Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Permutation City is a science fiction novel by Greg Egan that explores various philosophical aspects of artificial life and simulations of intelligence. It won the John W. Campbell Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year in 1995 and was cited in a 2003 Scientific American article on multiverses. Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers. Permutation City asks many of the same kinds of philosophical questions as The Matrix, Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell -- does anything differentiate a perfect computer simulation of a person from a "real" one? -- but its textual nature allows it to push the ideas further. Egan gleefully deconstructs and undermines traditional notions of self, future, personality, and even physical reality. A loose sequel, Diaspora was published in 1997. Its ISBN number is ISBN 1-85798-218-5. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.