At 12:48 AM 4/5/01 EDT, Spudboy wrote:
><< And as explored in vivid detail by Greg Egan in _Permutation City_
>for me, this must be a 'pearls before swine situation'. I have
>read and re-read the book several times, and just have trouble connecting to
>it. Perhaps SI's will one day give tests on it to see if a human is
>downloadable? REMIT NOT PAUCITY.
PERMUTATION CITY opens with a (rather bad) quasi poem comprising two
stanzas of 10 lines, starting with
Into a mute crypt, I
Chapter headings are like this:
Rip, tie, cut toy man
Remit not paucity
A notable exception to the algorithm is
Rut City
SPOILER
The lines are all permutations of the letters in... ta rah... PERMUTATION
CITY.
The `poem' is a list found in `a discarded notepad' in a madhouse in 2045.
There's probably a clue in their number as to the number of iterations of
the protagonist's virtual life (I think; it's years since I read the book),
and therefore the ontological status of the main narrative.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:44 MDT