Delving into Digital Immortality: A Look at Permutation City
Welcome back to the SciFi Books blog! Today, we’re traveling into the mind-bending world of Greg Egan’s 1994 cyberpunk-philosophy masterpiece Permutation City. This novel doesn’t just ask what it means to be human—it asks whether existence itself has any fundamental grounding in reality or if we’re all just endlessly recursive simulations.
The Story
Permutation City is set in a not-too-distant future where humans can upload their minds into digital reality. These minds—called “Copies”—run as simulations in computer hardware. The protagonist, Paul Durham, is an eccentric millionaire who believes that Copies should not be viewed as mere backups or second-class citizens, but as forms of life in their own right.
Paul takes things to the extreme when he proposes the building of a world entirely separate from our own, named Permutation City, where Copies can exist forever—outside the framework of time, energy, even the need for computation in a conventional sense. This daring—and deeply existential—proposition leads to intense philosophical debate among the Copies and developers involved. Durham’s core belief, called the “Dust Theory,” argues that consciousness is not bound by physical computation but persists through self-consistent logical structures, enabling existence from mere mathematical possibility.
The novel deftly explores multiple realities, subjective time, identity, and the very definition of existence. At its core, Permutation City is both a speculative thriller and a philosophical dialogue, weaving hard science with philosophical ramifications about life, death, memory, and the cosmos.
About the Author: Greg Egan
Greg Egan is one of the most respected names in hard science fiction. An Australian author and trained mathematician, his works typically blend rigorous science with expansive and mind-altering themes. Known for other novels such as Diaspora and Schild’s Ladder, Egan is revered for exploring the outer edges of physics, computer science, and the philosophy of mind.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Egan rarely makes public appearances and maintains a minimal online presence, which only deepens the mystique of his cerebral works. His writing often pushes readers to expand their conceptual frameworks, dabbling in themes like artificial life, post-human evolution, and the nature of consciousness.
Reflection and Intellectual Exploration
Permutation City isn’t just a science fiction novel—it’s a philosophical treatise disguised as a digital odyssey. What makes this book extraordinary is its unflinching exploration of the notion that existence does not require a physical substrate. In geography-free consciousness, where causality and even physics can become optional, Egan forces readers to ask: what makes “you” you? If your mind is simulated down to the atomic level, but in a virtual space, do you cease to be real?
The Dust Theory introduced in the novel poses a radical reassessment of reality—suggesting that if a pattern of consciousness can exist mathematically, then it exists, full stop. This has implications not just for AI and simulated minds, but for the very foundations of metaphysics. Perception, identity, continuity—all are up for scrutiny. Readers interested in the Singularity, mind uploading, and computational theories of mind will find this book a veritable goldmine.
Ultimately, Permutation City is best experienced as both story and thought experiment. It’s a challenging read, one that doesn’t shy away from dense scientific and philosophical passages, but those who commit to the journey will be richly rewarded with insights that linger far beyond the final page.
Happy reading, and I will see you in the next post!