![]() This Copy is identical in every way to the original person, and is often used by the rich and wealthy as a way to obtain partial immortality following death. In Egan’s version of the future, society has developed technology which allows one to create a precise one-for-one digital Copy of themselves. Egan explores the idea of artificial intelligence in a way I simply haven’t seen done before – where an AI is not a discrete individual that can only exist as an individual, but as a program which can copy and edit itself to be whatever it wishes… not to mention what that means where humanity is concerned. ![]() This does not feel like a novel which was written in 1994 – it feels like a novel someone wrote today about a slightly alternate vision of our present day future. Egan’s novel is almost distressingly prescient, dealing with modern concepts like sorting through spam email, distributed computing, and a world that lives and works predominantly online. Greg Egan is a writer for fans of “big idea” hard science fiction, and Permutation City absolutely lives up to this. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life. Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a “machine” with a finite number of possible states in a finite timeline he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. ![]() r/Fantasy Bingo Squares: Cyberpunk (HM), Australian Author, AI Character (HM) Publisher: Millenium Orion Publishing Group ![]()
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