Ask HN: Recommend any good business/hacker fiction? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Recommend any good business/hacker fiction?

30 pointsjskopek45 comments

I just finished re-reading Neal Stevenson's Cryptonomicon for the third time today, and I cannot get enough of the modern part of the story.

It's basically about a very HN-ish nerd named Randy who gets embroiled in a huge international venture to create the world's first data haven, with plenty of in-depth discussion on technical topics like Van Eck Phreaking and more absurd ones like pantyhose fetishes.

Has anyone here read anything along the lines of this? A book about a hacker/entrepreneur who sets out to change the world and comes across all sorts of wacky scenarios?

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* If you've already read Cryptonomicon (see more here: http://jseliger.com/2006/11/29/cryptonomicon ), you're going in the right direction, but you should skip the Baroque cycle and Anathem.

* David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk deals extensively with math (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2007/12/14/the-indian-clerk).

* Joel Spolsky's The Best Software Writing isn't fiction but is worth reading.

* I'll reiterate Tom Wolf's The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.

* Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is nominally aimed at adolescents, but people of any age can enjoy it.

* Michael Tolkin's The Player is partially about the business of film, as is its sequel, The Return of the Player.

If you're curious about more, send me an e-mail; I write a book blog at http://jseliger.com , and a lot of the reviews/commentaries would probably be of interest to hackerish types.

But the Baroque cycle is a prequel of sorts to Cryptonomicon, its worth slogging past the first 2/3 of the first book, it gets very good after that.

I enjoyed both Baroque cycle and Anathem, they build slowly but I like the long-term immersion and intricacy.

Anathem is better than Cryptonomicon.

Totally a matter of taste. I, for one, completely disagree. :-)

From your review, I see that you have only read one book out of the BC trilogy. In this case, I'm pretty sure you can't dismiss it without reading all of it. After finishing BC, do a careful re-read of Cryptonomicon. You will find a lot of things that seemed inconsequential on the first read, have a huge backstory behind them and they mesh as smoothly as a planetary gearbox. This is Neal Stephenson at his best. You can really tell that he had the whole story in his head, he just chose to tell the modern-day one first. I really hope he picks up this storyline again. I liked Anathem but I really have burning desire to know more about the families in BC. It's not a fast read and you need to pay attention but the reward is there, IMO.

"In this case, I'm pretty sure you can't dismiss it without reading all of it."

I can and do on a regular basis: books that don't have sufficient merit within a relatively small number of pages aren't going to keep me till the end, and I'm not masochistic enough to read through every single book I start in the hopes of "understanding" it.

I'm sure you'll get plenty of comments on hacker fiction, so here's some "business" fiction:

* "The Bonfire of the Vanities" by Tom Wolfe. The classic novel of 80s Wall Street at its peak.

* "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis. A pretty terrifying picture of greed and excess, again on 80s Wall Street. If you've seen the movie, you know what to expect -- only in greater detail.

* "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Some people hate it, but others find it an inspirational novel. The heroes are driven, smart, competitive entrepreneurs; the antagonists are greedy, pilfering government regulators. Whether or not you like this will probably depend on your pre-existing ideological preference.

I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting...

Second for Atlas Shrugged. It seems especially relevant right now.

One of my roommates here at the Hacker House uses two copies of Atlas Shrugged that happened to be laying around the house to adjust the height of his monitor.

It never occurred to me that the book might have other purposes than that. I think I'm going to check out The Fountainhead first though.

I read both (Fountainhead second), and I preferred the Fountainhead first. It's a lighter read and will give you a taste for Rand's style. If you can stand the heavy ideological slant, then you might want to look into Atlas Shrugged. I don't think that they are for everyone.

Another good introduction to Ayn Rand is the 'Virtue of Selfishness'. Its a collection of her essays with some that were written by people in her group. Its pretty short (100ish pages) and in my opinion says about everything she was trying to say in Atlas Shrugged.

Yeah. I'd say read the Fountainhead first, as to not get scared away by all the character-drive philosophy in AS. The Fountainhead is a pretty inspiring read, and a fun way to get your mind thinking a bit.

Thanks to everyone for the great suggestions - looks like I've got a reading to do!

I just remembered another incredible novel that I haven't read in years - Noble House by James Clavell; it's a novel about two warring business empires, set in 1930s Hong Kong.

Stephenson is in a league of his own when it comes to this kind of story. Snow Crash was a terrific piece of work, where the main protagonist :) was a hacker deeply lacking in entrepreneurial skills. Cryptonomicon had a ton of stuff in it, even down to Bobby Shaftoe getting cracked over the ear with an oar when he was reunited with his beloved Glory :-)

Agreed Snow Crash is very good. It along with Diamond Age are my favorite of his works. The Baroque Cycle is too long for what it is and might have crushed my spirit to read his work any longer. I advise avoiding it unless you are an avid fan of his.

I'll be honest - I couldn't finish the Baroque Cycle. (Maybe I'll try again someday.) But when Anathem came out I thought I'd give it a chance, as I so enjoyed Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash that giving up Stephenson altogether didn't seem like the right thing to do. Anathem starts out slowly but it gets much better and I'm definitely glad I read it. If you can get through the first few chapters you will be rewarded. (IMHO, anyway.)

While I agree BC was dense, I still think it was very good. I'm not really into heavy reading like that but I've still been through the trilogy twice. I whole heartedly recommend any Neal Stephenson. (I wasn't completely enamored with Diamond Age, but I realize I'm in a minority there.)

On a related note, I recommended Cryptonomicon to a co-worker who was complaining how much she spent on books (she typically buys one hardback per week) and how much storage space she had devoted to books. I lent her my copy of Cryptonomicon and it took her about 4-5 weeks to finish. She was in for a good bit of teasing about the apparent 'quality' of her normal fare. IIRC, the term 'bodice-ripper' was tossed about. ;-)

Interesting I also really enjoyed BC and was disappointed with Diamond Age, it held me to a point and then lost me completely. Judging comments here and elsewhere I'm starting to think that if you are a fan of one then you probably won't be a fan of the other.

I recently read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. It tracks the story of of a few people through there time in the entry level jobs at Microsoft to there experiences in a Silicon Valley start up predotcom bubble. A very fun read.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez, it really reminded me of Stevenson's work, highly recommend it! http://thedaemon.com/

Also loved Microserfs and JPod by Douglas Coupland.

I remember enjoying Neuromancer by William Gibson

That's a classic; his recent work is pretty good too. I really enjoyed both Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.

Yeah, I read it back in the mid 90s while in grad school and became hooked on the cyberpunk genre. Wow, I'm old.

You might like The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. Not the greatest book but it's about a hacker trying to change things for sure. And some of the details and concepts are exceptional.

Best black-hat hacker short story goes to "Burning Chrome" by William Gibson (last story in the anthology of the same name).

I liked Cryptonomicon, but more for the WWII side of the story. If you liked that part, check out Colossus by Jack Copeland. The Randy Waterhouse side of the story actually reminded me a lot of Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. Say what you will about Dan Brown, but I thought Digital Fortress was great.

Are you being serious about Digital Fortress? Digital Fortress is infamous for its technological and geographical inaccuracies. I found it good for a chuckle, but I wouldn't really consider it hacker fiction, unless we're talking about Hollywood's idea of a hacker.

Example: http://community.livejournal.com/linguaphiles/3257513.html

I read the Diamond Age, but I didn't finish it(Mostly because I read it in store). Someday, I'll finish it. What is really interesting to me because it feature an anarcho-capitalism model of society.

> What is really interesting to me because it feature an anarcho-capitalism model of society.

As does Snow Crash.

Yeah, the idea was that the government couldn't collect taxes anymore due because they couldn't get an accurate idea of what transactions were going on due to cryptography. I figured that it didn't occur to Stephenson that, if you can't crack the crypto one way or another: http://xkcd.com/538/ You could just raise property taxes, because it's hard to encrypt land.

But Stephenson made a reference to exactly that idea in Cryptonomicon, so I don't know what he was thinking.

I'd like to recommend Melissa Scott's The Jazz. It is out of print but available on the Kindle. It's a light, fun read, (not Stephenson style, that is for sure) but quite perceptive in how one can use the net to spin misinformation. A few of the stories on HN have reminded me of that book - most recently the twitter fake news story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577700

>A book about a hacker/entrepreneur who sets out to change the world and comes across all sorts of wacky scenarios?

Charles Stross's Accelerando fits the bill perfectly, but it's way out there with singularity stuff, unlike Cryptonomicon, which may not be what you want. His Halting State is set in the near future, with a robbery of an MMORPG that involves real money with real bad guys getting involved.

Check out this film:

WEST RUN (2007)

Directed, Photographed, & Edited by Rajah Samaroo Written by Rajah Samaroo and Andrew Harrar Runtime: 43 mins Genre: cyberpunk thriller

Retired hacker Roland West gets lured back into the game when the headhunter Sebastian find him living off the grid. The stakes has never been so high, as West must outwit a conniving group of business leaders bent on collapsing the world market and US government.

The adolescence of p-1, Thomas Ryan The soul of a new machine, by tracy kidder Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

The Man Who Sold the Moon, by Robert Heinlein

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Sold-Moon/dp/0671578634

(spoilers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon)

Then, for fun, go on to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, wherein a great acronym TANSTAAFL is introduced.

'For us the living' is also another interesting book by him. Sorta the anti-Atlas Shrugged.

Vernor Vinge: True Names (short story), A Deepness in the Sky, Rainbow's End

Greg Egan: Permutation City, Quarantine

(More programmer's fiction than startup fiction.)

Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep (to which A Deepness in the Sky is a presquel). I didn't like Rainbow's End though.

Agree they're more coder-fiction.

JR by William Gaddis

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

"The New New Thing" is not fiction, but it reads like it is.. Basically a bio snapshot of Jim Clark written by Michael Lewis (author of Liar's Poker, another good business book about Wall Street)

I fully recommend you read Infoquake and Multireal (the first two books of the Jump 225 trilogy) by David Louis Edelman. It has everything you're looking for.

I read The first billion by Christopher Reich(ISBN: 0440234697) about a year ago. It's about tech companies, finance and international crime. Pretty fun read.

Why business fiction when there are so many nice stories of real businesses around?

Founders at Work,

Stealing the Network Series (1st two are great :) ),

Startup.com - the documentary

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