Greg Egan's Permutation City
Permutation city is a science-fiction novel by Greg Egan. It was released in 1995 and in the same year won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The book showed me a story I have never seen in the genre before. At first glance plot looks typical: human race creates technology that lets them move their conciousness into a computer program, which makes their "copies" - as they call them - immortal. Yet, inventor of the computer, Paul Durham, wants the copies to have something fun to do during billions of years they have ahead, so with help of Maria Deluca he creates an artificial inteligence race of evolvable aliens from scratch.
The plot, unfortunately for me, wasn't the most important part of the novel. To understand it from A to Z, one needs to go deeper and discover complexities of the Dust Theory - which, for me, was too much to digest …show more content…
I applaud Egan's knowledge and imagination. In his book he shows, in a plausible way, what could happen if human race was to start "living" in a computer program AND creates a race of human-made AI aliens! Unfortunately though, author's writing didn't speak to me, action was stagnant and in the end it took me three months to get through Permutation city. This created a dilemma for me - a genius idea connected with almost no pace and dark and heavy atmosphere. I do not actually mind the technical details, they make the story more credible (that is why I chose a hard science fiction book in the first place), though it required a lot of time with dictionary and Wikipedia research to read and at least try to understand basic physical and computer science foundation. What is needed is also ability of abstract thinking, which is quite obvious, when we are given such an amount of mathematic knowledge. Still, I believe a book like this, that seems like it is created for a certain group of people, can be written in a more approachable and "friendly"
The plot, unfortunately for me, wasn't the most important part of the novel. To understand it from A to Z, one needs to go deeper and discover complexities of the Dust Theory - which, for me, was too much to digest …show more content…
I applaud Egan's knowledge and imagination. In his book he shows, in a plausible way, what could happen if human race was to start "living" in a computer program AND creates a race of human-made AI aliens! Unfortunately though, author's writing didn't speak to me, action was stagnant and in the end it took me three months to get through Permutation city. This created a dilemma for me - a genius idea connected with almost no pace and dark and heavy atmosphere. I do not actually mind the technical details, they make the story more credible (that is why I chose a hard science fiction book in the first place), though it required a lot of time with dictionary and Wikipedia research to read and at least try to understand basic physical and computer science foundation. What is needed is also ability of abstract thinking, which is quite obvious, when we are given such an amount of mathematic knowledge. Still, I believe a book like this, that seems like it is created for a certain group of people, can be written in a more approachable and "friendly"