Permutation City - Greg Egan
I've been meaning to write this one up since before I left for India. What a read! Permutation City, by Greg Egan, is a mindbending cyberadventure.
The book has two parts. The first takes place from around 2045 to 2051 AD, a time when humans have figured out how to upload and run their consciousnesses on computers. Well, at least the richest folks, with the best hardware, are able to -- and even they must suffer a slowdown of seventeen times the rate at which non-uploaded people experience time. I won't ruin the second part, but suffice to say that one of the characters learns quite a lot about what it means to be an uploaded consciousness, and then starts bending and breaking what we would think of as rules.
This book was written in 1994, and was way ahead of its time. Egan's predictions of how the Internet would progress are eery, especially in how he crafts a world where pretty much everything is done through cloud computing. This leads to excellent hard sci-fi, since it hits so close to home. The vibe is quite similar to "Vanilla Sky" but with a different sort of egomania driving one of the main characters, Paul. The other main character, Maria, is a pleasant foil to Paul's weirdness and drive; she is much easier to empathize with, as a normal(ish) of person who gets pulled into a deeply abnormal adventure.
What Greg Egan does best is take some random academic idea and turn it into the crux of a narrative. For example, he twisted physics a little in The Orthogonal Series. In this story, he plays with the idea of who, what, and where consciousness occurs. The gist, as I understood it, is as follows. If a pattern, whether stored in matter or in transistor voltages, is "strong" enough, then it will persist and "find itself" no matter what media exist in any objective reality. This idea is explored in a framework of computer science, but the book also delves deep into psychology and biology.
Overall, this story is heady, and requires some though and re-reading on the part of the audience. I strongly recommend it.
The book has two parts. The first takes place from around 2045 to 2051 AD, a time when humans have figured out how to upload and run their consciousnesses on computers. Well, at least the richest folks, with the best hardware, are able to -- and even they must suffer a slowdown of seventeen times the rate at which non-uploaded people experience time. I won't ruin the second part, but suffice to say that one of the characters learns quite a lot about what it means to be an uploaded consciousness, and then starts bending and breaking what we would think of as rules.
This book was written in 1994, and was way ahead of its time. Egan's predictions of how the Internet would progress are eery, especially in how he crafts a world where pretty much everything is done through cloud computing. This leads to excellent hard sci-fi, since it hits so close to home. The vibe is quite similar to "Vanilla Sky" but with a different sort of egomania driving one of the main characters, Paul. The other main character, Maria, is a pleasant foil to Paul's weirdness and drive; she is much easier to empathize with, as a normal(ish) of person who gets pulled into a deeply abnormal adventure.
What Greg Egan does best is take some random academic idea and turn it into the crux of a narrative. For example, he twisted physics a little in The Orthogonal Series. In this story, he plays with the idea of who, what, and where consciousness occurs. The gist, as I understood it, is as follows. If a pattern, whether stored in matter or in transistor voltages, is "strong" enough, then it will persist and "find itself" no matter what media exist in any objective reality. This idea is explored in a framework of computer science, but the book also delves deep into psychology and biology.
Overall, this story is heady, and requires some though and re-reading on the part of the audience. I strongly recommend it.
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