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Permutation City
- Narrated by: Adam Epstein
- Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins
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Publisher's summary
The good news is that you have just awakened into Eternal Life. You are going to live forever. Immortality is a reality. A medical miracle? Not exactly.
The bad news is that you are a scrap of electronic code. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy.
The good news is that there is a way out. By law, every Copy has the option of terminating itself, and waking up to normal flesh-and-blood life again. The bail-out is on the utilities menu. You pull it down...The bad news is that it doesn't work. Someone has blocked the bail-out option. And you know who did it. You did. The other you. The real you. The one that wants to keep you here forever.
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Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically - it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him. Society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers and mass-marketed psychedelic drugs.
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perfect audio experience
- By Darryl on 03-24-14
By: John Brunner, and others
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Invasion
- Alien Invasion, Book 1
- By: Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
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They are coming. The countdown has begun. First visible only as blips on a telescope image, the discovery of objects approaching from Jupiter's orbit immediately sets humanity on edge. NASA doesn't even bother to deny the alien ships' existence. The popular Astral space app (broadcasting from the far side of the moon and accessible by anyone with Internet) has already shown the populace what is coming.
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"terrible, absolutely terrible"
- By Andre M. Nel on 08-02-18
By: Sean Platt, and others
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Variable Star
- By: Robert A. Heinlein, Spider Robinson
- Narrated by: Spider Robinson
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
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At his death in 1988, Robert A. Heinlein left a legacy that almost single-handedly defined modern science fiction. But one of Heinlein's masterpieces was never finished. In 1955, he began work on Variable Star, a powerful and passionate tale of two young lovers driven apart by pride, power, and the vastness of interstellar time and space. Now, the Heinlein estate has authorized award-winning author Spider Robinson to expand his outline into a full-length novel. And the result is vintage Heinlein.
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Spider WHO
- By Randall on 04-25-09
By: Robert A. Heinlein, and others
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Expendable
- League of Peoples, Book 1
- By: James Alan Gardner
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
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Under the benevolent leadership of the League of Peoples, there is no war, little crime, and life is sacred...unless you're an Explorer. The ugly, the flawed, the misfit, the deformed, they are the unwanted, flung to the farthest corners of the galaxy to investigate hostile planets and strange, vicious creatures. Out there, there are a thousand different - and terrible - ways to die.
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FU@@ING EXPLORERS
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 03-06-15
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The Medusa Chronicles
- By: Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins
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Howard Falcon almost lost his life in an accident as the first human astronaut to explore the atmosphere of Jupiter - and a combination of human ingenuity and technical expertise brought him back. But he is no longer himself. Instead he has been changed into an augmented human: part man, part machine, and exceptionally capable.
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Almost stopped listening. Glad I didn't.
- By cek on 08-21-16
By: Stephen Baxter, and others
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Fleet of Worlds
- 200 Years Before the Discovery of the Ringworld
- By: Larry Niven, Edward M. Lerner
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
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Fleet of Worlds takes a closer look at Human-Puppeteer (Citizen) relations and the events leading up to Niven's first Ringworld novel. Kirsten Quinn-Kovacks is among the best and brightest of her people. She gratefully serves the gentle race that rescued her ancestors from a dying starship, gave them a world, and nurtures them still. If only the Citizens knew where Kirsten's people came from.
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Hurrah!
- By Bruce on 01-25-08
By: Larry Niven, and others
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The Post-Human Omnibus
- Books 1-4
- By: David Simpson
- Narrated by: Ray Chase
- Length: 24 hrs and 54 mins
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Before he was Oldtimer, he was Craig Emilson, a young doctor,sucked into military service at the outbreak of World War III. Enlisting to become a Special Forces suborbital paratrooper, Craig is selected to take part in the most important mission in American military history, a sortie into enemy territory to eliminate the world's first strong artificial intelligence.
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Man, I really wanted to like this book
- By Consumer on 04-29-15
By: David Simpson
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The Hercules Text
- By: Jack McDevitt
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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From a remote corner of the galaxy, a message is being sent. The continuous beats of a pulsar have become odd, irregular, and artificial. It can only be a code. Frantically, a research team struggles to decipher the alien communication. And what the scientists discover is destined to shake the foundations of empires around this world - from Wall Street to the Vatican.
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Lots to recommend here!
- By Matthew on 10-19-18
By: Jack McDevitt
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This guy might be great one day
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Solaris
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At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani ( Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.
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A comment on negative reviews
- By Burns on 09-20-11
By: Stanislaw Lem, and others
What listeners say about Permutation City
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- SciFi Kindle
- 02-26-15
Moral dilemmas of digitalization
This exploration of digital consciousness is heavier on the philosophy than hard SF, although enough near-future exposition and tech is provided to support the premise: supercomputers allowing for digitization of living minds. Once that platform is established, Egan is free to play with all the high concept questions that result from a physics-free playground subject to will and desires. In the virtual environments that these uploaded consciousnesses inhabit, every sensation and perception can be modified to the individual’s tastes, as can those tastes and indeed- the individual’s own personality. The story’s drama comes, in part, from characters altering their very selves to accommodate circumstances. Additional moral questions come into play when system-generated additional personalities are introduced to provide community, and when intelligent life evolves from scratch in the VR and begin to seek their own origin. When these intelligences come into conflict with one another, or with the outside world, where the same computer resources are in demand for improving life for the billions of our reality, additional dilemmas ensue. All in all, the novel does a great job extending the trope and giving it the full examination it deserves, although it’s a bit weak on the characters or action.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Educated Parent
- 07-16-23
Horrendous Narration Ruins Any Story
Narrator rendered it impossible to continue, returning. Story up to point of departure was very interesting.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Matthew Mitchell
- 12-10-21
narrator was distractingly bad
narrator's tone and delivery were mostly flat but inconsistent, with a noticable amount of mispronunciation, and extremely poor non-English accents.
i listened anyway because I enjoyed the story.
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- Frederick Lutz
- 12-10-23
Terrible narrator.
Very interesting story spoiled by a narrator that sounds like a mix between an old generation computer voice simulator and Christopher Walken.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jacob
- 08-31-18
disturbingly monotonous voice-actor
This novel deserves better. I could scarcely bear a minute of it, despite the fact that this is one of my favourite books.
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- Petter
- 06-14-24
Just great
If you like to ponder the nature of consciousness and simulation theory this is a must read.
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- Michael G Kurilla
- 04-21-19
Math and physics collide to create a universe
Greg Egan's Permutation City is an early attempt to offer the potential for "uploading" oneself into a virtual world. With sufficient computing power, which is always limiting, scanning an individual, allows for their existence in this virtual world. The relative slowness of this existence limits its utility for all but the super-rich as well as the terminally ill. Against this backdrop, a plan, that appears initially as a scam, concerns creating a virtual world unencumbered by speed or limited by computing power. What begins as a demonstration of virtual reality as a mechanism for evolution offers the possibility of unlimited existence as well as universal collapse.
Egan plays off the simple computer game of life to add more computing power and complexity to offer a more realistic virtual world. Underlying this thesis is that math and physics are essentially equivalent such that any mathematically consistent universe construction that can exist will exist once created. As such, once complexity reaches a critical level, a self sustaining universe is possible. At the same time, Egan suggests that alternative viewpoints on the underlying structure of the universe can cause problems if those differing viewpoints are each mathematically consistent.
The narration is reasonable with a decent range of characters and gender distinction. Pacing is a bit on the slow side.
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- jimlkport
- 01-05-20
Narration is unbelievably poor!
I now realize I should have believed the other reviews. The narration is terrible, stopped listening after an hour, fast forwarded to later chapter, not any better. Returned the book and got a refund.
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- Nicholas Adams
- 01-11-22
Curious story, abysmal narrator
Narrator is godawful. He used the exact same cadence for nearly every sentence, and once you notice it, it’s all you hear. Also, perhaps the worst Australian accent I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m sorry, this narrator should do some reflecting on his performance here. Perhaps take some notes.
Listen to Revelation Space or the culture novels instead. The narrators of those are just exquisite. Read this one in hard-copy.
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- Sean B.
- 11-03-22
Deep creation.
There was a lot of very deep construction of foundational physics but the structure was difficult for audio.
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