Just Finished Reading: Permutation City by Greg Egan

In the world of 2050 death has lost its final dominion. For a fee a person’s brain can be scanned and the mind uploaded into Cyberspace there to live forever. But such technological wizardry comes at a price and not just a financial one. Despite advances in computing power the resources needed to ‘run’ the Copy personalities is huge. Competing with them is a new global weather control system which periodically uses all of the worlds computing power. Afraid that they could be legally ‘deleted’ a group of virtual billionaires finance a scheme to produce a whole new universe specifically designed for them to live out their lives for all eternity. But when reality is controllable it’s always best to make sure who exactly is in control.

This was my first Egan book and I was totally blown away by it. It was just packed with so much inventive plotting and ideas that sometimes it was all I could do to keep up – indeed on a few occasions he lost me and I just had to go along for the ride until I got my bearings again. Bringing in such concepts as personal identity, the nature of reality, artificial life and the ethics surrounding death this book is a powerful reminder that in the future anything, and I do mean anything, might very well be possible. The problem we’re going to have is just how to deal with the moral, philosophical and practical aspects of our ever growing technological prowess. Parts of this book really had my brain working overtime with ideas of what actually is real and how that we can tell even who we are. It was a delicious way to spend a train journey or a lunch break at work – despite the funny looks I got when I laughed out loud at the authors amazing audacity. If you like having your mind expanded in the best possible way I can heartily recommend this to you. But be warned: this book will fuck with your head and you may never see things quite the same again. Excellent.