Permutation City (1994)

https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html

by RafelMri • 2 years ago

413 203 2 years ago

gregegan.net

k__6• 2 years ago

Pretty awesome book.

Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good.

hcarlens• 2 years ago

Yeah, this book was incredible and the tech in it has aged extremely well. Have you tried any of Ted Chiang's books? They're also great hard sci-fi. Another one that plays with similar ideas to Permutation City is the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor.

k__6• 2 years ago

I read Bobiverse which was pretty good, at least I liked all but the last book.

Thanks!

myaccount80• 2 years ago

My fav sci-fi books are:

Ubik by Philip K Dick

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Recursion by Blake Crouch

Highly recommended

Weidenwalker• 2 years ago

If you enjoyed Permutation City, you‘d probably also like „The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect“ by Roger Williams!

It explores a similar premise of a post-singularity future (though the mechanism is superintelligence rather than cellular automata/mind uploading), but rather than imagining exactly how we‘d get there, it tries to imagine what human flourishing would look like in a world of perfect abundance!

Cacti4• 2 years ago

Oh, is that the one with the incredibly explicit, and incredibly unnecessary, sex based around the authors obsession with fucking dead bodies and fucking and impregnating his daughter?

I’m very far from a prude, but JFC. Its clearly the authors vehicle to play out his fantasies, masquerading as a scientific-fi novel.

iainmerrick• 2 years ago

It's an oldie (1977), but plays with some similar ideas and I think it really holds up: The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley.

G3rn0ti• 2 years ago

Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good.

You could consider „Diaspora“ by the same author a good sequel a couple of thousands of years into the future where humanity is but a faint memory called „dream apes“ as living fossils in this story.

k__6• 2 years ago

That sounds cool.

Thanks!

nyssos• 2 years ago

where humanity is but a faint memory called „dream apes“ as living fossils in this story.

Dream apes are the descendants of an extreme primitivist subculture, the "statics" the protagonists visit at the beginning are baseline humans.

Frotag• 2 years ago

Been asking myself the same question for months.

So Egan's stories are basically a mathy whodunit -- start from first (fictional) principles and eventually solve some universe-scale question or crisis. His characters are basically walking textbooks meant for info dumping / FAQing the derivations.

In that light, some similar stories I've found are...

    - Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward)
    - Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Liu Cixin, 3 body problem author)
    - The Andromeda Strain (Crichton, more medsci than math)
    - Schilds Ladder, Diaspora (other Egan stuff)

The first two are especially similar to Egan's stuff in that the only real character is the civilization / setting not the people.

I've also tried some of the more common hard scifi recommendations like Reynolds and Stephenson, but I personally don't enjoy the dialogue / scenes meant for character development. I guess it's because the stories usually take a human-scale perspective instead of taking a what-if to its reality-bending extreme like Egan does.

k__6• 2 years ago

Hm... I didn't like Cixin or Crichton.

yencabulator2• 2 years ago

You should try the old master, Hal Clement. Mission of Gravity is a classic "start from first principles" story.

cdogl3• 2 years ago

It’s not an easy read, but Blindsight by Peter Watts has some equally unique and compelling synthesis of scientific concepts into a big concept plot.

bejd• 2 years ago

Blindsight hit all the right hard sci-fi notes for me. I've yet to find something that scratches that same itch.

gpderetta6• 2 years ago

Blindsight is his best book, but Watts has written a lot of great stuff, I recommend all of Rifters and, for something a bit different, especially the Sunflowers cycle.

k__6• 2 years ago

Haha, I already read Blindsight

davely2• 2 years ago

Oh, boy. Blindsight was a book that made me realize that maybe I like the _idea_ of hard sci-fi more than I actually like reading it.

zeekaran3• 2 years ago

Semi related: If you like The Thing (1982), Watts' The Things is pretty great: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

asymmetric• 2 years ago

One thing you can try when looking for similar books to one you liked, is to check Library Thing: https://www.librarything.com/work/18880

In my non-scientific assessment, it's better than GoodReads.

spiralx• 2 years ago

Stephen Baxter's books are along the same lines, start with one of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelike_Infinity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel)

gpderetta6• 2 years ago

The only think I have read of Baxter is his short story Last Contact[1], but I still think about it very often. Reading the Xeele sequence is in my todo list.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Contact

prepend8• 2 years ago

Completely different style but I think Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan introduces lots of new ideas and interacts with them realistically.

The first season of the show was good but very different than the book.

sorokod2• 2 years ago

The Netflix version is a diluted version of a rough and angry book. The idea of consciousness executed in hardware is explored, including simulated torture in subjective slow time (possibly in one of the sequels: Broken Angels or Woken Furies).

PBnFlash• 2 years ago

If you can handle the science changing since publication in the 1930s(!!!) Olaf Stapledon is simply remarkable. "Last and first men" is one of my favorite books for just how unique it is, but "star maker" has some interesting parallels

ArekDymalski• 2 years ago

Let me share several books that brought me a similar level of awe, due to the scope and creativity of the world-building:

1. Accelerando by Charles Stross - for THE Scope.

2. Quantum Thief by Hanny Rajaniemi - for the similarly high entry threshold and rewarding experience when you cross it.

3. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds - for a fascinating vision of future human societies.

I'd be happy to find more books like these.

yboris4• 2 years ago

Accelerando is amazing; see it being recommended several times in this post!

gpderetta6• 2 years ago

I enjoyed pretty much everything from cstross and Reynolds (pushing ice and especially house of suns are great stand alone).

I enjoyed quantum thief but somehow I have yet to go beyond the first book.

mietek• 2 years ago

I read and enjoyed these quite a bit, so let me add a few more to the list.

- “The Fall Revolution” tetralogy by Ken MacLeod: “The Star Fraction”, “The Stone Canal”, “The Cassini Division”, and “The Sky Road”

- “Void Star” by Zachary Mason

- “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross

- “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts

- “Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” by Jacek Dukaj

- “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge

- “The Golden Oecumene” trilogy by John C. Wright: “The Golden Age”, “The Phoenix Exultant”, and “The Golden Transcendence”

- “Gnomon” by Nick Harkaway

- the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks

marginrabbit• 2 years ago

People have already mentioned qntm, but I’ll put another plug in for “Valuable Humans in Transit” https://qntm.org/vhitaos

Sol Quy with monthly short stories: https://solquy.substack.com/p/111123-the-gunslinger

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time” series is fantastic.

Vernor Vinge can be a bit variable, but I would start with “A Fire Upon the Deep”

zeekaran3• 2 years ago

Children of Time is great. Children of Ruin was a lot of fun, but I was convinced by friends Children of Memory wasn't worth it.

sat0ri• 2 years ago

Have you read Gibson's "Sprawl" and "Bridge" trilogies? I read them > ten years ago and haven't read any sci-fi since, these books kinda put a subconscious "it does not get better, better diversify into other genres" attitude into my brain and personally I'm OK with that. Was reading a lot of sci-fi before that.

_dain_• 2 years ago

Novella, free to read: The Epiphany of Gliese 581

https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581

A linguist, a chemist, and a comparative psychologist explore the ruins of a dead superintelligence.

jz391• 2 years ago

Excellent Sci-Fi yarn, with nostalgic references. I particularly liked the VAX-11 and LISP reference ("ideograms in a formal language full of parentheses")

VikingCoder• 2 years ago

Yup, I enjoy this book.

If you enjoy it, too, might I recommend Fool's War by Sarah Zettel. It's more of a Space Opera, but some similar themes to Permutation City pop up in it...

surprisetalk4• 2 years ago

My book review from last September:

Reads like a “consciousness and computers are cool” story written by an engineer. A few incredible ideas padded by weak storytelling and philosophical exposition. Probably would’ve been better as a short story.

[0] https://taylor.town/books#permutation-city

If you like this book, I recommend Accelerando, Piranesi, Dick's Ubik, and Ted Chiang's collections.

Al-Khwarizmi• 2 years ago

Glad to see Ubik mentioned. While far from unknown, it typically takes a back seat to other works by Dick, and IMHO it's the absolute best. It is unsettling in a way comparable, although different, to Kafka.

surprisetalk4• 2 years ago

Agreed. Speaking of underrated works from cyberpunk authors, you may be interested in William Gibson's non-fiction essay collection Distrust That Particular Flavor. My hot take: I think Gibson's non-fiction is much stronger than his fiction.

EDIT: Ooh, that collection includes Disneyland with the Death Penalty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...

edanm8• 2 years ago

I'll have to disagree on this one. I'm a big Phillip K. Dick fan, and have read many of his works (though it's been a while), but I found Ubik to be a slog and didn't really enjoy it.

To anyone reading this - I'm not saying don't read it - it's a beloved book! I'm just saying, if you read it and don't enjoy it, keep in mind that you might be like me and enjoy his other stuff more.

gpvos2• 2 years ago

I liked the expansion of the ideas. I was bored a couple of times so it could be compressed a bit into maybe a novella half the size of the book, but a short story would have left me wanting.

selimthegrim• 2 years ago

Why Piranesi? Seems more straight up fantasy.

surprisetalk4• 2 years ago

To me, the main distinction between fantasy and sci-fi is world-building vs. idea-exploration.

This book feels more like the deep exploration of a cool idea, which is why I'm recommending it in this context :)

brookst2• 2 years ago

Piranesi is fantasy the way Kafka is fantasy. Which is to say, kinda, if you squint. But mostly it’s allegorical.

alexpotato2• 2 years ago

I read Accelerando recently and it's great.

Hard to believe that it was written in 2005 given the one scene where the main character is walking around generating multiple interlocking crypto contracts to store money for his daughter.

gpderetta6• 2 years ago

Yes, very prescient. Also the VR glasses with embedded AI and independent subagents seems almost something that you could build today.

cstross2• 2 years ago

It was published in 2005 -- actually I wrote the 9 novelettes that went into it from 1998-2003 (they were originally published in Asimov's SF magazine from 2002-2004 before I assembled and rewrote them to make the book).

NoMoreNicksLeft4• 2 years ago

No one reads Greg Egan for the character building or any of that other literary bullshit.

This is the novel that introduces the idea that a simulation universe need not have another universe simulating it. Hell, it's the only novel that has that idea. There is more insight here than we could extract from a thousand other authors, philosophers, and thinkers. But who cares, the characters were sort of cardboard and he has the whole r/menwritingwomen thing going on.

UniverseHacker3• 2 years ago

Neal Stephensons Anathem is also based on these same ideas- specifically the concepts of timeless physics, and the idea that mathematical and physical existence are identical.

zupatol• 2 years ago

I justs finished reading the book and the idea that a simulation universe need not have another universe simulating it indeed baffled me. How do you make sense of that? I was disappointed there wasn't a clearer motivation for it.

goatlover2• 2 years ago

By more insight do you mean pure speculation? I could say Liu Cixin has more insight than a thousand other minds with his Dark Forest and dimensionality, but again it's all speculative fiction.

Also, some people actually like well-written characters. I know it sounds strange.

caskstrength2• 2 years ago

If you like this book, I recommend Accelerando, Piranesi, Dick's Ubik, and Ted Chiang's collections.

Thanks for the recommendations. I read and liked most of the books in your list, so I'll likely also appreciate the ones I haven't.

EDIT: I would also recommend Watts' Blindsight.

brookst2• 2 years ago

Blindsight is such an underrated gem.

rollulus• 2 years ago

I loved this book. It’s the sort of book that made me occasionally pause and think about the ideas presented in it. Boltzmann brains still fascinate me. The spot market for CPU power was visionary. When reading it again when I was older I only found the characters a bit weak.

NoMoreNicksLeft4• 2 years ago

Boltzmann brains still fascinate me.

It's ok. You fascinate them too.

vagab0nd• 2 years ago

The spot market for CPU power was visionary.

Absolutely. Not to mention the use of proof of work, just 2 years after the idea was actually proposed. Very ahead of its time.

patchtopic• 2 years ago

A timeless classic.

UniverseHacker3• 2 years ago

I see what you did there

gmuslera• 2 years ago

If you like this one Diaspora seem to have extrapolated some of this ideas and went several step further (and then added much more), and Zendegi that is a lot more modest in extrapolation and tries to be more realistic (and emotional).

He have also a lot of mindblowing short stories. The collection I've read by him was Axiomatic, that had many great ones.

cdogl3• 2 years ago

Egan is the only great Australian science fiction writer I’m aware of. I principally recommend Diaspora for far future post-human history with a strong focus on physics and maths, and Quarantine which is a sort of heist thriller with a unique quantum physics hook in a relatively near future Northern Australia setting where First Nations people have gained independence and positioned themselves as an Asian financial / biotech hub.

Egan’s prose, characterisation and plotting are often weak, but almost every page has a new creative concept.

anileated• 2 years ago

Egan’s Diaspora is a strong book that I’d definitely recommend to hardcore sci-fi lovers.

andyjohnson0• 2 years ago

Egan’s prose, characterisation and plotting are often weak, but almost every page has a new creative concept.

I agree with all of that. I was thinking recently about how Egan compares to Neal Stephenson after some discussion of his (NS) fiction here a few days ago [1]. They both (imo) are weak at characterisation etc. - but to me Egan's work is among some of the best sf I've ever read [1], wheras I find reading Stephenson an ordeal. I think that's down to the depth of the ideas that Egan explores, but I'd be interested in what others think of how he compares to other authors.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39287616

[2] Permutation City. Diaspora, short works in collections like Luninous, etc.

ahartmetz• 2 years ago

IMO, Egan's prose and plotting are not notably bad. Characters are probably his weakest point. Plus, Egan knows when to stop rambling, or rather, he doesn't ramble. As opposed to the other guy.

hmahncke• 2 years ago

Greg Egan as great! Two other Australians you might try are:

Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman, about what it's like to be colonized.

Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMullen, about what it's like to be part of a computer.

googamooga• 2 years ago

Thank you so much for recommending both authors! I'm a huge fan of Egan and would really appreciate to explore the Australian sci-fi scene more.

cstross2• 2 years ago

Also worth noting is the work of the late George Turner (d. 1997), notably The Sea and Summer and Beloved Son.

mycologos• 2 years ago

Diaspora is my favorite Egan book. Permutation City seems to get talked about more, but the dust theory stuff just felt implausible, and it has one of the worst sex scenes I've ever read. Maybe it's because Diaspora is less concerned with anything as abstract as consciousness and more interested in how different forms of life play out, which I find fun when it's done well.

75th• 2 years ago

The sex in that sex scene is supposed to be cringingly bad. Supposed to be uncomfortable to read. Did you think it was poorly done, or was it just too uncomfortable-on-purpose?

adamgordonbell2• 2 years ago

Big Fan of Egan's short stories. I feel like they are his strongest work and maybe because they can lean more on ideas. Luminous about math grad students discovering some secrets in math is pretty great.

Wang's Carpets which became Diaspora is mind blowing.

Zendegi is an interesting novel by him I never see anyone mention. I enjoyed it and the characters are a bit more developed. It also has a Eliezer Yudkowsky stand in as the big bad guy i seem to recall. Which made me chuckle.

badcppdev2• 2 years ago

I think of Zendegi quite often when I think about the debates surrounding digital companions, etc. I don't think the book had great commercial success.

edanm8• 2 years ago

I'm a big fan of Egan, having read a few of his books and a bunch of short stories. Personally, Zendegi was the weakest of his books by quite a bit. (Still good, just... not great.)

gpderetta6• 2 years ago

My standards are likely lower than yours, but while agree that his characterization is not the strongest, I do like his prose and plotting.

admissionsguy• 2 years ago

Egan’s prose, characterisation and plotting are often weak

I sort of agree, but personally I like the rawness of it. For a similarly unrefined yet intellectually stimulating writing, check out Gregory Benford who used to be a professor of physics.

prepend8• 2 years ago

I’ve liked every Egan book I read but also want to mention Distress. I got shipped it accidentally when I ordered Diaspora and the seller told me to keep it.

It’s set in the “near future” so probably 2020 since it was published in 1998 and does a good job, I think, of talking about things that are happening now- third world empowerment, body augmentation, transgenders, precision pharmacy, biohacking.

And some things we don’t have yet- artificial island nations, self-autists, custom engineered plagues.

I like it because it’s one of those books that stuck with me for describing tech that “we should and one day will have” in that Egan described a “pharm” that compounds medication on the fly to precisely medicate us. For example, it will give you stimulants with your vitamix but have to counter it the next day based on how your body performs. I can’t wait for that and hate having to wait days to adjust meds. I feel similarly about Stephenson’s metaverse description and young lady’s illustrated primer, and nanodrones, and cryptocurrency. And Doctorow’s “comm” device that he described a few years before the iPhone.

cdogl3• 2 years ago

Distress also has a short passage explaining the collapse of the collapse of CBDs and inflation of the suburban property market and cost of living due to remote work, set in an area of suburban Sydney that’s now not far off Egan’s predictions. Few hard science fiction authors of recent decades can pull that off, as the 21st century has shown that our 20th century science fiction tropes are either already here (computing and networking revolution, hydrogen bombs, DNA sequencing) or will likely not materialise for centuries (space colonisation, mind uploading). Egan has a talent for speculating about little details of life that illustrate a very different world.

mvdtnz2• 2 years ago

Egan is prolific and his quality is quite uneven. I loved Permutation City, Diaspora and Dichronauts (although the latter had a weak story). But other books like Scale and Phoresis are downright bad. It's so hard to pick which Egan books to read because often the ones that sound the most interesting are the worst.

BLKNSLVR2• 2 years ago

Going back a while, but I really enjoyed The Resurrected Man by Sean Williams.

I have a few other books of his, some seem sci-fi, some seem fantasy, but haven't read them yet.

Seems he's not been idle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Williams_(author)

jharohit• 2 years ago

Greg Egan is an acquired taste of hard SF. I would highly recommend someone who wants to get in to start here - it is short stories and some of his very best. Also one of my best cover of sci fi books

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Greg-Egan-Stories-Science/dp/194...

adamgordonbell2• 2 years ago

Agreed. He's strongest I'm his short stories. I have two collections of them.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

(1994)

ajuc• 2 years ago

It's great classical sci-fi. Reminds me of Lem, Watts, Dukaj. Ideas and science matters more than special effects, action and characters.

peniswobbler2• 2 years ago

Just finished it! It's so good.

Doches• 2 years ago

Fun to see this on HN today; I just finished it last night, on a recommendation from a friend. It was great, and left me full of unfinished thoughts -- just what you want from a good SF yarn.

For folks who enjoyed the ideas in it I can heartily recommend qntm's short story Lena (https://qntm.org/lena), which explores some of the same ideas but with a hefty dollop of (implied, but all the more intense for it) psychological horror.

joshmarlow• 2 years ago

That's a great short story. The clinical ambience of it's description really amps it up. Real Black Mirror stuff.

I haven't read Permutation City (on my list) but I really enjoyed Disaspora by the same author (Greg Egan). Similar themes from what I gather.

gattr2• 2 years ago

More specifically, in Permutation City mind uploading is in its infancy, while in Diaspora it's a run-of-the-mill tech.

I'll add Schild's Ladder to the recommendations.

dzikimarian• 2 years ago

On the side note - most of qntm's works have these small, interesting ideas behind them - really satisfying to read.

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

Egan's "Instantiation" series of short stories is also probably up a similar alley - available in his collection of the same name.

edanm8• 2 years ago

Can confirm - I'm a huge fan of Greg Egan and specifically Permutation city, and also a huge fan of qntm's stories. Lena is probably the most famous, though not even the best ("I don't know Timmy" is better IMO).

Also, I finally read qntm's Antimemetics division and, while it is a bit lacking in the end, it is one of the most "oh wow this is a crazy good idea" stories I've read in years.

zeekaran3• 2 years ago

Make sure to read Ra as well. One of my favorite webfics. https://qntm.org/ra

Vetch• 2 years ago

I'd also wager that "I don't know Timmy" is more thematically related. I feel most of the discussion in this thread glosses over what is most unsettling about Permutation City. It isn't just a book about what it could be like to be a simulated mind, it's most deeply about exploring the disquieting metaphysical consequences of computable minds. I can't think of a story that has as thoroughly scattered my basic grasp of reality as this one. Only Blindsight even begins to comes close.

In "I don't know Timmy" there's a sequence that goes:

"Well, we can't exactly turn it off."

"Why not?" asked Tim, halfway to the door, then stopped mid-stride and stood still, realising.

"Oh."

But you can turn it off without consequence and Permutation City explores the disturbing implications of why thoroughly (with a deus ex machina ending to save causal physics, as expected of an Egan story, physics is what has plot armor).

Severian• 2 years ago

I got a copy of the Antimemetics division too after a read through on SCP wiki. Well worth getting a physical copy to support the author.

qntm is becoming one of my favorite authors as well.

yencabulator2• 2 years ago

Better link to read (same story, not the first draft): https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

schubart• 2 years ago

Fantastic read, thanks both of you for sharing this.

maxglute• 2 years ago

Good read, feels like it should be structured as an academic paper with made up bibliographies.

lloeki• 2 years ago

Ah, I was thinking of https://qntm.org/responsibility all along the story, and completely forgot about https://qntm.org/mmacevedo (of which lena is the draft)

peniswobbler2• 2 years ago

I just finished it. It's extraordinary. It's awesome. It goes way beyond ideas I'd seen half assedly developed before.

pranay01• 2 years ago

Just finished reading Exhalation by Ted Chiang, and can't recommend it enough. It's a collection of short stories - so easy entry point for beginners as well.

SamBam• 2 years ago

I love Ted Chiang, and enjoyed Exhalation, but personally I would recommend Stories of Your Life and Others as the first book of short stories. I found it had a higher percentage of home runs.

x86x87• 2 years ago

To me anything I've read from Ted Chiang is a home run and I've basically read all his work.

jeremiahbuckley• 2 years ago

You might like Invisible Planets, Chinese sci-fi short stories compilation. I’ve read a few of them; Folding Beijing is pretty great.

yboris4• 2 years ago

My all-time-favorite collection of short stories is The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu. Highly recommend, whether or not you liked The Three Body Problem (trilogy)

alexhornby• 2 years ago

loved the dust theory. really stuck with me, bit like the dark forest from three body problem

loudmax• 2 years ago

Greg Egan's Mastodon profile is https://mathstodon.xyz/@gregeganSF He's fairly active there and likes to post math problems.

I liked Permutation City, but Diaspora really blew me away. Every time you begin to get your mind around some radical new concept, Egan throws adds another fold that makes you reconsider everything you think you knew.

prepend8• 2 years ago

I think Diaspora has the best description of a valid digital identity. But I still kept thinking I’d never trust my existence to the polis/state keeping my private key private.

In Diaspora if someone steals your private cert then they become you or are at least indistinguishable to everyone else from you. I’ve never seen a super solid way to prevent this when everyone and everything is digital.

BLKNSLVR2• 2 years ago

I thought asking similar lines with Altered Carbon: If you can switch physical bodies, then how can you prove you're you?

Do you have to memorise a GUID? What if you forget it? What is someone else knows yours? If there's no physical link, how is it provable?

gchamonlive• 2 years ago

I would really like to see writers sell their work DRM free on their pages, or have an open and responsible platform that writers could use for that.

I know it is a hassle to process anything finance-related, but in my region on amazon the book is unavailable and a hard copy isn't an option for me.

It is virtually impossible for me to give money to the author for an e-reader version of the book.

prepend8• 2 years ago

Same. Not just for convenience of having drm-free ebooks but so I can have an AI read it to me.

I don’t really have a preference for audiobook performers so hate having to buy ebook and audiobook. So I’m happy just feeding a text file into a reader and listening that way.

macrolime• 2 years ago

What AI do you use for that?

wishfish2• 2 years ago

I agree with your wish for more DRM-free options. I don't know why a hard copy isn't an option for you. If it's just because you lack the space, then one option would be to order the physical book. Give it away. And download a copy of the book from LibGen. Author gets their money and you get a usable copy of the book.

bhaney2• 2 years ago

Permutation City was my introduction to Egan many years ago, and since then I've read nearly everything he's written (Scale is still somewhere on my unfortunately neglected reading list, but I'll get to it eventually).

The same captivating exploration of interesting ideas is omnipresent throughout his work, and that's always been why I keep coming back. I think it's important to go into his stories with an open mind towards what literature is allowed to be - namely that it can focus on things other than narrative or characterization without being a detriment to itself. A steak does not need to be as sweet as a cake in order to satisfy a diner, after all. And that's not to say that he avoids interesting narration or character development entirely, but there are definitely stories of his where he's clearly focusing on other aspects, and the choice to do that feels intentional and appropriate to me.

edanm8• 2 years ago

Which Egan is your favorite?

bhaney2• 2 years ago

It's been years since the last one I read, so it's a bit hard to recall. But the stories that have really stuck in my mind are the results of Egan tweaking some physical law, constructing a universe that might reasonably arise under those physical conditions, and then writing a plausible adventure within that universe.

Dichronauts (2 spacial and 2 time-like dimensions instead of our 3 and 1) and the Orthogonal trilogy (Riemannian spacetime instead of our "Lorentzian") come to mind. I just really like the care he puts into constructing these universes, from how planets form (the worlds in Dichronauts are infinite hyperboloids instead of spheres), to how scientific discovery progresses (as a result of the physics in Orthogonal, light of different frequencies travel at different speeds and visually separate as a common matter of course, which leads to a much earlier understanding of relativity by a fairly primitive civilization). It feels like he's building universes from first principles and taking care to consider every little consequence and detail, which leads to a lot of "Ohhhhh" moments when you encounter something counter-intuitive but then realize it directly follows as a consequence of the initial physics tweak.

BandButcher• 2 years ago

Sweet site thanks

CapmCrackaWaka• 2 years ago

Permutation city is one of those books that "blew my mind". If you read sci-fi recreationaly, you know what I'm talking about. When the author introduces a novel concept which makes you think "holy crap, _what if_???" and then uses that concept to create a compelling story. It's on the top shelf in my library, along with my other favorite books.

alecco• 2 years ago

Greg Egan is the Nintendo-hard of SciFi. You enjoy re-reading many times and every time you figure out something new.

gafferongames2• 2 years ago

Egan's short stories are great. Luminous is an excellent collection. I've never been huge fan of his long form novels, and will remember forever the sex scene in one of them that ends with a cramped testicle. Why Greg, why?

ycombinete• 2 years ago

That scene is from Permutation City. I thought it was a nice metaphor for that character’s strained relationship with his corporeal self.

gafferongames2• 2 years ago

I look forward to the motion picture adaptation of this scene.

eterps• 2 years ago

Egan's short stories are great [...] I've never been huge fan of his long form novels

Same here, I love his short stories!

IMO short form works better for him because there's so much to think about, even after having finished reading a story.

If someone needs a pointer on where to start I can recommend this thread: https://redlib.freedit.eu/r/printSF/comments/x1i4bj/greg_ega...

I especially enjoyed:

  - The Safe-Deposit Box
  - Into Darkness

GeekyBear• 2 years ago

I found the concept of computational biology pretty mind blowing in the early 1990s.

azaras• 2 years ago

I do not remember when I read that I was Richard Stallman's favorite book. Then I read it, and I love it.

I tried to find the citation online, but I found that Richard Stallman does not have a favorite book (https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html); anyway, it is a good book with good ideas to think about.

mindcrime3• 2 years ago

I thought Permutation City was great. One of my favorite sci-fi reads from the last couple of decades. It's probably about time to read it again, as most of the details escape me now.

Anyway, I was going to say... I've always thought that folks who enjoyed Permutation City might also enjoy Glasshouse[1] by Charles Stross[2]. The two novels aren't necessarily overtly similar, but I feel like there's a sort of abstract conceptual kinship there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross

edanm8• 2 years ago

I've long wanted to read Charles Stross and somehow haven't. (Well, I read a few chapters of Accelerando years ago and never finished it, despiting liking it quite a bit.)

Do you think Glasshouse is a good place to start with his writing and is representative of his style? I loved Permutation City, one of my favorite books.

(I would've asked cstross himself but that would seem too awkward!)

yboris4• 2 years ago

I once commented on HN how much I loved Accelerando and Charles Stross responded suggesting I read his The Rapture of the Nerds. I read it soon after and loved it. I very much enjoy the genre of people living inside computers; I welcome recommendations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds

mindcrime3• 2 years ago

Do you think Glasshouse is a good place to start with his writing and is representative of his style?

Well... to me, I'd almost divide Stross' works into two tranches: the "The Laundry Files" books, and everything else. In that regard, I think Glasshouse is fairly representative of the "everything else" tranche. But even then, there's a fair amount of variance in his works. I wouldn't, for example, necessarily compare Halting State and Glasshouse, or Rule 34 and Singularity Sky. I guess that's a way of saying that while Stross has his favored themes and topics, he's far from formulaic and I don't feel like you can pigeon-hole his "style" too narrowly.

That said, I haven't read every other work Stross has written, but I've read a pretty good chunk of them. And almost all of the "The Laundry Files" novels. Me personally, I recommend pretty much all of it. :-)

EDIT: Just realized that there's really a 3rd major tranche of works in Stross' ouvre: the "The Merchant Princes" books. I forgot about those, as I haven't actually read any of them (shame, shame, I know...). All of what I've read of Stross to date is from the "The Laundry Files" series or the "everything else" batch, minus "The Merchant Princes".

kybernetikos• 2 years ago

I think glasshouse is truly excellent, but to me it's not terribly representative of the other works (most of which I also enjoy - they're just different).

airstrike• 2 years ago

OK, I stared at that animation far longer than I should have...

then went digging and found this other link by the same author: http://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/Superpermutations/Superpermu...

waveBidder• 2 years ago

his mastodon presence is full of such things

https://mathstodon.xyz/@gregeganSF

lfciv• 2 years ago

What is this?? Permutation City?!

dandare• 2 years ago

Just came here to say that Diaspora by Gregg Egan is my #1 book ever :)

aethertron• 2 years ago

It's up there for me. But I liked his Schild's Ladder, which plays with some of the same ideas, even more.

gilbetron• 2 years ago

I literally was telling a friend about how the one group needed to warn the group on earth about the danger (keeping things vague deliberately!) and how they had to quickly "evolve" different entities to be able to communicate with the earth beings.

Also the different time scale awareness concept.

Such great ideas!

Pixelbrick• 2 years ago

If you enjoy the 'cute bugs doing science' SF subgenre then his incandescence is definitely worth a look.

https://www.gregegan.net/INCANDESCENCE/Incandescence.html

Karsteski• 2 years ago

Great book. I've read it through twice already! I always recommend it when talking about Sci Fi

prepend8• 2 years ago

I remember this book having the concept of people running at different time scales so people in “the real world” would run at 1x and simulated people would run at whatever fraction they could afford. And they could speed up temporarily to have conversations back to real world.

This made me think that sometimes our physical brains speed up and can run at 2x but still only get I/o at 1x. It will be neat that I think at some point we’ll be able to boost up to like 1000x with implants or whatnot and think about something that doesn’t require any new information and then return to the present with insight to continue the conversation.

I hope this is affordable because it will be so handy for many things. If even to just spend more time staring at the Mona Lisa and contemplating.

It also makes me wonder how people age in fiction where people can freeze time. If someone freeze time for a year, does their body keep aging biologically?

ryanianian• 2 years ago

This book rather profoundly impacted my sense of reality and the kinds of realities that can exist within sci-fi universes.

ews• 2 years ago

Egan has been my favorite author for years. I like his earlier works (like this one) much more than his last books. I have the impression most books he wrote and published in the last 15 years require a Ph.D. in either Mathematics or Theoretical Physics. Permutation City was my absolute gateway drug to his work and I could not stop talking about it when it first came out.

A series that explores similar ideas (although to a much smaller degree) of uploading, artificial life, and transfumanism, I've been enjoying lately is Pantheon. I just wanted to mention it here since I think you guys will enjoy it.

jeremyjh• 2 years ago

Zendegi is a recent book that is quite readable - but I agree regarding most of the others. Permutation City is one of my favorites but I think Diaspora must be my very favorite.

arisAlexis• 2 years ago

I felt dumb and that I couldn't keep up also with Permutation City

jamilton• 2 years ago

I read The Book of All Skies and quite liked it, but yeah, I basically just skimmed over the especially mathy sections. In that one the math is about (spoiler?) how gravity would work with a very unique planet, with comparisons drawn to electrostatics, I think. It was still enjoyable because it's still unique and interesting sci-fi.

gojomo• 2 years ago

If they ever want to shoot an 'Even Blacker Mirror' TV anthology, they should adapt Egan's short stories. 'Axiomatic', especially.

Two stories in that collection from before the modern social internet (1992), with non-internet somewhat fantastic premises, nonetheless often come to mind when observing modern online self-presentational & affiliational dynamics:

• 'The Hundred Light-Year Diary' - a method of receiving tiny (tweet-like!) messages from the future – eventually rationed out to all people! – examines questions of free-will & (self-)deception, at many levels

• 'Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies' - how much of what you believe/aver is imposed by your neighborhood?

chrispine• 2 years ago

This book sent me into a four-year-long depression and existential crisis.

Best book I ever read. I guess.

jcul• 2 years ago

I recommended this on another HN thread last week.

Probably my favourite book of all time. I'm almost due a reread.

vackosar• 2 years ago

Egan is great. Another good book is Incandescence. Only problem is that some of his novels contain some kind of loneliness. Can't describe it.

Permutation City (1994)

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