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Permutation City

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Permutation City

By: Greg Egan
Narrated by: Adam Epstein
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About this listen

The good news is that you have just awakened into Eternal Life. You are going to live forever. Immortality is a reality. A medical miracle? Not exactly.

The bad news is that you are a scrap of electronic code. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy.

The good news is that there is a way out. By law, every Copy has the option of terminating itself, and waking up to normal flesh-and-blood life again. The bail-out is on the utilities menu. You pull it down...The bad news is that it doesn't work. Someone has blocked the bail-out option. And you know who did it. You did. The other you. The real you. The one that wants to keep you here forever.

©2013 Greg Egan (P)2013 Audible, Inc. Hard Science Fiction Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Fiction

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Editor reviews

Greg Egan concocts a fascinating and thought-provoking novel that explores the role of technology in creating alternate realities, blurring the lines between what is "real" and what isn't. In this future world of globalized economy and devastating climate change, Paul Durham has scanned multiple "Copies" of himself into his computer and becomes entangled with Maria, an Autoverse aficionado. Egan raises interesting questions about artificial intelligence and morality within a technological world, and it's a high concept that is brought to life by Adam Epstein, whose measured performance and faintly rumbling voice adds a palpable and dramatic intrigue to Permutation City.
All stars
Most relevant  

Where does Permutation City rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

The story and concepts are fantastic but is let down a little by the narration.

What other book might you compare Permutation City to, and why?

Islands in the Net or any Hard SciFi / Cyberpunk

What about Adam Epstein’s performance did you like?

There are a few comments here saying Adam Epstein's performance is terrible. While not the best performance in the world it was definitely listenable and once I got used to the way he narrated I began to listen to longer chunks and enjoy the narration.

Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Some of the concepts introduced in the book held my attention a lot more than the actual story.

Any additional comments?

Concepts gave me something to think about after I finished the book. Give it a chance and take your time with it.

Interesting if you take your time

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Worth reading the authors website for further notes and FAQs explaining the dust concept.

Exhilarating finale

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I really can´t give the story a review, because the performance makes it impossible to listen to. EVERY sentence is read in the exact same intonation. Its monotone and it does not fit the story at all.

The performance ruined it

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If you're fascinated by concepts like uploaded minds, and some of the rarely explored aspects of what that entails, this book is great, and one of my favourites.

I just really wish it had a different narrator. Adam Epstein's odd, repetitive intonation in every phrase is extremely distracting and makes listening an unenjoyable experience. Listen to the sample of this book, and get the audiobook if you think you might be able to ignore the repetitive intonation, otherwise read the book yourself, it's great!

Such a great story let down by poor narration

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Obsessed with Permutation City, a very profound novel indeed exploring the true nature of algorithms and the nature of sentience, but a lot of the subtlety will be lost on most people who will simply view it as just another Sci-Fi novel, because they won't be familiar with recursion, or Turing machines, or Turing Complete cellular automata, or von Neumann's reproduction proof, demonstrated by creating a combination (on paper) of a Universal Constructor and a Universal Turing Machine - independently paralleling the discovery of the mechanism of DNA structures by Watson and Crick.

Epstein is a fine narrator on the whole, but why did he make up an accent straight out of Mrs. Brown's Boys when reciting the lines of Elizabeth, Durham's wife? That was utterly hilarious (but not in a good way).

Obsessed with Permutation City, but...

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I like the story so far. But I’m switching to reading the book on my Kindle. The voice acting is very… specific. Highly suggest to listen to a sample first

Extremely bad performance just ruins the whole experience

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Most of the interesting philosophical issues are covered in the early chapters. I listened to the end, but had mostly lost interest over half way.

Great Start But ...

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The ghost in the machine no longer is a ghost but a replication, a mantra for a new form of creation for making life possibilities that are beyond the grasp of death but not human despair.
A complex tale of machine replicating human consciousness and human environments, to sustain immortal consciousness in imperfect machine realities.
This is one of those ideas that are interesting but so full of paradoxes and possibilities of time restrictions, on not just the biological but the physicality of machines and cultures sustaining ideas of the past or possibility of maintaining a code for hundreds or thousands of years.
No matter how virtual your universe it is still in having a primary reality and physics, not to mention and everchanging culture and political influences that would not at all points in time respect the needs of virtual citizens or entities that do not share a common reality, for example, in the now we do not respect even beings that inhabit our reality.
And interesting mind exercise that was better developed by the movie Inception.

Inception AI and singular universes

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I found the story to be intriguing, original and thought-provoking, if a little far-fetched at times. But there was enough to keep me interested, and often hooked, right up to the end. So I'd definitely recommend the book.

Sadly, it was let down by the narrator. Although Adam Epstein does narrate clearly and understandably, there are at least three things he does that I didn't like:

(1) He reads every sentence in exactly the same way. He's not monotonous in the literal sense, but his intonation is identical for every sentence, regardless of what's going on. There was a complete lack of variety. While I don't expect an audiobook to be performed like a play, I do expect the narrator to inject at least _some_ personality into it.

(2) Epstein seems to have a weakness for foreign words, and frequently mispronounces them. In particular, there are a number of German names and words in this book, and he manages to get almost every single one wrong. He also doesn't appear to know how to say "Yorkshire".

(3) His foreign accents are not great. The worst was an Italian character, which was just painful to listen to, and occasionally wandered into something like Jamaican.

I previously reviewed Distress, also by Greg Egan and narrated by Epstein; my comments about the narration for that book are much the same as for this one. So, at least he's consistent, I guess...? :-)

Intriguing and original story; terrible narration

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Greg Egan's novel is brilliant SF and I have read it to myself countless times. The narration in this audiobook is dreadful, though. The narrator's intonation is monotonous, he cannot do accents to save his life and shouldn't have tried, and he doesn't seem to know the difference between "causal" and "casual". I managed to tune out the delivery and focus on the story, but if I didn't already love the story, I wouldn't have got past the first chapter.

Great story, awful narration

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