Permutation City (Subjective Cosmology #2) 
by 

Greg Egan

 

Fractious Fakes

What happens when your virtual clone hates your guts? Well apparently “Panic. Regret. Analysis. Acceptance” in that order. “People reacted badly to waking up as Copies.” Well, yeah of course. It’s a bit like finding out your girlfriend is really a transgender biker - a mixture of fearful awe and fascinated interest. 

From a literary point of view, Egan has done something both awesome and interesting: he’s created a sort of reverse allegory. Instead of language taking on an alternative meaning from its literal referents, he has people taking on the literal qualities of language - vocabulary, grammar, and effects. You aren’t what you eat but what can be said about you, and programmed, in Permutation City.

The key to Egan’s intention, I think, is in his protagonist’s muttering of a secret password, “Abulafia.” This is a reference to a medieval Kabbalist who, as Kabbalists are wont to do, turned everything into language in order to disorient those who use it -people in other words - and, paradoxically, thereby to free language-users from the insidious power of the language which is actually using them (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

The device of using a virtual reality ‘Copy’ within a virtual reality world - “urine and feces production optional” - is something Abulafia would have grasped immediately as obvious and necessary given the availability of the technology. This is Tohu, the Shattering of the Vessels through which the original unity of the universe is broken into fragments, both physical and spiritual. Tohu happens psychically as well for individuals. That is, bits of the Self are strewn about creation in a most unsatisfactory and unhappy state. 

These spiritual bits can become quite unruly in their condition of fragmented isolation. They are desperate to end their loneliness by re-integrating with the original whole. This is Tikkun, a sort of reconstruction of psychic pieces into a new entity. Paradoxically, of course, such a ‘rebirth’ also involves the ‘death’ of the fragmented Selves. If anything were to impede this process, an aberrant techno-savvy Kabbalist for example, there is an interesting story to be told.

And Egan tells the story masterfully. I can only marvel at how he finds his inspiration for a high-tech tale in an ancient wisdom like Kabbalah, and then proceeds to out-Kabbalah even the Kabbalists with his creativity.