Ask HN: Sci-Fi Books for Hackers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Sci-Fi Books for Hackers?

15 pointsfranze10 comments

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?

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No code in these two, but lots of problem solving:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34_%28novel%29

I recently read Rule 34 by HNer Charles Stross. I liked it a lot.

Thanks Charles.

If you want to go old school, Rendezvous With Rama is great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama

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/

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Greg Egan - hard science, mind bending.

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.

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

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