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Permutation City (1994)

gregegan.net

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Re: Permutation City (1994)

#171

Post by gattr »

BillSaysThis wrote: post #141
mindcrime wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compar…

Merchant Princes series is about my favorite cstross!

I love both The Laundry Files and Merchant Princes/Empire Games, and wouldn't mind seeing a high-budget TV adaptation of them.

mild spoiler

At some point there's a bloody Project Orion-type spaceship taking off the Earth's surface.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#172

Post by prepend »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #167
prepend wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

They skipped this in Altered Carbon and it was just a “rule.”

Memorizing a GUID wouldn’t work because someone could read it from your memory.

Stephenson did this well, I think, in Dodge with the PURDAH as it was an AI trained on every characteristic of an individual through their life so it was impossible to fake. Still hand waving, but logically consistent hand waving for an id that spans consciousness transferring from biology to digital.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#173

Post by arisAlexis »

ews wrote: post #152

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 (althoug…

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

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#174

Post by AceJohnny2 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #168
zeekaran wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I just read the Antimemetics division and qntm's short story collection. I loved the short stories and first ~40-60% of the Antimemetics Division and felt it then got too crazy and abstract. The "magic is real" thing has new worried as I usually avoid fantasy. Do you think I'll still like Ra?

I read Ra and I loved it, but it's imperfect. It could use an editor.

Antimemetics, being SCP-related, comes with a hefty dollop of magical realism.

Ra, to me, felt like a rocket ride as new ideas, twists, and exponentially escalating stakes get thrown at you. The pacing is very jerky, and I can very much understand if people just nope halfway through.

In particular, the characters... suck (my apologies, Sam)

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#175

Post by shabble »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #98
cstross wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Blew my mind in the best way. Thank you. There's a line in there that feels like it could pop up in a permutation city sequel: > ... running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of spacetime itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath... Does that idea come up anywhere else in your work? If so, I'd go read it.

Scratch Monkey may have some vague notions along those lines, if I remember rightly: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/fiction/monkey/index.html

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#176

Post by grfhtsdfvv »

zeekaran wrote: post #119
edanm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Thank you for this link, I’m really enjoying it.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#177

Post by cdogl »

prepend wrote: post #79
cdogl wrote: post #17

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 /…

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…

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.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#178

Post by gpderetta »

ArekDymalski wrote: post #107
k__ wrote: post #2

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

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…

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.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#179

Post by bhaney »

edanm wrote: post #156
bhaney wrote: post #54

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…

Which Egan is your favorite?

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.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#180

Post by lukifer »

zeekaran wrote: post #119
edanm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

While if didn’t hook me as quickly as Antimemetics or Ra, I also thoroughly enjoyed Fine Structure: https://qntm.org/structure
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