Yeah, good scientific speculations, some very good philosophical dilemmas, but no story, no tension or action, no characters (just names talking to each other, but with nothing to set them apart as personalities), lame and dry writing... in short, extremely boring. I actually "did not like it", the extra star is for the speculations I thought myself because of it. ( )

Permutation City by Greg Egan (1995)

Easily some of the top sci-fi I've read.
Egan manages to juggle a plethora of inspiring ideas alongside a cast of varied and really compelling characters.
Echoes of Berkeley, Leibniz, Hegel, and Nietzsche in the speculations (my reading) plus Von Neumann and Searle (explicitly stated).
Egan's a really impressive writer. Any worries I had about this being at the level of The Matrix or Rick and Morty or Black Mirror were completely unmitigated. This book lives leagues and leagues above those. ( )

574

The whole thing strikes me as preposterous—wish I could call a contingent of analytic philosophers to rip apart the "dust theory," which, to my mind, is an evasion of the real problems one might encounter in considering what makes a "system" sentient. Egan seems to be trying to reconcile structure and subjectivity (whatever that is) by suggesting that the former, once specified, will simply pop into existence complete with its own inner states by hijacking some material substratum: a programmer's idea of metempsychosis?

A kind of tiresome self-assuredness runs through the book as well, the confidence of a devotee of the natural sciences who throws a sundry assortment of analogies to cellular automata theory, differential geometry and relativity into a hat and with a wave of the hand claims to have said something interesting about "consciousness."

As a novel: the prose is rather tedious—neither the characters nor the scene really seem to come to life—and the plot strikes me as flimsy. ( )