The premise has already won before the novel begins.

Permutation City doesn't argue for simulated worlds as escape—it assumes the escape as settled fact, then watches what happens when you strip away the last pretense that anything matters inside them.

The blank, procedurally generated vacation worlds that characters treat as disposable are not Egan's vision of the future. They are his evidence that we have already accepted the fundamental trade: authentic experience for consequence-free customization.

Take the specific design choice of those worlds themselves—not elaborate, not rich with unexpected texture or genuine otherness, but blank and resettable, formatted like a hotel room or a rental car interior, pleasant and empty and optimized for the person who will leave. A character can visit them, spend subjective years inside, then abandon everything without friction, and Egan doesn't frame this as dystopian loss but as obvious, of course you would want this, the world resets, your choices don't echo, you pay and you leave. This is not naive—Egan understood that the true horror of infinite leisure is not oppression but permission, not that we are forced to use these spaces but that we will design them this way because we already want them this way.

We built social media on this exact principle, and Egan saw it coming not because he imagined the technology but because he recognized what we were willing to trade for it—the prediction was correct only because we had already begun.