A subculture of poorer copies, calling themselves the "Solipsist Nation", tries to reject external reality completely.Įgan’s bleak vision of copy inequality is not one I have encountered before, and one that seems a bit too credible for comfort.Īll the standard brain emulation -related questions are also given some space. What this means for the world of Permutation City is that in addition to private copies running relatively fast, there are also virtual slums of slow-running copies that can afford computing power only when it’s cheapest, and cannot generate new income because their slow running speed (tens or hundreds of times less than the real-world) makes them useless for most jobs. Less wealthy ones run much slower, and their running speed depends on the price of computing power changes, which is traded on a global market (note that the book was published in the 1990s cloud-based computing power as a service was probably not a very common idea). The wealthiest copies run on private computers managed and paid for by a trust fund. However, they cannot retreat into their virtual worlds, since copies can be affected by real-world events, particularly because legally, they are software, not people. In the novel’s world, many rich clients have their brains scanned before their biological death, and the copies started after they die. Even on economy mode, though, copies in the 2050 world of Permutation City run at best at less than one tenth the speed of the real world. The simulated reality isn’t an exact copy: only brains are simulated in any detail, while the rest of the environment is an approximation, though a photorealistic one, to save on running costs. He is a “copy” the “original” had a brain scan made of himself, and started running that in a computer. Oh, and Durham is inside a computer (literally, though not too literally). The first paragraphs are as pedestrian as it gets: our protagonist, Paul Durham, wakes up in a room and looks around. (It is hard to limit spoilers in this review, since the plot of the book is very tightly wound to the questions it explores. Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City is another. Isaac Asimov’s short story "The Last Question" is a classic example. How do you tell whether reality is simulated? Can humans even understand sufficiently advanced aliens? What does the possibility of artificial intelligence say about consciousness?Īnd the last tier is works in which the whole point is speculating about the ultimate nature of the universe itself. The level after that would be works that ask similar questions, but go deeper into their consequences, especially by exploring what they say about human nature. What if humans made contact with aliens? What would an artificial intelligence do? What if genetic engineering were cheap and widespread? Then there would be works in which the speculative element is something paradigm-shifting. Maybe an evil organization is plotting to create a pandemic. Maybe dinosaur DNA could somehow remain intact for over sixty million years. One way to classify science fiction works is by the scope of the speculative concepts in the work.įor example, the first tier could contain works in which the only speculative elements are things with non-Earth-shattering consequences. Book: Permutation City, by Greg Egan (1979).
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