Title: Emerging from the Dust: Materiality of the Digital Changelings in Greg Egan’s Permutation City

Abstract: In Permutation City, Greg Egan’s “Dust Theory” presents a process where matter and information interweave and continually emerge. N. Katherine Hayles takes this into serious consideration, critiquing Hans Moravec’s “teleology of disembodiment” in his vision of digital resurrection. She argues that Moravec simplifies digital resurrection to a mere physical reproduction by transferring consciousness to a digital medium, neglecting the more complex mechanisms of information flow and generation behind it. Through concepts like “pattern/randomness” and the “computational universe,” Hayles emphasizes that digital resurrection is not merely a substitution of the corporeal body but the generation of new materiality and reality through the dynamism of information and algorithms. Karen Barad’s theory of “agential realism” further deepens this perspective, highlighting the entanglement of agency and materiality and suggesting that “intra-action” is the driving force of the world’s materialization. In the debate between Barad and Hayles, digital resurrection is no longer simply a simulation or substitution of the physical world. Rather, like the “dust” in Permutation City, it emerges from the interplay of matter, information, pattern, and randomness, giving rise to a new agent from the random and contingent—this forms the materiality of what I term “digital changelings.”

Keywords: Greg Egan, Permutation City, N. Katherine Hayles, computational universe, Karen Barad, agential realism

Author: Guangzhao Lyu, Associate Professor, College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.03.004