Permutation City

The one entry in this shard that is about compute rather than about space. Egan’s premise is that a scanned human mind — a “Copy” — can be run at whatever rate its owner can afford, so subjective time becomes a purchased good and the cost of existing is a line item; the plot follows a man recruiting Copies into an experiment that bootstraps a universe which no longer needs a substrate to run on. It is a hard book, and the argument it makes about what computation is has aged unusually well.

Context: B tier, “also worth reading,” and one of the few standalone entries in the sci-fi sections. a16z’s note is the most directly work-adjacent on the whole list: they single out the novel’s mercenary 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.