(Damn, now I gotta re-read it and see if my memories are failing me and it’s actually horrifying…)
Well, scary is subjective, but I'll try to explain why
I find it scary.
I'm not into computer stuff, I don't get the philosophical implications and whatnot (but maybe that's for the best).
I'm also not into hard cyberpunk at all. So, the cyber-content I've seen comes in two varieties:
(1) Shadowrun style: yeah megacorps are bad. It's funny, it's sad, it's prescient, it's not very scary. (Loren L. Coleman is a fraud, and
David A. Hill Jr. is a pedophile.)
(2) homogay philosophical normie baby's first sci-fi. An example: there's a game titled "Soma" where the big tweeest, meant to be UNEXPECTED and HORRIFYING and THOT-PROVOKING, is when a cyber entity (you the player) is copied into an evacuation pod, and the copy you get to see to the game's ending is the original that doesn't get rescued. Overwhelmingly Pozzed! 6 million copies sold! The acclaim this game's enjoyed makes me hate humanity so much IHNMIAMS's AM should be asking me for tips to maximize hate per Teraflop.
Also, at the time I first read
Permutation City, I was, well, not so much bullish on AI as bearish on biological immortality: specifically, a game designer / doctor who I was a fan of said that however fantastical AI was, physical immortality was (is) even more implausible, we'd have to get used to the notion of robot children conquering the universe. All the drawbacks about being a robot I knew at the time were either homogay baby's first bullshit (see above) or no different from challenges faced by contemporary organic humans (reprogramming, memory manipulation, viruses, etc). Even Leiji Matsumoto (picrelated, he created my space angel waifu) couldn't really offer a meaningful drawback to robothood other than "it's expensive, only rich assholes become
robots mechanical humans" (fact: they're "mechanical humans" because "robot" comes from the Slavic root "work").
Permutation City has:
- poorfags who can't afford computer time and have to live in extremely slow mode, with IRL centuries passing for every subjective second
- a guy who gets cucked and locks himself in an infinite loop (I've always found unwinnable states in gamebooks scarier than the standard "you're dead!")
- a guy who committed murder and feels performatively-regretful about it so creates a copy of himself to get tortured
- a guy who gets too much into citizen computer science that he disembowels himself to go to the anime girl dimension
This last guy reminded me of Fermatists (the t is not silent) and (they don't have a special name but) Quantum Mechanics. As in, normies who get into some famous scientific problem and go crazy trying to solve it, ambush and attack mathematicians, etc. AI psychos might qualify, too. The notion works on me especially well
because I can't follow Egan's science in the book:
- if I could and thought it made sense, I'd disembowel myself (lol fat chance)
- if I could and thought it didn't make sense, it would be less scary, dude goes insane and 41%, yeah whatever, happens all the time in the troon thread
But I can't, so the possibilty that there's a meme that can talk intelligent people into disembowelment remains real, and if I keep thinking about it, I just might get it, too. (Hypothetically, of course.)
I do remember Egan’s short stories about the math wars being very very scary. The titles are “Luminous” and “Dark Integers”.
It has been awhile since I read it, but I got the impression that he didn't take the base idea seriously and got a little sloppy in the story telling because of that. He entertained the idea but wasn't as stringent as he normally is.
About math and sloppiness: I've read one short stort of Egan's,
The Infinite Assassin. (I'd found Egan through this story via Tvtropes (yeah), looking up fiction about retries.) In it, the protagonist survives getting killed by manipulating reality and picking one of the infinite timelines where he didn't get killed. This is somehow tied to fractals, even though the concept doesn't rely on fractal dimensions at all and is perfectly explainable by
ye olde 17th century infinitesimals.
In the end, he gets killed when the antagonist "projects him into Cantor dust" (a 0-dimension fractal) -- this is unbelievably soft-sciencey and cringeworthy! The story's premise, explained over and over and over and over and over, relies on the "dimensions" of reality staying the same, this is what supposedly guarantees the protagonist's immortality! Like, imagine a square. You cut half off, you get a rectangle. Cut half off, get a smaller square. It's still a square/rectangle, it's still 2d. If Cantor dust was a known possibility, the protagonist wouldn't be so sure of his invincibility. If it wasn't (as it happens in the story), then it's technobabble against technobabble.
“You’re a coward and a pup. I’ll tell my big brother on you, and he can thrash you with his little finger, and I’ll make him do it, too.”
“What do I care for your big brother? I’ve got a brother that’s bigger than he is—and what’s more, he can throw him over that fence, too.” [Both brothers were imaginary.]
The condensed plot is this:
P: "I always win because I can't be projected to a lower dimension."
A: "I just projected you to a lower dimension, you lose."
The le epic tweeeest doesn't rely on fractals (or infinitesimals):
P: "I always win because I'm a hedgehog and I can't be buggered at all."
A: "I just buggered you, you lose."
What I'd go with if I wrote the story:
- delusions of omnipotence (protagonist or protagonist's faction)
- escalating difficulty of problems in need of optimization (why not lol, we're omnipotent)
- escalating difficulty of picking the right timeline (takes exponentially more attempts)
- lack of brain space to store branches that have been tried
- insanity
- stuck trying at random for (effectively) ever
- somewhere out there is page 400, 1/10^100^10 chance to find it, good luck lmao
I also attempted to come up with a more illustrative fictional bad example of a soft plot. What I came up with is this:
- you get infinite wishes from a cyber genie
- integer overflow
See!? This is better than
The Infinite Assassin, because the tweeest engages with the premise, it's
not a flavor of technobabble!
I'm torturing myself reading
Divine Hammer, an atrocity of a book. Disembowelment and
Gate Crashers don't look too bad now.
) back to back, plus a Stephen King short story (which was the first Lovecraftian thing I've read and a cut above King's other writing).
