10 ms·

Pretty awesome book. Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good.

by k__ 3y ago

hcarlens 3y ago
Yeah, this book was incredible and the tech in it has aged extremely well. Have you tried any of Ted Chiang's books? They're also great hard sci-fi. Another one that plays with similar ideas to Permutation City is the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor.
- k__ 3y ago
  I read Bobiverse which was pretty good, at least I liked all but the last book. Thanks!
myaccount80 3y ago
My fav sci-fi books are: Ubik by Philip K Dick Dark Matter by Blake Crouch Recursion by Blake Crouch Highly recommended
Weidenwalker 3y ago
If you enjoyed Permutation City, you‘d probably also like „The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect“ by Roger Williams! It explores a similar premise of a post-singularity future (though the mechanism is superintelligence rather than cellular automata/mind uploading), but rather than imagining exactly how we‘d get there, it tries to imagine what human flourishing would look like in a world of perfect abundance!
- Cacti 3y ago
  Oh, is that the one with the incredibly explicit, and incredibly unnecessary, sex based around the authors obsession with fucking dead bodies and fucking and impregnating his daughter? I’m very far from a prude, but JFC. Its clearly the authors vehicle to play out his fantasies, masquerading as a scientific-fi novel.
  - gpvos 3y ago
    You could try his other writings, such as The Curators, which I just finished and can recommend. It has some sex in it but much more normal, and the violence is mostly abstract (like destroying a planet by teleporting it into its star). Available at his website http://localroger.com/ http://localroger.com/ .
    - Cacti 3y ago
      Thanks for the rec, but my issue is less with the book and more with the author. And his non-existent editor.
  - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    Not sure we are talking about the same book here. It's certainly quite twisted, with people taking out death contracts that allow them to die painfully (but they are ressurected by the godlike AI every time). There's also torture and other unsavoury things. To me, this was not unnecessary, but quite fundamental to the story. Everyone was trapped by the AI who would not let anyone come to harm without their permission anyway, and nobody could die. Various people tried to push back against these constraints in creative but disturbing ways.
    - Cacti 3y ago
      I was going to post the final few pages of the book here as one example, but it’s way more graphic than I remembered, so I won’t. But nothing at all was served by us reading about how deftly the main characters 13 year old daughter blew him until he was hard enough to ride. Or the main characters musings about their two (very underage) children having sex and how he was totally ok with it. Or the long section about the wife urging him to impregnate his daughter. Or the other dozen weird-ass things in that chapter. There’s several more examples like this in the book. The author is not exactly the first to explore potential consequences of effective immortality, but they are one of the few who was seemingly unable to do it without repeatedly getting to multi-page, graphic, and violent, sex scenes. Like, if one feels the need for that kind of thing, William S Burroughs and Tom Wolfe already beat that one to death decades ago. As another example more relevant to this crowd, Altered Carbon covered the exact same subject matter, and did so without needing to write smut for teenage boys.
iainmerrick 3y ago
It's an oldie (1977), but plays with some similar ideas and I think it really holds up: The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley.
G3rn0ti 3y ago
> Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good. You could consider „Diaspora“ by the same author a good sequel a couple of thousands of years into the future where humanity is but a faint memory called „dream apes“ as living fossils in this story.
- k__ 3y ago
  That sounds cool. Thanks!
- nyssos 3y ago
  > where humanity is but a faint memory called „dream apes“ as living fossils in this story. Dream apes are the descendants of an extreme primitivist subculture, the "statics" the protagonists visit at the beginning are baseline humans.
Frotag 3y ago
Been asking myself the same question for months. So Egan's stories are basically a mathy whodunit -- start from first (fictional) principles and eventually solve some universe-scale question or crisis. His characters are basically walking textbooks meant for info dumping / FAQing the derivations. In that light, some similar stories I've found are... - Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward) - Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Liu Cixin, 3 body problem author) - The Andromeda Strain (Crichton, more medsci than math) - Schilds Ladder, Diaspora (other Egan stuff) The first two are especially similar to Egan's stuff in that the only real character is the civilization / setting not the people. I've also tried some of the more common hard scifi recommendations like Reynolds and Stephenson, but I personally don't enjoy the dialogue / scenes meant for character development. I guess it's because the stories usually take a human-scale perspective instead of taking a what-if to its reality-bending extreme like Egan does.
- k__ 3y ago
  Hm... I didn't like Cixin or Crichton.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  You should try the old master, Hal Clement. Mission of Gravity is a classic "start from first principles" story.
cdogl 3y ago
It’s not an easy read, but Blindsight by Peter Watts has some equally unique and compelling synthesis of scientific concepts into a big concept plot.
- bejd 3y ago
  Blindsight hit all the right hard sci-fi notes for me. I've yet to find something that scratches that same itch.
  - paul80808 3y ago
    Second this recommendation. Blindsight hits much harder and faster than Egan - and in my opinion the writing is much tighter. Similar focus on science-based idea exploration, particularly in regards to theories of consciousness, brain structure, probability, and vampires. If you like Egan I'd be shocked if you didn't like watts. He is one of the hidden gems of science fiction and an absolute gift to humanity.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  Blindsight is his best book, but Watts has written a lot of great stuff, I recommend all of Rifters and, for something a bit different, especially the Sunflowers cycle.
  - badcppdev 3y ago
    Standard internet Watts warning that the Rift novels have random sexual torture just in case you prefer to avoid that
    - gpderetta 3y ago
      Right, yes, especially the last Rifter book made me wonder a bit about the sanity of the author.
      - k__ 3y ago
asymmetric 3y ago
One thing you can try when looking for similar books to one you liked, is to check Library Thing: https://www.librarything.com/work/18880 https://www.librarything.com/work/18880 In my non-scientific assessment, it's better than GoodReads.
spiralx 3y ago
Stephen Baxter's books are along the same lines, start with one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelike_Infinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelike_Infinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel)
- gpderetta 3y ago
  The only think I have read of Baxter is his short story Last Contact[1], but I still think about it very often. Reading the Xeele sequence is in my todo list. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Contact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Contact
prepend 3y ago
Completely different style but I think Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan introduces lots of new ideas and interacts with them realistically. The first season of the show was good but very different than the book.
- sorokod 3y ago
  The Netflix version is a diluted version of a rough and angry book. The idea of consciousness executed in hardware is explored, including simulated torture in subjective slow time (possibly in one of the sequels: Broken Angels or Woken Furies).
  - prepend 3y ago
    I think they also changed the societal and cultural aspects quite a bit. In the book, everything was accepted and there were weren’t any “downtrodden.” The show changed all this with the meths being super billionaires and then there being lots of poor people. And the whole thing with the rebellion. Book takashi was an envoy super spy person with immense training that stuck with him through sleeves. Tv takashi is like a rebel/terrorist who just got some training and has personality. In the book, it was fruitless to fight against the government because what’s the point? The tv show seems to want to make a more simple rebels vs big brother. Still cool, but I think changed the flavor quite a bit. Second season, of course, is rubbish and I wouldn’t recommend watching it to anyone. It’s suspiciously horrible given how good the first was.
    - sorokod 3y ago
      Not sure about "it was fruitless to fight against the government because what’s the point", a rebellion is a worthwhile thing in itself. "Make it personal" [1] is almost a call to arms. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/169549-the-personal-as-everyone-s-so-fucking-fond-of-saying-is https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/169549-the-personal-as-ever...
PBnFlash 3y ago
If you can handle the science changing since publication in the 1930s(!!!) Olaf Stapledon is simply remarkable. "Last and first men" is one of my favorite books for just how unique it is, but "star maker" has some interesting parallels
ArekDymalski 3y ago
Let me share several books that brought me a similar level of awe, due to the scope and creativity of the world-building: 1. Accelerando by Charles Stross - for THE Scope. 2. Quantum Thief by Hanny Rajaniemi - for the similarly high entry threshold and rewarding experience when you cross it. 3. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds - for a fascinating vision of future human societies. I'd be happy to find more books like these.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  I enjoyed pretty much everything from cstross and Reynolds (pushing ice and especially house of suns are great stand alone). I enjoyed quantum thief but somehow I have yet to go beyond the first book.
- yboris 3y ago
  Accelerando is amazing; see it being recommended several times in this post!
- mietek 3y ago
  I read and enjoyed these quite a bit, so let me add a few more to the list. - “The Fall Revolution” tetralogy by Ken MacLeod: “The Star Fraction”, “The Stone Canal”, “The Cassini Division”, and “The Sky Road” - “Void Star” by Zachary Mason - “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross - “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts - “Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” by Jacek Dukaj - “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge - “The Golden Oecumene” trilogy by John C. Wright: “The Golden Age”, “The Phoenix Exultant”, and “The Golden Transcendence” - “Gnomon” by Nick Harkaway - the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks
marginrabbit 3y ago
People have already mentioned qntm, but I’ll put another plug in for “Valuable Humans in Transit” https://qntm.org/vhitaos https://qntm.org/vhitaos Sol Quy with monthly short stories: https://solquy.substack.com/p/111123-the-gunslinger https://solquy.substack.com/p/111123-the-gunslinger Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time” series is fantastic. Vernor Vinge can be a bit variable, but I would start with “A Fire Upon the Deep”
- zeekaran 3y ago
  Children of Time is great. Children of Ruin was a lot of fun, but I was convinced by friends Children of Memory wasn't worth it.
  - drewthestu 3y ago
    [dead]
  - ohlookcake 3y ago
    Children of Memory is my favourite in the series! If you liked the first two (#1 was significantly better imo), you should 100% go for the third
sat0ri 3y ago
Have you read Gibson's "Sprawl" and "Bridge" trilogies? I read them > ten years ago and haven't read any sci-fi since, these books kinda put a subconscious "it does not get better, better diversify into other genres" attitude into my brain and personally I'm OK with that. Was reading a lot of sci-fi before that.
_dain_ 3y ago
Novella, free to read: The Epiphany of Gliese 581 https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581 https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581 >A linguist, a chemist, and a comparative psychologist explore the ruins of a dead superintelligence.
- jz391 3y ago
  Excellent Sci-Fi yarn, with nostalgic references. I particularly liked the VAX-11 and LISP reference ("ideograms in a formal language full of parentheses")

Pretty awesome book. Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good.

by k__ 3y ago

Pretty awesome book. Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good.

Yeah, this book was incredible and the tech in it has aged extremely well. Have you tried any of Ted Chiang's books? They're also great hard sci-fi. Another one that plays with similar ideas to Permutation City is the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor.

k__ 3y ago
I read Bobiverse which was pretty good, at least I liked all but the last book. Thanks!

myaccount80 3y ago

My fav sci-fi books are: Ubik by Philip K Dick Dark Matter by Blake Crouch Recursion by Blake Crouch Highly recommended

Weidenwalker 3y ago

If you enjoyed Permutation City, you‘d probably also like „The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect“ by Roger Williams! It explores a similar premise of a post-singularity future (though the mechanism is superintelligence rather than cellular automata/mind uploading), but rather than imagining exactly how we‘d get there, it tries to imagine what human flourishing would look like in a world of perfect abundance!

Cacti 3y ago
Oh, is that the one with the incredibly explicit, and incredibly unnecessary, sex based around the authors obsession with fucking dead bodies and fucking and impregnating his daughter? I’m very far from a prude, but JFC. Its clearly the authors vehicle to play out his fantasies, masquerading as a scientific-fi novel.
- gpvos 3y ago
  You could try his other writings, such as The Curators, which I just finished and can recommend. It has some sex in it but much more normal, and the violence is mostly abstract (like destroying a planet by teleporting it into its star). Available at his website http://localroger.com/ http://localroger.com/ .
  - Cacti 3y ago
    Thanks for the rec, but my issue is less with the book and more with the author. And his non-existent editor.
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  Not sure we are talking about the same book here. It's certainly quite twisted, with people taking out death contracts that allow them to die painfully (but they are ressurected by the godlike AI every time). There's also torture and other unsavoury things. To me, this was not unnecessary, but quite fundamental to the story. Everyone was trapped by the AI who would not let anyone come to harm without their permission anyway, and nobody could die. Various people tried to push back against these constraints in creative but disturbing ways.
  - Cacti 3y ago
    I was going to post the final few pages of the book here as one example, but it’s way more graphic than I remembered, so I won’t. But nothing at all was served by us reading about how deftly the main characters 13 year old daughter blew him until he was hard enough to ride. Or the main characters musings about their two (very underage) children having sex and how he was totally ok with it. Or the long section about the wife urging him to impregnate his daughter. Or the other dozen weird-ass things in that chapter. There’s several more examples like this in the book. The author is not exactly the first to explore potential consequences of effective immortality, but they are one of the few who was seemingly unable to do it without repeatedly getting to multi-page, graphic, and violent, sex scenes. Like, if one feels the need for that kind of thing, William S Burroughs and Tom Wolfe already beat that one to death decades ago. As another example more relevant to this crowd, Altered Carbon covered the exact same subject matter, and did so without needing to write smut for teenage boys.

iainmerrick 3y ago

It's an oldie (1977), but plays with some similar ideas and I think it really holds up: The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley.

G3rn0ti 3y ago

> Would be cool if someone could recommend sci-fi that equally good. You could consider „Diaspora“ by the same author a good sequel a couple of thousands of years into the future where humanity is but a faint memory called „dream apes“ as living fossils in this story.

k__ 3y ago
That sounds cool. Thanks!
nyssos 3y ago
> where humanity is but a faint memory called „dream apes“ as living fossils in this story. Dream apes are the descendants of an extreme primitivist subculture, the "statics" the protagonists visit at the beginning are baseline humans.

Frotag 3y ago

Been asking myself the same question for months. So Egan's stories are basically a mathy whodunit -- start from first (fictional) principles and eventually solve some universe-scale question or crisis. His characters are basically walking textbooks meant for info dumping / FAQing the derivations. In that light, some similar stories I've found are... - Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward) - Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Liu Cixin, 3 body problem author) - The Andromeda Strain (Crichton, more medsci than math) - Schilds Ladder, Diaspora (other Egan stuff) The first two are especially similar to Egan's stuff in that the only real character is the civilization / setting not the people. I've also tried some of the more common hard scifi recommendations like Reynolds and Stephenson, but I personally don't enjoy the dialogue / scenes meant for character development. I guess it's because the stories usually take a human-scale perspective instead of taking a what-if to its reality-bending extreme like Egan does.

k__ 3y ago
Hm... I didn't like Cixin or Crichton.
yencabulator 3y ago
You should try the old master, Hal Clement. Mission of Gravity is a classic "start from first principles" story.

cdogl 3y ago

It’s not an easy read, but Blindsight by Peter Watts has some equally unique and compelling synthesis of scientific concepts into a big concept plot.

bejd 3y ago
Blindsight hit all the right hard sci-fi notes for me. I've yet to find something that scratches that same itch.
- paul80808 3y ago
  Second this recommendation. Blindsight hits much harder and faster than Egan - and in my opinion the writing is much tighter. Similar focus on science-based idea exploration, particularly in regards to theories of consciousness, brain structure, probability, and vampires. If you like Egan I'd be shocked if you didn't like watts. He is one of the hidden gems of science fiction and an absolute gift to humanity.
gpderetta 3y ago
Blindsight is his best book, but Watts has written a lot of great stuff, I recommend all of Rifters and, for something a bit different, especially the Sunflowers cycle.
- badcppdev 3y ago
  Standard internet Watts warning that the Rift novels have random sexual torture just in case you prefer to avoid that
  - gpderetta 3y ago
    Right, yes, especially the last Rifter book made me wonder a bit about the sanity of the author.
    - k__ 3y ago

asymmetric 3y ago

One thing you can try when looking for similar books to one you liked, is to check Library Thing: https://www.librarything.com/work/18880 https://www.librarything.com/work/18880 In my non-scientific assessment, it's better than GoodReads.

spiralx 3y ago

Stephen Baxter's books are along the same lines, start with one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelike_Infinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelike_Infinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(Baxter_novel)

gpderetta 3y ago
The only think I have read of Baxter is his short story Last Contact[1], but I still think about it very often. Reading the Xeele sequence is in my todo list. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Contact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Contact

prepend 3y ago

Completely different style but I think Altered Carbon by Richard K Morgan introduces lots of new ideas and interacts with them realistically. The first season of the show was good but very different than the book.

sorokod 3y ago
The Netflix version is a diluted version of a rough and angry book. The idea of consciousness executed in hardware is explored, including simulated torture in subjective slow time (possibly in one of the sequels: Broken Angels or Woken Furies).
- prepend 3y ago
  I think they also changed the societal and cultural aspects quite a bit. In the book, everything was accepted and there were weren’t any “downtrodden.” The show changed all this with the meths being super billionaires and then there being lots of poor people. And the whole thing with the rebellion. Book takashi was an envoy super spy person with immense training that stuck with him through sleeves. Tv takashi is like a rebel/terrorist who just got some training and has personality. In the book, it was fruitless to fight against the government because what’s the point? The tv show seems to want to make a more simple rebels vs big brother. Still cool, but I think changed the flavor quite a bit. Second season, of course, is rubbish and I wouldn’t recommend watching it to anyone. It’s suspiciously horrible given how good the first was.
  - sorokod 3y ago
    Not sure about "it was fruitless to fight against the government because what’s the point", a rebellion is a worthwhile thing in itself. "Make it personal" [1] is almost a call to arms. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/169549-the-personal-as-everyone-s-so-fucking-fond-of-saying-is https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/169549-the-personal-as-ever...

PBnFlash 3y ago

If you can handle the science changing since publication in the 1930s(!!!) Olaf Stapledon is simply remarkable. "Last and first men" is one of my favorite books for just how unique it is, but "star maker" has some interesting parallels

ArekDymalski 3y ago

Let me share several books that brought me a similar level of awe, due to the scope and creativity of the world-building: 1. Accelerando by Charles Stross - for THE Scope. 2. Quantum Thief by Hanny Rajaniemi - for the similarly high entry threshold and rewarding experience when you cross it. 3. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds - for a fascinating vision of future human societies. I'd be happy to find more books like these.

gpderetta 3y ago
I enjoyed pretty much everything from cstross and Reynolds (pushing ice and especially house of suns are great stand alone). I enjoyed quantum thief but somehow I have yet to go beyond the first book.
yboris 3y ago
Accelerando is amazing; see it being recommended several times in this post!
mietek 3y ago
I read and enjoyed these quite a bit, so let me add a few more to the list. - “The Fall Revolution” tetralogy by Ken MacLeod: “The Star Fraction”, “The Stone Canal”, “The Cassini Division”, and “The Sky Road” - “Void Star” by Zachary Mason - “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross - “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts - “Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” by Jacek Dukaj - “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge - “The Golden Oecumene” trilogy by John C. Wright: “The Golden Age”, “The Phoenix Exultant”, and “The Golden Transcendence” - “Gnomon” by Nick Harkaway - the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks

marginrabbit 3y ago

People have already mentioned qntm, but I’ll put another plug in for “Valuable Humans in Transit” https://qntm.org/vhitaos https://qntm.org/vhitaos Sol Quy with monthly short stories: https://solquy.substack.com/p/111123-the-gunslinger https://solquy.substack.com/p/111123-the-gunslinger Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time” series is fantastic. Vernor Vinge can be a bit variable, but I would start with “A Fire Upon the Deep”

zeekaran 3y ago
Children of Time is great. Children of Ruin was a lot of fun, but I was convinced by friends Children of Memory wasn't worth it.
- drewthestu 3y ago
  [dead]
- ohlookcake 3y ago
  Children of Memory is my favourite in the series! If you liked the first two (#1 was significantly better imo), you should 100% go for the third

sat0ri 3y ago

Have you read Gibson's "Sprawl" and "Bridge" trilogies? I read them > ten years ago and haven't read any sci-fi since, these books kinda put a subconscious "it does not get better, better diversify into other genres" attitude into my brain and personally I'm OK with that. Was reading a lot of sci-fi before that.

_dain_ 3y ago

Novella, free to read: The Epiphany of Gliese 581 https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581 https://borretti.me/fiction/eog581 >A linguist, a chemist, and a comparative psychologist explore the ruins of a dead superintelligence.

jz391 3y ago
Excellent Sci-Fi yarn, with nostalgic references. I particularly liked the VAX-11 and LISP reference ("ideograms in a formal language full of parentheses")