This seems to be required reading in all the transhumanist/AI/wibble circles, so it’s been high on my reading list. Now I’ve read it. Now I can be one of the people shouting at other people, telling them to read it immediately.

This is a SF story for mathgeeks, or anyone who can appreciate really big numbers. I can’t say you won’t enjoy it if you don’t meet those criteria, but I can imagine a large subset of the population just going “eh?” after the first few chapters, and filing it under “textbooks”. Some say it really does belong on the reference shelf, but not me. I subscribe to the Strong AI Hypothesis, but even that isn’t strong enough for Permutation City. As long as you keep telling yourself “it’s only SF”, you won’t need to take notes or realign any major belief systems.

As most reviews will tell you, this is a book about people waking up and finding themselves inside a computer. That’s not really a spoiler; you find out on page 2. It’s not silly like The Matrix. There are deep questions asked (and even a few answered!) on the nature of being, thought, existence, time, and experience.

It’s exactly the right length. SF books have a tendency to be overlong - the authors write the story, then realise there aren’t any characters in it, then graft in a few hundred extra pages of pointless dialogue and description, not realising that idea-as-the-hero is a perfectly legitimate form for the story to take. Permutation City does have characters, but none of them are pointless (after all, the human mind is the key object of study here).

I haven’t read that big fat Stephen Wolfram book (”A New Kind of Science”), but this seems like it might be a good introduction to it, and maybe even part inspiration for it.

Like they said, required reading.

Permutation City, Greg Egan, 1994.