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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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echelon

I haven't read or thought of this in a long time. It's a really good short story. Thank you for sharing!

Some of my other short story favorites:

- The Egg, http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

- MMAcevedo, https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

- The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

- Last Contact, https://zestfullyblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/last-contact-by-s...

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Since "Lena" ("MMAcevedo") and "They're Made Out of Meat" from this subthread are on my "fiction recommendations" list, let me share the list: https://dbohdan.com/fiction-recs.

I highly recommend "Basilisk collection" by Blackle Mori (https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/basilisk/), a fascinating short story written as a fictional Wikipedia page, like "Lena". It is about a partial hash inversion anomaly. Really! I would call its genre "hard computer science fiction". It was a delight to stumble upon after I followed a link to https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/.

Nice, thank you! I've read The Egg before, but working my way through the others now as I have the opportunity.

Have you come across The Last Question? Another favourite:

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

Nitpick: the title of the qntm story is "Lena", not "MMAcevedo" - the latter is the title of the fictional Wikipedia article that is the framing device :)

I did an 80 short stories by 80 different authors post a while back. I've been meaning to get it up to 100.

https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/10/80-authors-80-science-...

This inspires me to post Eight O’clock in the Morning

https://pvto.weebly.com/uploads/9/1/5/0/91508780/eight_o%E2%...

Wow. Loved the story you're responding about. Read it a few times since first hearing about it a long while back. Kinda surprised tho that your list hasn't got one single thing I'd read before. Thank you for the excellent list.

The Egg is by Andy Weir who also wrote the Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary. I recommend the first and third of these, Artemis is just okay in my opinion.

He also wrote the (now finished) webcomic Casey and Andy. I don't think I've ever shown it to an engineer who didn't instantly love it.

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