[Weidenwalker]

If you enjoyed Permutation City, you‘d probably also like „The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect“ by Roger Williams!

It explores a similar premise of a post-singularity future (though the mechanism is superintelligence rather than cellular automata/mind uploading), but rather than imagining exactly how we‘d get there, it tries to imagine what human flourishing would look like in a world of perfect abundance!

[Cacti]

Oh, is that the one with the incredibly explicit, and incredibly unnecessary, sex based around the authors obsession with fucking dead bodies and fucking and impregnating his daughter?

I’m very far from a prude, but JFC. Its clearly the authors vehicle to play out his fantasies, masquerading as a scientific-fi novel.

[MattPalmer1086]

Not sure we are talking about the same book here. It's certainly quite twisted, with people taking out death contracts that allow them to die painfully (but they are ressurected by the godlike AI every time). There's also torture and other unsavoury things.

To me, this was not unnecessary, but quite fundamental to the story. Everyone was trapped by the AI who would not let anyone come to harm without their permission anyway, and nobody could die. Various people tried to push back against these constraints in creative but disturbing ways.

[Cacti]

I was going to post the final few pages of the book here as one example, but it’s way more graphic than I remembered, so I won’t.

But nothing at all was served by us reading about how deftly the main characters 13 year old daughter blew him until he was hard enough to ride. Or the main characters musings about their two (very underage) children having sex and how he was totally ok with it. Or the long section about the wife urging him to impregnate his daughter. Or the other dozen weird-ass things in that chapter.

There’s several more examples like this in the book.

The author is not exactly the first to explore potential consequences of effective immortality, but they are one of the few who was seemingly unable to do it without repeatedly getting to multi-page, graphic, and violent, sex scenes.

Like, if one feels the need for that kind of thing, William S Burroughs and Tom Wolfe already beat that one to death decades ago.

As another example more relevant to this crowd, Altered Carbon covered the exact same subject matter, and did so without needing to write smut for teenage boys.

[MattPalmer1086]

I confess I had forgotten the very end, where they are trying to rebuild the human race with a limited pool of people. It definitely did not need to be that graphic, although it is somewhat in keeping with the generally disturbing themes throughout.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it as something very different to the usual sci fi fare.

I also liked Altered Carbon, although I found it read more like a hyper violent blockbuster action movie than a novel. Other than they both use ressurection as a plot device, they are very different stories. The violence in it I actually find more gratuitous than in Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.

[Cacti]

Oh, I was referring to the books, not the Netflix series.

I enjoyed Prime Intellect, but I enjoyed it like a mindless action film or a trashy beach book, and I’d never actually recommend it to anyone.

[gpvos]

You could try his other writings, such as The Curators, which I just finished and can recommend. It has some sex in it but much more normal, and the violence is mostly abstract (like destroying a planet by teleporting it into its star). Available at his website http://localroger.com/ .

[Cacti]

Thanks for the rec, but my issue is less with the book and more with the author. And his non-existent editor.