Greg Egan's Permutation City FAQ

I just found this Frequently Asked Questions page that Greg Egan himself wrote in response to questions readers have asked him about his novel Permutation City.

I am really impressed with how introspective and self-critical he is about his award-winning book. Other authors might have gotten defensive about people asking the questions that people obviously asked of him, but he does not; he actually tries to answer them. He talks openly about parts of the book that he could have done better, or that are inconsistent.

His answer to question #6 is my favorite:

Q6: What do you regret most about Permutation City?

A6: Something quite separate from the issues with the Dust Theory mentioned above, although these are all valid points. What I regret most is my uncritical treatment of the idea of allowing intelligent life to evolve in the Autoverse. Sure, this is a common science-fictional idea, but when I thought about it properly (some years after the book was published), I realised that anyone who actually did this would have to be utterly morally bankrupt. To get from micro-organisms to intelligent life this way would involve an immense amount of suffering, with billions of sentient creatures living, struggling and dying along the way. Yes, this happened to our own ancestors, but that doesn’t give us the right to inflict the same kind of suffering on anyone else.

This is potentially an important issue in the real world. It might not be long before people are seriously trying to “evolve” artificial intelligence in their computers. Now, it’s one thing to use genetic algorithms to come up with various specialised programs that perform simple tasks, but to “breed”, assess, and kill millions of sentient programs would be an abomination. If the first AI was created that way, it would have every right to despise its creators.

It's worth reading, for people who really want more noodling on the issues raised by that book.

Book Review: Permutation City

Greg Egan
1994
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – – 

What Egan is trying to do in Permutation City is to examine a large and diverse array of issues related to the virtualization of human life. He uses his various characters to explore whether you can achieve immortality as a virtual copy of yourself and what that would be like; whether it would be possible to create life forms that could actually evolve in a virtual environment; the mental adjustments that you might go through upon waking up and discovering that you are a virtual copy of your former self; how economic inequality might affect your virtual existence; and even what a virtual hell might be like. 

All of this is pretty ambitious. And some of the specific scenes are certainly thought-provoking and vividly written. But the main story line is not at all compelling, leaves many more promising smaller story lines unfinished, and is based on a vaguely explained metaphysical theory with feeble conceptual underpinnings. It seems as if Egan first brainstormed all of the virtual reality theories he could think of, and then just connected them all together with the thinnest and stretchiest of story skins. 

In the world of Permutation City, in 2045, people can create fully sentient electronic copies of themselves, with memories intact. These “Copies” live in virtual environments but can interact with flesh-and-blood humans through immersive interfaces. People can extend their lives a long time this way; for example, many major companies are still being run by virtual Copies of their founders, many years after the originals have died.

There is a catch, though: creating a Copy of yourself is expensive. And the processors required to run your Copy and its virtual environment are expensive too, and usually require a trust be set up to fund them in perpetuity. So self-virtualization is really only available to the wealthy. And less wealthy Copies running on cheaper processors can be stuck living at speeds many times slower than real time, making it hard for them to interact with other, faster Copies, and next to impossible to interact with the outside world.

The economic inequality of processor speed for virtual humans could be an interesting plot in itself. Egan creates, for example, a radical separatist movement among Copies, “Solipsist Nation,” which advocates turning entirely inward to your virtual self and cutting yourself off completely from the “real” outside world. And some equality-minded faster Copies, particularly those in Solipsist Nation, like to go “slumming” at slow-down bars, where all of the Copies in the bar sync themselves down to the speed of the lowest person there. But these are only incidental topics, dealt with only briefly; in fact, the only two characters in the book who talk about these issues are dead ends with almost no bearing on the main story line whatsoever.

No, the main narrative instead centers on the crackpot theories of main character #1: Paul Durham, insurance salesman by profession and virtual reality experimentalist by passion, who claims to have been reincarnated from dust twenty-three times.

Durham likes to create Copies of himself to experiment with, to analyze his reactions to being virtualized. The book opens, in fact, with a scene of one of his Copies waking up and realizing that he is virtual, not a flesh-and-blood human. The Copy goes through shock, depression, panic, and then anger as he realizes that the fail-safes in his environment won’t allow him to commit virtual suicide.

[Note here to the editor of Permutation City: the term that Egan uses to describe committing virtual suicide—when Copies can’t cope with being virtual and turn themselves off permanently—is “baling out.” He uses this term repeatedly. Unless he is making some clever pun on the word “bale,” as in “baleful,” I think he meant to use the term “bailing out,” which means to remove yourself from a harmful situation. If it is indeed not a pun, then it is misspelled in the text, over and over and over.]

Durham’s Copy’s frustration is understandable. The thought processes he goes through and the feelings he has, when he thinks about how he can no longer touch his girlfriend or walk beyond the borders of his virtual world, ring very true. He knows he could simulate those things, but they wouldn’t be real, and that is tremendously depressing to him at first. He knows that the simulation of his virtual world disappears when it is out of his eyesight, that none of the visuals are generated by the computer until they need to be generated to protect his illusions; he wishes he could turn his head fast enough to see the parts that aren’t there.

This scene is one of the best in the book, and the issues it raises might have been enough to hang the entire plot on. It brings up good questions, such as: if everything feels real around me, but I know it isn’t real, does it make a difference? Should it? What kind of life could I build for myself in a virtual world? Does it make me less of a person to be virtual? How do I go about accepting who I am?

But rather than musing over these questions for long, Durham’s Copy quickly starts to accept his situation. And, sitting there in his unique environment, he comes up with a theory, which he calls the “dust theory,” that goes like this:

Everything is made of tiny cosmic particles, or what Durham’s Copy calls “dust.” If there are sentient beings in that dust, their very beingness—or, as he says, “the internal logic of their experience”—is strong enough that if they are somehow destroyed, that the particles that made them up will still combine in an infinite set of permutations that eventually will result in them coming into existence again.

Durham theorizes further that he can use this wackjob theory to create a virtual refuge for Copies that is completely unconnected and protected from the real world. He thinks that if he builds the seed of this environment correctly, loads a bunch of Copies into it, launches it into the void, and then cuts it off from the outside world, that it will continue functioning, and even growing, forever. It won’t need any physical presence in our universe at all, so it won’t be subject to real-world competition for power or processors, or the potential of being shut down.

To provide ethically questionable entertainment that could last potentially forever for the residents of his refuge, Paul then enlists the help of main character #2, Maria Deluca. Deluca is a hobbyist who spends much of her free time playing with virtual bacteria in a bacterium-modelling virtual universe, and she has recently become the first person ever to develop a virtual bacterium that actually evolves and adapts to its environment.

On what I might uncharitably say is the thinnest of premises to include another not-fully-realized virtual-reality-related thought experiment in the book, Durham hires Deluca to build the seed of an entirely new planetary system, running separate from but parallel to the human Copies’ refuge. This alien environment will be packed with the building blocks of virtual life, designed to grow and evolve into a fully diverse ecosystem of its own, for the Copies to observe. (This is another subplot that might have been good as the fully-developed center of a novel of its own: following the alien ecology’s evolution in detail, interacting with the inhabitants, answering their questions about their creation, coping with the moral issues it raises. But this was not to be.)

Durham then goes out and recruits a bunch of wealthy Copies to fund the project. One of these is Thomas Riemann, who, unbeknownst to anyone living today, long ago in his dark youthful past, semi-accidentally killed his girlfriend. The murder continually weighs on his conscience, and he runs through the incident in his mind over and over again. (Riemann’s agony, too, might have been good explored as a story by itself: how prolonging your life through virtualization doesn’t rid you of your past mistakes, and how it can even turn an infinite lifespan into a sort of hell. Egan deals with this a bit, but then lets it fizzle out.)

Durham and Deluca set up the seed for the standalone environment, which they are calling Elysium, pack it full of billionaire client Copies and the seed of Deluca’s virtual alien planet, and launch it out into the ether. 

And it turns out that the dust theory works, that the Copies survive, that Elysium works, that Deluca’s alien world works, and that it all keeps growing and expanding and evolving, unconnected from the real world they left behind. 

And then, thousands of years later, Elysium is faced with a new crisis, when the alien planet has developed sentient life forms and the two environments appear to be affecting each other, encroaching on each other. 

Permutation City certainly has some bright spots: isolated subplots with potential, isolated sections with interesting narratives. But the main story is flat and almost emotionless with the barest excuse for a rationale, and the subplots are stuck into it haphazardly. In general, it does a lot of metaphysical navel-gazing about esoteric virtual reality theories without blending them into a coherent whole—much less an exciting story.

Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall

I should say here that it is possible to incorporate questions about perception and virtual reality into riveting stories. Take, for example, maybe half of the works of Philip K. Dick. Dick may have done such a good job of it because he was genuinely afraid of not being able to distinguish between reality and artificial memories, and he let his real fear come through into his writing.