The question then becomes: Is this what she really wants? Is this what we really want?įrom the brilliant mind of Greg Egan, Permutation City, first published in 1994, comes a world of wonder that makes you ask if you are you, or is the Copy of you the real you? You will never be your normal flesh-and-blood life again. There is, however, one catch: you can no longer terminate, bail out, and remove yourself. Paul makes Maria an offer to design and drop a seed into the Autoverse that will allow her to indulge in her obsession. She spends every waking minute with the cellular automaton known as the Autoverse, a world that lives by the mathematical “laws of physics.” You also have Maria Deluca, who is nothing but an Autoverse addict. For Paul Durham, he keeps making Copies of himself, but the issue is that his Copies keep changing their minds and shutting themselves down.

You have been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. Immortality is a real thing, just not the thing you’d expect. You have Eternal Life, the power to live forever. What happens when your digital self overpowers your physical self?Ī life in Permutation City is unlike any life to which you’re accustomed. This is fundamental to the whole project of SF and it’s why Egan’s Best – and his Rest – is worth any number of looks. “Egan is determined to make sense of everything – to understand the whole world as an intelligible, rational, material (and finally manipulable) realm – even if it means abandoning comfortable and comforting illusions.

Permutation city by greg egan