Permutation City
- ISBN-10
- 192224001X
- ISBN-13
- 9781922240019
- Category
- Fiction
- Pages
- 310
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1994-04-26
- Publisher
- Greg Egan
- Author
- Greg Egan
Description
Paul Durham keeps making Copies of himself: software simulations of his own brain and body which can be run in virtual reality, albeit seventeen times more slowly than real time. He wants them to be his guinea pigs for a set of experiments about the nature of artificial intelligence, time, and causality, but they keep changing their mind and baling out on him, shutting themselves down. Maria Deluca is an Autoverse addict; she’s unemployed and running out of money, but she can’t stop wasting her time playing around with the cellular automaton known as the Autoverse, a virtual world that follows a simple set of mathematical rules as its “laws of physics”. Paul makes Maria a very strange offer: he asks her to design a seed for an entire virtual biosphere able to exist inside the Autoverse, modelled right down to the molecular level. The job will pay well, and will allow her to indulge her obsession. There has to be a catch, though, because such a seed would be useless without a simulation of the Autoverse large enough to allow the resulting biosphere to grow and flourish — a feat far beyond the capacity of all the computers in the world.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Diaspora
By Greg EganThis diaspora eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an older group of travellers: a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe.
-
Incandescence
By Greg EganHugo Award-winning author Egan returns to the field with Incandescence, a new novel of hard SF. The Amalgam spans nearly the entire galaxy, and is composed of innumerable beings from a wild variety of races, some human or near it, some ...
-
Teranesia
By Greg EganWelcome to Teranesia, the island of butterflies, where evolution has stopped making sense.
-
Schild’s Ladder
By Greg EganFor twenty thousand years, every observable phenomenon in the universe has been successfully explained by the Sarumpaet Rules: the laws governing the dynamics of the quantum graphs that underlie all the constituents of matter and the ...
-
Quarantine
By Greg EganIt's late in the 21st century and bioengineering is now so common that people are able to modify their minds in any way they wish.
-
In the Orbit of Sirens
By T. A. BrunoNightmarish machines have driven humanity into the depths of space. The survivors are forced to adapt to a planet filled with monsters.
-
Distress
By Greg EganBurnt out after completing a documentary on controversial developments in biotechnology, he turns down a chance to report on a baffling new mental disorder known as Distress and instead takes an assignment covering the Einstein Centenary ...
-
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
By Roger WilliamsIt has been read and discussed in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Slovenia, South Africa, and other countries. This Lulu edition is your chance to own "Prime Intellect" in conventional book form.
-
Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War
By Tony DanielFree download! Peruse "The Metaplanetary Gazetteer," created by the author especially for this PerfectBound e-book.
-
One Hundred and One Best Novels 1985-2010
By Paul Di Filippo, Damien BroderickIncludes cover images, plot summaries, and critical analyses of the genre's most significant novels during the past twenty-five years.