Subject: Review: PERMUTATION CITY by Greg Egan

From: "Evelyn C Leeper" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 1995 01:00:28 GMT

PERMUTATION CITY by Greg Egan
          Millennium, ISBN 1-85798-218-5, 1995, 310pp, L4.99
                   A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		    Copyright 1995 Evelyn C. Leeper

     When you start this, you may be tempted to compare it to Charles
Platt's SILICON MAN.  But wait, because what you think the book is about is
not what the book is about at all.

     PERMUTATION CITY starts out with the idea of being able to download
one's personality into a computer (the "Autoverse").  (And a friend of mine
who works on projects dealing with virtual reality sorts of things says it's
the best representation he's seen in science fiction of what it would be
like.)  But it goes beyond that, into further levels of remove from
"reality"--which ironically may actually be their own reality.  It reminded
me of the philosopher who dreamt he was a butterfly, but then awoke, only to
try to decide if he was a philosopher who had dreamed he was a butterfly or
a butterfly dreaming he was a philosopher.  There's also a variation of an
idea that my husband Mark had suggested independently: an alternate history
which hasn't *diverged* from ours into a different present, but *converged*
into ours from a different past.  The whole book reminds me of that set of
mirrors from CITIZEN KANE, reflecting back and forth, stretching to infinity
-- and when you think you're looking at reality, it turns out to be just
another mirror.

     In the middle of all these ideas, it would be easy for the characters
and characterization to be given some short-shift, and in fact that is one
problem I had (not to mention the fact that the "same" character can be
different characters, depending on which level of remove he's at).  This in
turn made following some of the convolutions difficult, as I wasn't always
sure of who the characters were.  Still, there are enough ideas in the book
to compensate for this, particularly if ideas are what you are looking for.

     [This is also available in a United States edition, HarperPrism,
US$4.99, ISBN 0-06-105481-X.]

%T      Permutation City
%A      Greg Egan
%C      London
%D      1995
%I      Millennium
%O      paperback, L4.99 [1994]
%G      ISBN 1-85798-218-5
%P      310pp

-- 
Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | [email-masked]
"Why are women reading romances presumed to be any more
idiotic than men watching football?"  --Beth Kolko