Permutation City
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Permutation City
| Author | Greg Egan |
|---|---|
| Published | 1994 |
| Pages | 340 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Greg Egan’s novel about compute: a scanned human mind — a “Copy” — runs at whatever rate its owner can afford, so subjective time becomes a purchased good, and the plot bootstraps a universe that no longer needs a substrate to run on. A hard book whose argument about what computation is has aged unusually well. |
Permutation City
Where I heard about it
- The a16z infrastructure team — on the a16z Infra Reading List, in Sci-fi / Also worth reading, B tier, as a standalone entry. They single out the novel’s market in “QIPS” — quadrillions of instructions per second — as something that “might feel evocative to any engineer currently buying compute from a hyperscaler.”
Connections
- a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
- Greg Egan — the author.
- Identity — what a Copy is, and whether it is the person.
- Science Fiction — the genre page.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.