Permutation City

By: Greg Egan

Narrated by: Adam Epstein

Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

The good news is that you have just awakened into Eternal Life. You are going to live forever. Immortality is a reality. A medical miracle? Not exactly.

The bad news is that you are a scrap of electronic code. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy.

The good news is that there is a way out. By law, every Copy has the option of terminating itself, and waking up to normal flesh-and-blood life again. The bail-out is on the utilities menu. You pull it down...The bad news is that it doesn't work. Someone has blocked the bail-out option. And you know who did it. You did. The other you. The real you. The one that wants to keep you here forever.

©2013 Greg Egan (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Math and physics collide to create a universe

Greg Egan's Permutation City is an early attempt to offer the potential for "uploading" oneself into a virtual world. With sufficient computing power, which is always limiting, scanning an individual, allows for their existence in this virtual world. The relative slowness of this existence limits its utility for all but the super-rich as well as the terminally ill. Against this backdrop, a plan, that appears initially as a scam, concerns creating a virtual world unencumbered by speed or limited by computing power. What begins as a demonstration of virtual reality as a mechanism for evolution offers the possibility of unlimited existence as well as universal collapse.

Egan plays off the simple computer game of life to add more computing power and complexity to offer a more realistic virtual world. Underlying this thesis is that math and physics are essentially equivalent such that any mathematically consistent universe construction that can exist will exist once created. As such, once complexity reaches a critical level, a self sustaining universe is possible. At the same time, Egan suggests that alternative viewpoints on the underlying structure of the universe can cause problems if those differing viewpoints are each mathematically consistent.

The narration is reasonable with a decent range of characters and gender distinction. Pacing is a bit on the slow side.

Narration is unbelievably poor!

I now realize I should have believed the other reviews. The narration is terrible, stopped listening after an hour, fast forwarded to later chapter, not any better. Returned the book and got a refund.

Curious story, abysmal narrator

Narrator is godawful. He used the exact same cadence for nearly every sentence, and once you notice it, it’s all you hear. Also, perhaps the worst Australian accent I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m sorry, this narrator should do some reflecting on his performance here. Perhaps take some notes.

Listen to Revelation Space or the culture novels instead. The narrators of those are just exquisite. Read this one in hard-copy.

Deep creation.

There was a lot of very deep construction of foundational physics but the structure was difficult for audio.

Horrible narration

Narration was so bad I couldn't continue. A pity, as the story seemed quite interesting

Moral dilemmas of digitalization

This exploration of digital consciousness is heavier on the philosophy than hard SF, although enough near-future exposition and tech is provided to support the premise: supercomputers allowing for digitization of living minds. Once that platform is established, Egan is free to play with all the high concept questions that result from a physics-free playground subject to will and desires. In the virtual environments that these uploaded consciousnesses inhabit, every sensation and perception can be modified to the individual’s tastes, as can those tastes and indeed- the individual’s own personality. The story’s drama comes, in part, from characters altering their very selves to accommodate circumstances. Additional moral questions come into play when system-generated additional personalities are introduced to provide community, and when intelligent life evolves from scratch in the VR and begin to seek their own origin. When these intelligences come into conflict with one another, or with the outside world, where the same computer resources are in demand for improving life for the billions of our reality, additional dilemmas ensue. All in all, the novel does a great job extending the trope and giving it the full examination it deserves, although it’s a bit weak on the characters or action.

Horrendous Narration Ruins Any Story

Narrator rendered it impossible to continue, returning. Story up to point of departure was very interesting.

narrator was distractingly bad

narrator's tone and delivery were mostly flat but inconsistent, with a noticable amount of mispronunciation, and extremely poor non-English accents.

i listened anyway because I enjoyed the story.

Terrible narrator.

Very interesting story spoiled by a narrator that sounds like a mix between an old generation computer voice simulator and Christopher Walken.

disturbingly monotonous voice-actor

This novel deserves better. I could scarcely bear a minute of it, despite the fact that this is one of my favourite books.