Permutation City has a brilliant premise but I found sections of it mostly unreadable and I can&#x27;t say I enjoyed it very much. Egan would have been better served presenting the content in an essay format.<p>Egan&#x27;s more unforgiving stories are an acquired taste IMO. I started out with his short stories and found them enjoyable when there wasn&#x27;t so much pretentious info-dumping and preaching. Permutation City felt like one of his harder to parse short stories stretched to the length of a novel.<p>Blindsight is on my Kobo right now, but after reading Permutation City I&#x27;m scared to start reading it because I don&#x27;t want to reach halfway and want to chuck it like I did Permutation City.<p>On a more positive note, I just want to say that I liked how prescient the novel was in foretelling AWS.