Wow! Artificial intelligence, biochemistry, physics, mathematics – Greg Egan has it all going here. A multidimensional, fast-paced adventure where we're never quite sure if men or women are their flesh-and-blood selves or copies created in a computer simulation.
In order not to give away too much of the unfolding zip, zappy action, I'll make an immediate cut to a batch of snapshots:
Holy Doppelgänger, Batman! - Paul Durham wakes up as a Copy of himself within an extremely convincing virtual world of his own creation. It's all so real! “Hypothetical light rays were being traced backwards from individual rod and cone cells on his simulated retinas, and projected out into the virtual environment to determine exactly what needed to be computed: a lot of detail near the center of his vision, much less towards the periphery.” Paul can hardly believe his own experience. Paul sent a number of willing subjects into a virtual world but after only about fifteen minutes they all freaked out and terminated themselves. But Paul is determined to continue the experiment, which means he'll dialogue again and again via computer with his flesh-and-blood self in the real world, enough exchanges to test his limits of sanity. Hey, wait a minute! What if he as a Copy has bouts of his previous insanity? Hang in there, Paul. No reason to get too upset. After all, it would only be virtual insanity.
Let There Be Virtual Light - Maria Deluca is an Autoverse junkie. “The Autoverse was a 'toy' universe, a computer model which obeyed its own simplified 'laws of physics' – laws far easier to deal with mathematically than the equations of real-world quantum mechanics.” With her strong background in biology and chemistry and physics, Maria has a hard time pulling herself away from her keyboard; after all, there's so many levels of possibility she can work with, things like hunting down mutose molecules and invoking Maxwell's Demon and asking it to find one for her. Hey, Maria. What if someone paid you a huge pile of cash to create your own version of the Autoverse, one that could eventually support intelligent life? Once created, human copies could be sent to inhabit your creation. In that way, we Earthlings could not only simulate first contact with an alien species but those human copies could achieve immortality. Greg Egan challenges us to fire up our brain cells as we explore the consequences of such an Autoverse universe.
To Replicate Or Not To Replicate - Thomas Riemann is a wealthy banker and would dearly love to become immortal. However, Thomas feels a ton of guilt having committed a grisly murder, so weighty and so dark the guilt has become a huge part of his personal identity. Now, since Copies are created by a sophisticated computer program, Thomas could have a copy of himself made where that part of his past could be removed. But, once removed, Thomas wonders if he would be the same person or a different person. With Thomas' case, Greg Egan raises a provocative question: If we were given the chance to live for many years in a virtual reality, would we opt to modify ourselves in any way? As I see it, some of the possibilities: a facility to read and write and speak foreign languages (for example, read Plato in the original Greek and Tolstoy in Russian), have an extraordinary talent in a particular field like mathematics or Jungian psychology, alter our background if we were the victim of child abuse, an ability to meditate like a Zen monk...the possibilities are endless.
Virtual Reality Gone Wild – Peer is a Copy living in an alternate reality. Kate, Peer's girlfriend, treats him to a night on the town. “At the Cabaret Andalou, the musicians presented as living saxophones and guitars, songs were visible, tangible, psychotropic radiation blasting from the mouths of the singers – and on a good night, a strong enough sense of camaraderie, telepathy, synergy, could by the mutual consent of the crowd take over, melting away (for a moment) all personal barriers, mental and mock-physical, reconstructing with the memories, perceptions and emotions of all the people it had been.” And it continues. Kate helped Peer redesign his apartment, “transforming it from a photorealist concrete box into a system of perceptions which could be stable, or responsive, as he wished. Once, before sleep, he'd wrapped the structure around himself like a sleeping bag, shrinking and softening it until the kitchen cradled his head and the other rooms draped his body. He'd changed the topology so that every window looked in through another window, every wall abutted another wall; the whole thing closed in on itself in every direction, finite but borderless, universe-as-womb.”
All of the above is taken from the first third of the novel. From here on out, Greg Egan's imagination combined with permutations of science and math swirl to breathtaking heights. And there's the second part of the book where Paul and Maria take a journey to...for each reader to discover.
Actually, as a non-science liberal arts type, I should be given a medal for making it to the last page. There's loads of technical detail to satisfy the scientists in the crowd yearning for the science of science fiction, but even if your background is not computers, math, and science, Permutation City makes for a most rewarding read. Thanks, Greg!
Australian author Greg Egan, born 1961 - Greg takes pride in not having any photos of himself available on the web. This photo is the way I picture the outstanding SF novelist writing at his computer.
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