Ask HN: Sci-Fi Books for Hackers?

15 points by franze 14 years ago

Hiho, I just finished "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!" now i need another good book to read. I'm in the mood for some Sci-Fi - but, not the kind that is about politics, light-saber wars, worm-drugs, a fascist regime masquerading as humanitarians, ... - it should be more like "The Robot and the Baby" (by J. McCarthy) but longer, with even more mind bending pseudo code.

Long question short: Are there Good Sci-Fi Books for Developers?

lsiebert 14 years ago

http://textiplication.com/2009/07/13/hackers-and-hacking-in-...

has many of the recommendations I'd make. I especially recommend Cryptonomicon if you want some pseudocode. I'll add a few newer books:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(technothriller_series)

However, have you considered some free nonfiction? http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html The Hacker Crackdown http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html#labelTAZ Temporary Autonomous Zones

You might also like scifi short stories: http://www.flurb.net/

db48x 14 years ago

A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge. It's all about the nature of computation vs thought, usenet, and truly evocative aliens. Not much actual code though.

leeny 14 years ago

I'm surprised _Snow Crash_ (or other Neal Stephenson stuff) hasn't come up yet. It's a bit dated, as it envisions what teh internets will be like from a 1992 perspective, but still a very enjoyable/amusing read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

latch 14 years ago

Non-developer specific good sci-fi books:

-Dune

-Hyperion + The Fall of Hyperion

-The Book Of The New Sun

-Ilium + Olympos

-Takeshi Kovacs trilogy

-The Culture Series (meh..)

-The Demolished Man

More dev-oriented:

-Reamde (which I hated, but I seem to be in a minority)

-Neuromancer

I'll always have a special place in my heart for Calculating God (not science fiction), because its the book that got me into reading seriously.

ramblerman 14 years ago

Adding "for developers" to the end of a question doesn't automatically make it fitting for hackernews.

I think reddit is a better place for these questions.

  • franze 14 years ago

    i don't do reddit - and it's a question to the HN community (not a question to anyone else) - because i value HNers opinion - they might answer, they might not.

DanBC 14 years ago

Ted Chiang - except this is short stories. Very good though.

Greg Egan - hard science, mind bending.

LarryMade 14 years ago

One that has a lot of programming and hackerish humor is the Wizard's Bane series by Rick cook. Fantasy realm mixing programming and magic quite well.

ninjaweasel 14 years ago

Space Operas: - The Reality Dysfunction (Peter Hamilton) - Gridlinked (Neal Asher) - Hidden Empire (Kevin J Anderson)