Permutation City

I work in computers for a living and even I had to stop reading twice to go look up Dust Theory outside the book, just to make sure I understood what Egan was actually claiming before I let him take the next fifty pages somewhere with it. I ended up spending genuinely more time on outside explainers than I spent reading the chapters that introduce the idea, which either means the book failed to land its own concept or means it did exactly what good hard sci-fi is supposed to do, send you down a rabbit hole. I’ve landed somewhere in between.

Plot-wise, this is thin, and I don’t think that’s a controversial thing to say, there’s a real argument that if you stripped out the philosophical defense of the premise you’d have something closer to a novella than a novel. I didn’t mind that as much as some people apparently do, I was there for the ideas more than the story, but go in knowing the pacing reflects that choice.

Where the book actually surprised me was the characters holding up better than I expected from something this idea-dense. Maria felt like an actual person making actual choices, not just a mouthpiece for the concept, and Durham’s quiet, unshakeable obsession with seeing his theory through is well drawn even though he gets less interior space than Maria does.

Four stars. It’s homework in the best sense, and I mean that as a compliment for the first time in my life.