Note: This is an older review to introduce Substackers to our house style (TCTIN). A majority of the books we review will be advanced review copies (ARCs) given to our parent companies, everafterbooks.uk and theubergroup.org.
The coolest thing I noticed about the science fiction novel Permutation City was how focusing on the world of the story itself, even to the exclusion of character development, can deliver a satisfying, memorable experience (blurb-level spoilers follow).
Stories about the future mostly seem to focus on characters that are more interesting than the worlds they live in. I think this is because people and what they do are usually more memorable than places or things. Sure, alien planets and digital realms are full of eye candy and danger, but these mostly exist to give characters something to worry about. And, truthfully, many of these places aren't very different from the world we live in.
Permutation City is one of a few books I've read that turns this idea on its head — its world is very different from ours, but the people are almost depressingly normal. Just as stupid, crazy, impulsive, the opposite, and everything else that I'm used to in real life.
In Permutation City, the climate has degraded as everyone expects, global computing has grown by orders of magnitude, and generations of people have digitized their personalities and inserted perfect, sentient copies of themselves into cloud-hosted digital realities, where they can live forever. But, of course, immortality isn't free, and even copies must earn a living to avoid grinding to a halt without processing power, or simply getting deleted.
With that setup, the story presses "play," and all of these parts start moving. Copies socialize with, enrich, and betray their living selves. They create and modify more of themselves, then worlds within their world for these descendants to inhabit. Among them are tycoons, thieves, stowaways, lovers, artists, explorers, and (for lack of a better term) gods. And then somebody kicks off a new ecosystem, which (much later) yields a unique and dangerous kind of intelligent life.
By the time I was done with Permutation City, I didn't really like any of the characters, but I respected them. They did their job — they lived and died believably within a reality the human race has both been working towards for its entire existence, but is no way prepared for. This reminds me of Three Body Problem, where normal, everyday people with more than enough problems find themselves caught up in a reality-warping, life-or-death struggle to save the human race.
Much like its characters, I didn't so much enjoy Permutation City as I respected it. It showed me a reality I could have generally anticipated, but not experienced or felt like its unexceptional inhabitants do. Thanks to this approach, the world of Permutation City has stuck with me in a way that few others have.
Are there character arcs? Seems like it would be rough to rope people in these days without adequate character development.