Permutation City
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Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
Permutation City
Buy Now for £18.99
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Narrated by:
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Adam Epstein
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By:
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Greg Egan
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.Listeners also enjoyed...
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.
Exhilarating finale
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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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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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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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Unique and complex story held back by poor narration
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