Permutation City (1994) by Greg Egan

Book Review

Permutation City (1994)

by Greg Egan

   Diaspora, Australian author Greg Egan's mind-blowing 1997 novel about life, post-life, the universe and everything, really intrigued me when I read it last month.  Intrigued me enough so that I immediately turned around and checked out his 1994 novel, Permutation City, about the idea that at some point we will be able to scan ourselves "into the cloud" and live forever.  It's a concept that is at the heart of Diaspora, and Permutation City can be seen as a kind of prequel- how the world got from the present circa 1990 to his post-human world of the future in Diaspora. 

  Permutation City has its moments but I found it almost impossible to follow.  Egan labels the scanned people "copies" but much of the book involves scans who think they may be people and people who think they may be scans and the narrators include both the scans and the original people and different scans of the same people. Keeping track of it required the same level of effort I usually reserve for experimental literary fiction.  The whole book is built around the idea of a limited amount of computing power in the world that prevents the copies from running at the same speed as the real world. It's a concept that has aged poorly- an impossibly advanced virtual world whose creation obsesses the main characters basically sounds like Minecraft or Roblox.  In 2024, I play Minecraft on my phone and it certainly doesn't require a worlds worth of computing power to function.