Permutation City Paper

Due Friday, April 6 by 5pm.  Please use the form below to submit your paper to me.  (In other words, don't use Web-X this time.)

Permutation City introduces us to a future world that is much stranger than anything we experience here and now.  It's a wonder that we can relate to it at all, since the copies that become Egan's central characters become no longer human (most of the copies that inhabit Elysium don't seem to regard themselves as human at all).  Nevertheless, Egan uses his tremendously abstracted and extrapolated characters to reflect on our current condition, to raise questions like What does it mean to be human? and What is the nature of life and death in this universe?

Write a four- to five-page double spaced paper that explores what the post-human characters of Permutation City can teach us about our present human condition, what the very alien future they inhabit can teach us about our own present world.

I will be somewhat flexible with the topic on this last paper.  If you want to talk about the novel's "dust theory" and how it relates to the Newtonian cosmology we have been studying so far, go right ahead.  If you want to contrast this novel with The Time Machine to better understand how Egan's future arises out of our present, feel free.

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Cut and paste your paper into this text box, then click on the send button.  Your paper will not be cut off, as it sometimes was in Web-X.  However, as always, remember to keep your original word processor file just in case something odd happens.