Algorithmics The spirit of computing: this is a really great exploration of 'algorithmic' thinking, accessible to anyone:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2378136.Algorithmics
Soul of a new machine: the book won the pulitzer, it's about now defunct Data General and implementing a new machine in the early 80's:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_Ma...
Fiction:
Marooned in Realtime: Vernor Vinge on a group of people who missed the singularity, and try to understand what happened. A damn good detective story too:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167847.Marooned_in_Realti...
Very thought provoking look at recycling and design for eventual recycling.
This dude can explain grand ideas encompassing human civilization in (relatively) simple, brief, and entertaining language and I can't get enough of it. I think Homo Deus's forward focus will appeal to the HN crowd more than his more famous Sapiens.
For a similar type of book I would recommend Howard Bloom's Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. They both take a similarly broad scientific perspective on human history and behavior, and both are fun reads.
Infinite in All Directions, Freeman Dyson : just a book of his thoughts, but I really appreciated his perspective on respect between religion/spirituality and science.
Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants, J.D. Clark : I picked up a copy of this in a roadside bookstore on a lark. Entertaining tales of people blowing themselves up in the name of science.
Apollo 11 Press kit : My grandmother was a journalist for Florida Today during the space race, and she gave me her copy. It is amazing to see how much detail was provided. I don't know if our modern press ever gets press kits like these, but it was not dumbed-down much at all, which was very nice to see.
The Adventures of Samurai Cat, Mark Rogers : Silly fun. Kind of like if Bored of the Rings had been written by Jerry Bruckheimer and Spider Jerusalem.
Into the cool, Sagan and Schnieder : about complexity and thermodynamics. Written for a layperson, I still learned a lot from it.
Order out of Chaos, Prigogine and Stengers : More thermo, also written for lay audience, also learned a lot from it.
Controlled Thermonuclear Reactions, L. Artsimovich : Of all the plasma physics books I have read (many) this is the one I remember most. Rather out-of-date now, it contains loads of information about the early Soviet fusion program, with pictures and discussion of now-forgotten experiments.
* http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/effectivejava-136174....
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1vQf4qyMXg (a talk by the author)
Corner cases in the Java programming language:
* http://www.javapuzzlers.com/
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbp-3BJWsU8 (a talk by the author)
The Story is breathtaking and the teachings are divine. It currently has the potential to change my life, i even marked some sentences and put tapes to important pages that concern my life.
The author is very passionate about all this - and I think most people would find the intensity off-putting. He manages to fill ~800 pages. I am not sure I agree with everything. While it resonated strongly, I'm also not that bummed out about the ability to launch a website from scratch in 5 minutes. But, in much the same way I feel about the writing of Nassim Taleb, despite having many statements that are incendiary and possibly wrong, it approaches a topic from an angle that you probably haven't been getting elsewhere.
I immediately thought of this book when I read the question because I've never met anyone who has read it or who has any interest in reading it after hearing about it.
History of thinking is the book which Sapiens / Homo Deus would like to be. I think it is one of the best complete arguments on the nature of our relationship to computers.
If you've ever read "Code" by Charles Petzold, it's as illuminating as that was.
Also a little bit tragic, makes you realize there is a lot of fun and beauty and even social history in math. I didn't realize there is also a lot of complaints in how math is taught, and that the arithmetic we all learn is considered the most boring part.
Tony Horwitz, all works -- especially _Baghdad Without a Map_ (which will leave you with a much healthier view of the modern Middle East) and _Confederates in the Attic_ (a dress-rehearsal for the Age of Trump?).
Pearl Buck, _Sons_. (Best to read _The Good Earth_ first, but you've probably already read it.) I doubt it's a very accurate depiction of China, and the characters' morality is hair-raising (while the narrator is so far off the deep end that he/she is impossible to take seriously); but it's a memorable adventure story firmly grounded in the plausible, and it dramatizes some important lessons about the dangers that can afflict families and middle age.
http://www.joseitoda.org/religious/hr.html
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
It's a part travel book, a part geopolitical analysis. In the hindsight, Kaplan was probably wrong on many things, and his views were US and West centric, but personally it was inspiring read, a travel book that was much more than a travel book.
Have you come across Tony Horwitz? He's goofier than Kaplan, but his writing scratches the same itch.
I also enjoyed Jonathon Livingston Seagull, which seems to have fallen out of favour recently.
Influential to someone whose practices and path to success in engineering doesn't follow the normal pattern but is still valid. (At least it was influential to me.)
The point he makes in the book is in fact very interesting (essentially, the lifepaths of creative individuals fall into two discernible categories: innovators, whose main contributions are early in the career and slowly fade, and those who slowly master a craft, whose most noteworthy contributions come later in life), and the techniques he marshals to study it in different context noteworthy, but it would have made for a great two week class. Instead, Galenson spent the entire time basically assigning everything he ever wrote -- which made the same point over, and over, and over again -- and constantly berated students who tried to respectfully dialogue with him.
Sorry, didn't mean to hijack your post, but every mention I see of him just elicits this visceral reaction in me and I just needed to get it off my chest.
Its about how hard it was to program the Atari 2600 and the clever tricks required to get the most out of the machine. One of my favorite anecdotes was that in I believe Yars revenge, one of the sound effects was produce by reusing a section of code as sound data because it sounded good enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noir_(novel)
My username isn't a co-incidence.
Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson.
Probably one of the best books about the Civil War that has been written.
The Happiness Hypothesis - Jonathan Haidt
Alamut - Vladimir Bartol
Non Stop - Brian Aldiss
A fortune teller told me - Tiziano Terzani
A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest
Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds
It's hard to describe. Rather, the story is easy to describe: it concerns the travel of a man from a future age. Nothing is what it seems.
There was a moment when I realized "Oh shit. This is real." The book may be fiction but almost nothing about it is fake. The Big Questions, in History, in Philosophy, in Politics, in Theology, in Technological Progress, in interpreting reality, it's all there.
Most non-fiction work of fiction I've ever read, and the best one, above Tolkien, above the Bible, it towers above all texts I have read.
It will take multiple reads to understand what it is saying, different parts will appeal to you each time.
In terms of the people you know: imagine that Stewart Brand, Peter Thiel and Christopher Nolan somehow had a lovechild - it would be The Book of the New Sun.
https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2007/gwng0704.htm
The main character is an unreliable narrator.
However consider all the veils that would have to be cast aside to understand reality:
1. The narrator could be lying to you. 2. The narrator could not understand what is truly happening. 3. The narrator may have mental models which are not accurate. 4. The narrator may be passing on inaccurate information or lies. 5. The narrator may be using words in a way that you think you understand, but do not. 6. The narrator may be expecting you to implicitly understand something that you do not e.g. we make certain assumptions about information because the Internet now exists, something similar exists in the world of the New Sun. 7. The narrator may be using the language of metaphor to describe something that is quite real but not what we think it is. 8. The narrator may not be one person. This won't make sense until you read the book. 9. The narrator could be telling you the truth, but you merely do not understand what he is really saying. 10. The narrator may not be lying at all, merely leaving out information that makes him look bad.
I could go on for many more points. I found thinking of Vernadsky's theories useful while reading it. If reading Gene Wolfe does not fire up your neurons, nothing will.
Again: the answers are in the text, it is not subjective in my experience, but you're going to have to think real hard on many different levels. Your understanding of the New Sun's world will be in flux for the duration of the book. Gene Wolfe gives you the answer, but he gives it once so you have to pay close attention. If something puzzles you, tuck it away and keep reading.
I am readying myself for a reread (including Urth, as yet unread), so this is all IIRC, but there is a paragraph mentioning how Erebus or Abaia have influence in the world - likely through a computer network similar to the Internet (as telegraph to Net, Net to ...) but unimaginably more sophisticated e.g. embedded into everything, like the IoT. Of course there are other entities with access to infrastructure that the peasants are either ignorant of or dimly aware of e.g. cacogens, Father Inire.
Another example is Jonas's past life as a sailor. I believe at first he is a sailor, but later... very poetic.
The bit that is bugging me about BOTNS is part of the final book, where a young woman is seen by Sevarian in an old part of the city - it's beautifully written and this feels familiar but I can't place it, I know there's something I'm missing about that experience.
That has settled it, next time I take notes ;-)
Great moments for me include:
Sevarian's explanation of his craft's morality (which he later discounts!) The battle of the flowers. I could see it. Realizing Agia's betrayal. Rethinking everything I've read after the gemstone, and then again after the nature of Sevarian's role is uncovered, and again as I realize the meaning of a Autarch. The Ascians! So much more. Often I'll realize something about it hours or days later after reading.
Note: if you read this past the spoiler alert, do not be afraid, read the book!
Severian describes how Master Gurloes is an educated man and that he talks to other people/beings through something like a radio network at the top of the Tower.
It was phrased like this:
"He was the only one of our guild - Master Palaemon not excepted - who was unafraid of the energies there and the unseen mouths who spoke sometimes to human beings and sometimes to other mouths in other towers and keeps."
The reviewer disagrees that all the questions are answered. Unanswered mysteries for the sake of nothing? Not sure I can stomach it.
The reviewer is kind of wrong. I can think of high probability answers to half the questions that he posed and I've read the volumes just once. The observation on text stability is one that all books with unreliable narrators have, not just the Book of the New Sun, but I don't think we're about to throw out all that literature. More important I think is that the reason to have an unreliable narrator is because it is more realistic - the world around us, its people, its ideas, its history, it's all unreliable on a good day. That's part of why I like Gene Wolfe's wriing: it's multi-layered and multi-faceted, that is why I said it feels real. People with the Wolfe Gene aren't part of a mystery cult, most things I can think of in the text have answers, only perhaps you need to have read widely e.g. greek myth, dark age/enlightenment philosophy to get at all of it. If you have a bad habit of scanning text very quickly, like many readers of science fiction with their enormous multi-thousand pageturners, then you shall inevitably lose resolution on what's going on, I think that happens to quite a few readers new to Wolfe.
tldr; The Book of the New Sun is not Lost the TV show.
Good that it's not Lost. What I'm worried is more that it'll be House of Leaves though. Or Finnegan's Wake. But I'm already invested enough to keep going so we'll see how it goes. :)
5) Reading Gene Wolfe is dangerous work. It's a knife-throwing act, and like all good knife-throwing acts, you may lose fingers, toes, earlobes or eyes in the process. Gene doesn't mind. Gene is throwing the knives
How does that help me exactly? Answer, it doesn't. Reading Gene Wolfe apparently motivated Neil Gaiman to write a bunch of words that say almost nothing. This is not encouraging.
I have been thinking about how the trend in long-form television would be very favorable for translating some of Wolfe's books into film and exposing them to a broader audience. There are so many things in New Sun that would make for compelling television, and we have the technology to do the special effects right--that is, not a CG-fest, but (mostly) subtle and in service of the story. His fuligin cloak alone I would love to see in motion. Though I think the way the story is told would have to change drastically, unless they were to keep the narration--which is a tricky prospect. Part of the book's charm is that you never know if what you are imagining based on what the narrator says really happened that way, and people put enough faith in what they see to lose that aspect.
For that reason, and because a film translation would have to expose a number of the puzzles that Gene put into New Sun for us, I've latched onto the idea of a TV series for Book of the Long Sun instead. It is just as imaginative, the world (or should I say the whorl) just as vast, and the book follows almost as grand an adventure. Patera Silk, in my opinion, makes for an even more compelling protagonist than Severian, and the other characters are even more human than those in New Sun. On the surface it is not as dramatic, or fantastic, but the interactions of the gods of the Whorl with the humans gets at one of those central philosophical and technological questions, as does Silk's enlightenment (which happens on page one, so I'm not giving anything away) among other things.
So if anyone here happens to be a producer, or knows one, get the first book of either series into their hands. They'll get the rest on their own. And hurry up, please--Gene's getting up there in age and you'll want his help.
* though of course there is Urth of the New Sun...
I think it is difficult, but possible to convert BOTNS into television, it would be on the scale of The Lord of the Rings (which I originally thought impossible to film) and about as long as the Game of Thrones series.
If only we could the Cohen Brothers and the Nolan Brothers to cooperate!
I hadn't thought about who would be good to produce/direct it, but either pair of brothers would be a great choice. They'd certainly have enough material to work with.