Permutation City (Subjective Cosmology #2)

Enjoyable, thoughtful exploration of the existential dread of being able to upload your consciousness to a computer. What does it mean to copy your soul? To run that copy slower than real time, or faster? What happens to society? It's a great theme and Egan has a very thoughtful treatment of it.

The part of the book that didn't work for me was the somewhat mystical explanation for a transcendetal computer, a machine with effectively infinite computing power. I'm OK just accepting that device to let the rest of the story be told, but he spends a lot of pages and character on trying to explain how it comes to be. And it just made no sense to me, I never did understand it. Maybe that's me.

Reasonably good characters, although the first 100 pages I was having a hard time keeping them straight. Good plotting and narrative structure. Overall quite an enjoyable book.