Permutation City

De: Greg Egan

Narrado por: Adam Epstein

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

Excellent Hard SciFi done right! AWFUL narration

Would you consider the audio edition of Permutation City to be better than the print version?

No, the narration was awful, about as bad as possible without causing me to stop listening or return the purchase to audible. His voice is nasal, and his style monotonous: A deadly combination. On top of this, his accents were awful

What other book might you compare Permutation City to and why?

Anything else by Greg Egan; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

What didn’t you like about Adam Epstein’s performance?

His voice is nasal, and his style monotonous: A deadly combination. On top of this, his accents were awful I don't recall listening to anything else by him, so maybe he just had a bad day.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Permutation City, the Movie: WTF, Hollywood Actually Made This?

Any additional comments?

Permutation City amounts to a compelling thought experiment on the nature of consciousness, self-identity, and the implications of artificial reality & existence. This is not SpaceOpera scifi; It's hard scifi and requires thinking about the ideas & concepts presented rather than passively enjoying a good story. One of my favorite books.

Felt like a story that couldn't decide

Felt like a story that couldn't decide what it wanted to be about. There are enough ideas here for several books but it felt like a Frankenstein conglomeration instead of one complete story. I also found the narrator really off putting. I know that criticism of the narrator is pretty vague but lots of reviewers express similar views so be warned.

good book, bad narrator

I don't like to be negative in reviews but the narrator appears to have a single way of intonating sentences, so that he always puts an accent/stress on the last word. This was terrible to listen to for the first few hours until I got used to it.

But the book is great, although it seems to me it has a weak ending.

Epic hallucinatory trip

Great story blending fiction, science and bizarre. The plot and writing is very much in the Philip K Dick style. The universes are being created, recreated and reimagined at the characters' wbim. The audiobook is read in the manner of Napoleon Dynamite, which initially was utterly annoying, however, on reflection the robotic narration suits the story line. Worth persevering to the end.

Weird narration, good book

Poorly done accents (Germans that sound Russian, Australian that sounds... just bad, an uncomfortable Caribbean/Italian combo for no reason at one point), some obvious mispronounced words. The performance distracts from the content.