. Not to mention the use of proof of work, just 2 years after the idea was actually proposed. Very ahead of its time.
Egan’s prose, characterisation and plotting are often weak, but almost every page has a new creative concept.
I agree with all of that. I was thinking recently about how Egan compares to Neal Stephenson after some discussion of his (NS) fiction here a few days ago [1]. They both (imo) are weak at characterisation etc. - but to me Egan's work is among some of the best sf I've ever read [1], wheras I find reading Stephenson an ordeal. I think that's down to the depth of the ideas that Egan explores, but I'd be interested in what others think of how he compares to other authors.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39287616
[2] Permutation City. Diaspora, short works in collections like Luninous, etc.
Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman, about what it's like to be colonized.
Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMullen, about what it's like to be part of a computer.
Wang's Carpets which became Diaspora is mind blowing.
Zendegi is an interesting novel by him I never see anyone mention. I enjoyed it and the characters are a bit more developed. It also has a Eliezer Yudkowsky stand in as the big bad guy i seem to recall. Which made me chuckle.
I sort of agree, but personally I like the rawness of it. For a similarly unrefined yet intellectually stimulating writing, check out Gregory Benford who used to be a professor of physics.
It’s set in the “near future” so probably 2020 since it was published in 1998 and does a good job, I think, of talking about things that are happening now- third world empowerment, body augmentation, transgenders, precision pharmacy, biohacking.
And some things we don’t have yet- artificial island nations, self-autists, custom engineered plagues.
I like it because it’s one of those books that stuck with me for describing tech that “we should and one day will have” in that Egan described a “pharm” that compounds medication on the fly to precisely medicate us. For example, it will give you stimulants with your vitamix but have to counter it the next day based on how your body performs. I can’t wait for that and hate having to wait days to adjust meds. I feel similarly about Stephenson’s metaverse description and young lady’s illustrated primer, and nanodrones, and cryptocurrency. And Doctorow’s “comm” device that he described a few years before the iPhone.
I have a few other books of his, some seem sci-fi, some seem fantasy, but haven't read them yet.
Seems he's not been idle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Williams_(author)
Two stories in that collection from before the modern social internet (1992), with non-internet somewhat fantastic premises, nonetheless often come to mind when observing modern online self-presentational & affiliational dynamics:
• 'The Hundred Light-Year Diary' - a method of receiving tiny (tweet-like!) messages from the future – eventually rationed out to all people! – examines questions of free-will & (self-)deception, at many levels
• 'Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies' - how much of what you believe/aver is imposed by your neighborhood?
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Greg-Egan-Stories-Science/dp/194...
He have also a lot of mindblowing short stories. The collection I've read by him was Axiomatic, that had many great ones.
The same captivating exploration of interesting ideas is omnipresent throughout his work, and that's always been why I keep coming back. I think it's important to go into his stories with an open mind towards what literature is allowed to be - namely that it can focus on things other than narrative or characterization without being a detriment to itself. A steak does not need to be as sweet as a cake in order to satisfy a diner, after all. And that's not to say that he avoids interesting narration or character development entirely, but there are definitely stories of his where he's clearly focusing on other aspects, and the choice to do that feels intentional and appropriate to me.
Dichronauts (2 spacial and 2 time-like dimensions instead of our 3 and 1) and the Orthogonal trilogy (Riemannian spacetime instead of our "Lorentzian") come to mind. I just really like the care he puts into constructing these universes, from how planets form (the worlds in Dichronauts are infinite hyperboloids instead of spheres), to how scientific discovery progresses (as a result of the physics in Orthogonal, light of different frequencies travel at different speeds and visually separate as a common matter of course, which leads to a much earlier understanding of relativity by a fairly primitive civilization). It feels like he's building universes from first principles and taking care to consider every little consequence and detail, which leads to a lot of "Ohhhhh" moments when you encounter something counter-intuitive but then realize it directly follows as a consequence of the initial physics tweak.
This made me think that sometimes our physical brains speed up and can run at 2x but still only get I/o at 1x. It will be neat that I think at some point we’ll be able to boost up to like 1000x with implants or whatnot and think about something that doesn’t require any new information and then return to the present with insight to continue the conversation.
I hope this is affordable because it will be so handy for many things. If even to just spend more time staring at the Mona Lisa and contemplating.
It also makes me wonder how people age in fiction where people can freeze time. If someone freeze time for a year, does their body keep aging biologically?
I liked Permutation City, but Diaspora really blew me away. Every time you begin to get your mind around some radical new concept, Egan throws adds another fold that makes you reconsider everything you think you knew.
In Diaspora if someone steals your private cert then they become you or are at least indistinguishable to everyone else from you. I’ve never seen a super solid way to prevent this when everyone and everything is digital.
Do you have to memorise a GUID? What if you forget it? What is someone else knows yours? If there's no physical link, how is it provable?
Memorizing a GUID wouldn’t work because someone could read it from your memory.
Stephenson did this well, I think, in Dodge with the PURDAH as it was an AI trained on every characteristic of an individual through their life so it was impossible to fake. Still hand waving, but logically consistent hand waving for an id that spans consciousness transferring from biology to digital.
Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good.
Thanks!
Ubik by Philip K Dick
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Recursion by Blake Crouch
Highly recommended
It explores a similar premise of a post-singularity future (though the mechanism is superintelligence rather than cellular automata/mind uploading), but rather than imagining exactly how we‘d get there, it tries to imagine what human flourishing would look like in a world of perfect abundance!
I’m very far from a prude, but JFC. Its clearly the authors vehicle to play out his fantasies, masquerading as a scientific-fi novel.
To me, this was not unnecessary, but quite fundamental to the story. Everyone was trapped by the AI who would not let anyone come to harm without their permission anyway, and nobody could die. Various people tried to push back against these constraints in creative but disturbing ways.
But nothing at all was served by us reading about how deftly the main characters 13 year old daughter blew him until he was hard enough to ride. Or the main characters musings about their two (very underage) children having sex and how he was totally ok with it. Or the long section about the wife urging him to impregnate his daughter. Or the other dozen weird-ass things in that chapter.
There’s several more examples like this in the book.
The author is not exactly the first to explore potential consequences of effective immortality, but they are one of the few who was seemingly unable to do it without repeatedly getting to multi-page, graphic, and violent, sex scenes.
Like, if one feels the need for that kind of thing, William S Burroughs and Tom Wolfe already beat that one to death decades ago.
As another example more relevant to this crowd, Altered Carbon covered the exact same subject matter, and did so without needing to write smut for teenage boys.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed it as something very different to the usual sci fi fare.
I also liked Altered Carbon, although I found it read more like a hyper violent blockbuster action movie than a novel. Other than they both use ressurection as a plot device, they are very different stories. The violence in it I actually find more gratuitous than in Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
I enjoyed Prime Intellect, but I enjoyed it like a mindless action film or a trashy beach book, and I’d never actually recommend it to anyone.
You could consider „Diaspora“ by the same author a good sequel a couple of thousands of years into the future where humanity is but a faint memory called „dream apes“ as living fossils in this story.
Thanks!
Dream apes are the descendants of an extreme primitivist subculture, the "statics" the protagonists visit at the beginning are baseline humans.
So Egan's stories are basically a mathy whodunit -- start from first (fictional) principles and eventually solve some universe-scale question or crisis. His characters are basically walking textbooks meant for info dumping / FAQing the derivations.
In that light, some similar stories I've found are...
- Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward)
- Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Liu Cixin, 3 body problem author)
- The Andromeda Strain (Crichton, more medsci than math)
- Schilds Ladder, Diaspora (other Egan stuff)
I've also tried some of the more common hard scifi recommendations like Reynolds and Stephenson, but I personally don't enjoy the dialogue / scenes meant for character development. I guess it's because the stories usually take a human-scale perspective instead of taking a what-if to its reality-bending extreme like Egan does.
In all seriousness, I thought I had seen it in a list of "top hard sci-fi books" awhile back and a quick Kagi search seems to imply that a lot of people seem consider it hard sci-fi for whatever reason.
Maybe this means there's still a chance for me.
Regardless Blindsight is a good book and definitely has interesting concepts and good writing throughout.
I really like hard SF and will never again read by this author.
> Standard internet Watts warning that the Rift novels have random sexual torture just in case you prefer to avoid that
in thread next to this one is not really surprising me
Also, not really sure is Blindsight actually hard SF. It seems to be soft one at most with a lot getting close to magic with SF styling.
Was the ending actually bad? like badly written or bad for the characters? Personally I thought the ending was good. It felt inevitable and also positive. Humanity got to keep living and the main character reached some type of personal growth.
Anyway heres the section from the notes and references that you must not have read about the "creatures capable of movement - not noticeable by the human brain"
For example, the invisibility trick of that young, dumb scrambler— the one who restricted its movement to the gaps in Human vision— occured to me while reading about something called inattentional blindness. A Russian guy called Yarbus was the first to figure out the whole saccadal glitch in Human vision, back in the nineteen sixties15. Since then, a variety of researchers have made objects pop in and out of the visual field unnoticed, conducted conversations with hapless subjects who never realised that their conversational partner had changed halfway through the interview, and generally proven that the Human brain just fails to notice an awful lot of what's going on around it16, 17, 18. Check out the demos at the website of the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois19 and you'll see what I mean. This really is rather mind-blowing, people. There could be Scientologists walking among us right now and if they moved just right, we'd never even see them.
In my non-scientific assessment, it's better than GoodReads.
The first season of the show was good but very different than the book.
Book takashi was an envoy super spy person with immense training that stuck with him through sleeves. Tv takashi is like a rebel/terrorist who just got some training and has personality.
In the book, it was fruitless to fight against the government because what’s the point? The tv show seems to want to make a more simple rebels vs big brother.
Still cool, but I think changed the flavor quite a bit.
Second season, of course, is rubbish and I wouldn’t recommend watching it to anyone. It’s suspiciously horrible given how good the first was.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/169549-the-personal-as-ever...
1. Accelerando by Charles Stross - for THE Scope.
2. Quantum Thief by Hanny Rajaniemi - for the similarly high entry threshold and rewarding experience when you cross it.
3. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds - for a fascinating vision of future human societies.
I'd be happy to find more books like these.
I enjoyed quantum thief but somehow I have yet to go beyond the first book.
- “The Fall Revolution” tetralogy by Ken MacLeod: “The Star Fraction”, “The Stone Canal”, “The Cassini Division”, and “The Sky Road”
- “Void Star” by Zachary Mason
- “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross
- “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts
- “Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” by Jacek Dukaj
- “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge
- “The Golden Oecumene” trilogy by John C. Wright: “The Golden Age”, “The Phoenix Exultant”, and “The Golden Transcendence”
- “Gnomon” by Nick Harkaway
- the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks
Sol Quy with monthly short stories: https://solquy.substack.com/p/111123-the-gunslinger
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time” series is fantastic.
Vernor Vinge can be a bit variable, but I would start with “A Fire Upon the Deep”
https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581
>A linguist, a chemist, and a comparative psychologist explore the ruins of a dead superintelligence.
I know it is a hassle to process anything finance-related, but in my region on amazon the book is unavailable and a hard copy isn't an option for me.
It is virtually impossible for me to give money to the author for an e-reader version of the book.
I don’t really have a preference for audiobook performers so hate having to buy ebook and audiobook. So I’m happy just feeding a text file into a reader and listening that way.
And I’ve also played around with speechify and natural reader, but am kind of stuck because most of the public domain I want to read already have librevox or some recording available. And I can’t feed properly purchased books without a hassle.
then went digging and found this other link by the same author: http://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/Superpermutations/Superpermu...
I tried to find the citation online, but I found that Richard Stallman does not have a favorite book (https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html); anyway, it is a good book with good ideas to think about.
Same here, I love his short stories!
IMO short form works better for him because there's so much to think about, even after having finished reading a story.
If someone needs a pointer on where to start I can recommend this thread: https://redlib.freedit.eu/r/printSF/comments/x1i4bj/greg_ega...
I especially enjoyed:
- The Safe-Deposit Box
- Into DarknessIf you enjoy it, too, might I recommend Fool's War by Sarah Zettel. It's more of a Space Opera, but some similar themes to Permutation City pop up in it...
Probably my favourite book of all time. I'm almost due a reread.
Best book I ever read. I guess.
Also the different time scale awareness concept.
Such great ideas!