Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Permutation City (1994)

gregegan.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 207 posts

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#121

Post by _yb2s »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #88
surprisetalk wrote: post #6

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.

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…

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.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#122

Post by zeekaran »

marginrabbit wrote: post #118
k__ wrote: post #2

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

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”

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.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#123

Post by caskstrength »

surprisetalk wrote: post #6

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.

> 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.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#124

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

_yb2s wrote: post #121
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Thanks. I'll put that one on my reading list. Haven't read but one of his before.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#125

Post by gattr »

joshmarlow wrote: post #76
Doches wrote: post #29

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) psycho…

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.

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.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#126

Post by [deleted] »

caskstrength wrote: post #123
surprisetalk wrote: post #6

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.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#127

Post by mindcrime »

edanm wrote: post #95
mindcrime wrote: post #84

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 abstrac…

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!)

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".

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#128

Post by LeifCarrotson »

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

It's one of my favorite webfics too, so I got a hardcover:

https://www.amazon.com/Ra-qntm/dp/B096TRWRWX

Have this in my personal library as well as a (paperback) of Permutation City. I think it's awesome they're published online but there's something special about having it in print too.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#129

Post by mvdtnz »

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 /…

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.

Re: Permutation City (1994)

#130

Post by caskstrength »

k__ wrote: post #96
gpderetta wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, yes, especially the last Rifter book made me wonder a bit about the sanity of the author.

I read the acknowledgements in some of his books and found him rather dislikeable.

You might want to read his blog [0] to get more insight into his character. I got the impression that the author is a great and likeable human being that became rather cynical due to his disillusionment with humanity.

[0]: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/

Post reply on HN