Rating: 
Summary: Seemingly endless details, but still good...
Review: Permutation City is a notable cyberpunk novel by Greg Egan, which is worth giving a try if you fancy this genre of literature. Here we have a story about a young man, Paul Durham, who uploads the contents of his brain to a computer. In doing so, he seemingly acquires the gift of immortality, which is granted so long as he carries on the rest of his life in this virtual world created for him. That's not such a bad deal to begin with, but it doesn't take long for him to experience the tremendous sense of isolation and uselessness. In the VR, Paul is simply a spectator of the world around him and every glitch in the construct serves as a violent reminder that he is no longer flesh and blood. I must warn you that Egan goes to great extent to provide the reader with plenty of meticulous details that add to the realism and plausibility of the storyline. Early in the story, I think it's fantastic because it does so much to paint a vivid picture for the reader. However, there are plenty of times when it does weigh down the story. For example, Egan beat Maria's experiment with mutose to death by explaining the actual chemistry involved, which I found unnecessary. It seemed to me like Egan was more or less showing off how learned he is in different subjects. This is definitely a novel you must read slowly if you plan on getting the most from it. Yet, I still found myself tempted to put it down at times because I was overwhelmed with too much detail. On the other hand, I did love the underlying human issues presented in the story. The entire plot toys with the philosophical quandary of personal identity. If everything in the VR is not truly real, then can the copy of Paul be considered human? Or is he just another jumble of computer code simulating a human? I found this fascinating and with that in mind I would have to say this story does have something to offer. My best advice would be to wade through all the fussy details and focus on the big picture - the underlying questions and themes that arise.
Rating: 
Summary: issues to think about
Review: Greg Egan's Permutation City is a novel centered around computer "copies" of human beings. Egan takes these characters on quite an interesting journey. The characters in this book are brought face-to-face with their own possible immortality. When a person is scanned, their very being becomes a type of computer program, which can simply run multiple copies of the same person on the computer. I was honestly frightened to read about the sad potential one has in living forever. While life extension is something our society is constantly striving for, I am bothered to read about these characters, who repeatedly "wake up" into a new round of the same old life. Each time another copy is created, the copy wakes up to the same life as that of the original and all of the copies combined. Even though each copy is a "new creation", there is no new life - it is like a recycled life. This process can be used over and over again. One of the main characters (Paul Durham) lives for over 7,000 years! It seems to me that it would be more like a never-ending nightmare than a dream come true! In the actual storyline of the book, the main character (Paul Durham) makes a copy of himself, but removes the emergency "bail-out" option, which is required by law to provide the copy with the choice of becoming a flesh-and-blood person. The copy (Paul) works against his original in attempt to free himself from his "trapped" computer existence. Unfortunately, for readers who are new to or not very familiar with the fast paced cyberpunk style, this book is rather confusing. The line between virtual reality and flesh-and-blood is quite thin. However, if you are able to keep up with what is real and what isn't, you may be able to enjoy and appreciate Greg Egan's Permutation City. I cannot say that I enjoyed the book as a whole, but I do believe that a shorter, simplified version would be slightly more appealing to readers like me, who are not "hard" cyberpunk fans.
Rating:
Summary: Are you sure this is reality?
Review: An excelent book. What would happen if you could be downloaded to a mainframe? And if your virtual self creates a virtual world that in time creates self consciounness?. It could explore a little more the relation between the autoverse (a creation within the creation) and the creators, but still Hard Sci Fi at its best
Rating: 
Summary: Supreme SciFi with a firm scientific foundation
Review: Best SciFi around, right now. This book and author richly deserve the praise that it has been given. It takes on a new level of significance (as do most the author's other major SciFi works) when the ideas within them are pursued. For example, perform web searches on the topics: "Information mechanics", "Edward Fredkin" "Digital Physics", "Quantum Information Theory", "Information Theory" and other combinations of these terms. You will find a wealth of interesting web pages confirming that the ideas in this book are the subject of ongoing research. When considered alongside the ideas in the author's book "Diaspora" and the writings of Hans Moravec the possibilities are endless.
Rating:
Summary: The greatest hard-SF book ever written.
Review: Diamond-hard science fiction has to be the most difficult form of literature in the world. If you had asked me to list three subjects on which it would be impossible to write hard SF, the fundamental nature of reality would have been #2. Forget the Hugo and Nebula; this book deserves a Nobel Prize. "Permutation City" is the only truly perfect hard SF book which I have ever read, and I've been reading Niven and Pournelle since age nine.
Permutation City is the only fiction book I keep in my reference section. As an SF fan since age seven, and a member of the first generation to grow up with computers, it takes an awful lot to give me a sense of future shock. Out of the thousands of SF books I've read, this is one of exactly two books that bowled me completely over. It's like sticking your brain in a high-voltage electrical socket. Read it or else.
Rating:
Summary: Best ideas-book I ever read!
Review: For the ideas (Autoverse is brilliant!!) I would hand out five stars and more! After having read a few disappointing sf stories, this brought me back to the genre! Unfortunately the narrative can't keep up with the technical descriptions. IMO the book should have slimmed about 50 pages, then it would have been great.
Rating:
Summary: The best ideas man since Philip K Dick!
Review: Greg Egan has been described as one of the great ideas men of modern fiction. And that he is.
Having followed Greg's progress from the sale of "The Moral Virologist" to a small fan magazine in Australia, to his now international best sellers, it amazes me that Greg's writing just keeps on getting better, more complex, and certainly more full of ideas.
Like the shorts "The Moral Virologist" and "White Chistmas," Permutation City is a very complex story, detailing in hard, realistic terms an all-too-possible future where medical computing blurs the edges of life and death. (Greg specializes in medical and biological computing systems himself, and it shows in much of his work.)
Thankfully, hard-tech edge to Greg's writing does not diminish the narration of the story. He manages to blend in technical issues as smoothly as he does the philosophical and legal ramifications.
At the heart of Permutation City, Greg is exploring the nature of existence itself. Does the fact that a mathematical model, encapsulating a universal concept, make such a universe a reality? If the nature of our universe based purely upon computable laws, why not others? This is an old theme in literature, but Greg breaths new life into it, partly by showing just how soon this issue will become a real concern for society.
I eagerly await new stories by Greg Egen and have put him on my list of authors to watch. Once you read Permutation City (or better still, grab a copy of his short stories) you will also be hooked
Rating:
Summary: Forget cryogenics, this is real immortality!
Review: Greg Egan is an ideas man par excellance! If the first few pages don't scare you, you haven't cranked up your sense of wonder anywhere *near* enough. The premise is fascinating; the super-rich can take virtual copies of themselves into cyberspace and still influence the real world. Us mere mortals cannot afford the supercomputer power needed...or is there another way? Greg is best in short stories and needs a while to tie his plot together; the wait is well worth it. His work is at least as good for the nineties as Asimov's for the fifties, Niven's for the seventies or Brin's for the eighties; I haven't come across anyone better in his genre. Enjoy! Also highly recommended: Axiomatic - surely one of the best speculative collections ever.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended look at brain sims and artificial life
Review: Greg Egan is one of the most inventive and exciting current SF writers. His SF is distinctly "hard", rife with "cutting edge" speculations, and also generally "through-composed", in that he tries to set his stories in fully-furnished futures (complete with brand-names and with Bruce Sterlingish throwaway ideas), and also in that he tries to examine the full consequences of his ideas, and not just the first consequence, or the most convenient one. Permutation City is very heavily a novel about certain computer science related ideas. The main two ideas, closely linked, are completely virtual environments, in which a simulation (or "Copy") of a human brain can be run (including the memories of the living template for the copy, full sensorium simulation, and interaction with other copies and the "real world"); and Artificial Life, arising from sets of rules operating within a computer program. The interest in the novel, and the aspects of this novel which make it, IMO, Egan's best, and one of the better SF novels of the past few years, is the constant exploring of the consequences of the central ideas: thus we have the copies controlling their mental states so accurately that they can take up hobbies by conscious decision, be literally perfectly content with the hobbies for years, then switch; and we have the detailed description of Artificial Life within the Autoverse, including a neat life form which communicates in ways analogous to the operation of a computer program; and, most importantly, each of the main characters is exploring (or revealing to us) different ideas about the nature of personal identity: where does identity lie when you are a "simulation" of a real life person? when you can control your moods and interests at the processor level, as it were? when you are rerunning your "program" in an infinite loop? when your program is halted? when the physical components of your "processor" are separated in both time and space? when your entire universe is a computer program running in another universe? All in all, a highly recommended novel. For one reason or another, Egan's novels seem to get less notice in the US than I think they deserve: partly, perhaps, because they are published first in the UK, and don't get over here until some time later. Hopefully this is beginning to change.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent portrayal of strong AI and its implications
Review: Greg Egan is the first fiction writer I've seen who takes the concept of AI somewhat seriously (see my detractions below). In virtually all science fiction, AI is either not present (Dune), artificially rare (Star Wars, William Gibson), somehow deficient relative to the "real" intelligence of humans (Star Trek), or easily tamed into servitude (Asimov). Egan thankfully avoids these lame cop-outs and provides a more realistic view of what might happen when our hardware can support human-mind-scale computation. Some of the extrapolation is fairly straightforward, for example the idea that the first humans to have themselves "scanned" and instantiated within a computer as Copies will be the elderly and the fatally ill. Egan goes many orders beyond the straightforward, however, and hits on some big questions: If I get moved into a computer, is it still "me"? Should sentient software be considered legally human? If I am a program running in a computer and I edit my memories and my most basic desires, have I become a new person? If I halt a Copy's program and archive their data indefinitely, have I "killed" the Copy? What would it be like to be forced to live forever within a computer, with no ability to commit suicide ("bail out")? If these are interesting philosophical questions today, they will become much more tangible over the coming decades as (or if, depending on your view) AI develops. Now, my caveats/complaints. A book that seriously considers AI must, I think, include the possibility of super-human AI as well. And Egan, like almost all other authors, conveniently leaves this possibility out. For example, in Permutation City there is an unexplained 17x slowdown of Copies relative to real time. In truth if the average Copy runs at a 17x slowdown, the millionaires among us would cobble together enough supercomputing power to run at a rate equivalent to real time. And the billionaires would have enough hardware to run laps around flesh-and-blood humans. I could easily envision a scenario where every company that doesn't have a management team of hyperspeed Copies would be left in the dust. But Egan tends to stay away from these kinds of unpleasant they-will-become-our-masters scenarios. (In another book of his called Diaspora, Egan does allow for faster-than-human robots called gleisners, but again assumes they will treat is well -- basically a variant of Asimov's stunted-AI). I would love to see Egan put on the Bill Joy hat and deal with superhuman intelligences fairly. The second half of the book relies very heavily on the author's intriguing "Dust Theory". While I don't necessarily find the idea very compelling as a physical theory, it does touch on some ideas that could very well have validity, such as the notion that a universe will exist if it has internal mathematical consistency (the Platonic view to its logical conclusion). Unfortunately at some points in the story the Dust Theory feels like a cheap trick, a bit of magic that can push the story in whatever arbitrary direction the author desires. In this respect the plot is like a French art film: locally rational, globally irrational. Despite the detractions, I enjoyed the book immensely and found the ending surprisingly poignant. Read it especially if you are intrigued by the notion of strong AI.
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