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Comment by yboris | Hacker News Reader

I once commented on HN how my favorite Sci Fi novel is Accelerando and the author, Charles Stross, replied to it suggesting I try his The Rapture of the Nerds he co-wrote with Cory Doctorow; I loved it when I read it too.

I love HN - it's basically the only website I visit these days (aside checking mail, watching YouTube, and gardening my GitHub repositories).

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Accelerando is one of my favourite too! Thanks for sharing the reply, always love book recommendations

In a thematically similar but very different vein, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series was an enjoyable read.

I also recommend Eric Nylund's work, specifically Signal to Noise and A Signal Shattered.

Edit: Well, there you go, Children of Time had 23 mentions now that I've read down further. Disappointed to see Eric Nylund's work fade into obscurity, I rate him up with Neal Stephenson.

I haven't been able to find Eric Nylund's "Signal to Noise" and sequel "A Signsl Shattered" in ebook format.

But they are strange and great.

Those two novels of Nylund's really captured the "dark forest" concept well, though I won't say more so as to avoid spoilers.

I haven't read the source material so I can't speak to the books, but the adaptations of 3 Body (Problem) that I've watched, both the Tencent and Netflix ones, also explore similar themes to Nylund's works. Heck, I just discovered that Liu Cixin coined the "dark forest" term, though he isn't the first to explore it.

I thought I recognized that name: Nylund also wrote some books for the Halo series which I enjoyed, although I was already a fan of the games.

I believe he was a staff writer for the Halo series in house as well, something like Marc Laidlaw at Valve, and the books emerged from internal storytelling written for the series. Very interesting stuff.

I also highly recommend his older books Pawn's Dream, Dry Water, and especially A Game Of Universe. They're available on Kindle and part of the Unlimited program so easy to check out.

I must finished my last book and grabbed Accelerando blind based on ya all's recommendation and damn it's great. Thank you!

Not long ago I came across this book in an HN thread about AI and the future. The moment I saw the title, I knew I had to read it. Crypto, AI, collective intelligence — it hits all the right notes for me.

If you want some other portrayals of the Singularity, see The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and Friendship is Optimal (and also Caelum Est Conterrens)

It was good. Depressing, but good. While not singularity, some motiff and predictions seem to align.

I would still add:

Snow crash Rainbow's end

The Singularity series by William Hertling were fun reads in that category too.

Amazon lists it as book 3 of 3 in a series - do you need to have read the first two?

Never read the first two, love Accelerando, unsure what I was missing; feels like a well-written self-contained story.

Just reread Accelerando ... Still awesome.

I really appreciate Cory Doctorow's work on digital rights, enshittification and other topics, but I couldn't make it more than half way through 'Rapture of the nerds'. Just too strange, I couldn't connect to it. It is very original though. Some people will probably love it.

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