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Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

I hoped for actual fiction, like "The Laundry Archives" (where computation can summon demons), "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" (about raising children AI), "The Last Question" (short story from Asimov) or "The Nine Billion Names of God" (about monks buying a computer for religious purposes).

All of the above are highly recommended, by the way.

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Greg Egan's "Disapora"[1] (where most of us literally live in computers) and "Permutation City"[2] (living in a cellular automata).

Similar themes in Roger William's "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[3] (an AI accidentally takes over the universe).

1: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.h...

2: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PERMUTATION/Permuta...

3: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

6 tabs later and a $4 copy of Permuation City on its way to me from Amazon, I had to go back and find what started me on that rabbit hole. Thanks for the recommendation, that sounds fascinating.

If you don't mind highly technical hard SF, Schild's Ladder is also very good. It's not explicitly spelled out in the text, but it serves as a good pseudo-sequel to Diaspora.

Egan's publisher recently ran off a new printing of many books in his back catalog that were hard to find in the US.

http://www.amazon.com/Schilds-Ladder-Novel-Greg-Egan/dp/1597...

Awesome, thanks for sharing. I'm a big hard scifi fan, although I tend to stick to the middle half of the last century (there's just so much good stuff!)

+1 for Diaspora, if you have any interest in trans-humanism this book has one of the most plausible/believable post-singularity worlds I have encountered.

Greg Egan is fantastic. Too many authors just magic stuff into existence all over the place and it leads to large, annoying inconsistencies. Egan's stuff mainly seems to follow the rule of only using magic once, and having the rest of the storyline come from that and make sense/be consistent.

I wish more stories would start off with one magic point, cast one universe-altering spell, suspend my disbelief once, and then just deal with the consequences.

Yeah I hear people call this "hard sci-fi", but that's not really fitting. It can apply to any fiction. There's fantasy like Harry Potter where the world is just unbelievably inconsistent (as HPMOR loved to point out). Compared to, say, Mistborn (I don't read a lot of fantasy), which introduces its restricted magic system and more-or-less deals with it from there.

And the one big change can be huge, unrealistic, too! Like the Culture books - posit that we've got hyperintelligent friendly AI that can warp many dimensions at will - the rest fits in more-or-less from there; but no one would call Culture hard sci-fi.

Or Wizard's Bane by Rick Cook, where a programmer gets summoned to a fantasy world and writes a magic compiler in forth.

And how could I forget: David Langford, "BLIT"[1], and "Different Kinds of Darkness"[2].

> BLIT (which stands for Berryman Logical Image Technique) is a short science-fiction story written by author David Langford. It features a setting where highly dangerous types of images called "basilisks" have been discovered; these images contain patterns within them that exploit flaws in the structure of the human mind to produce a lethal reaction, effectively "crashing" the mind the way a computer program crashes when given data that it fails to process.

1: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm

2: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of...

Like in "Snow Crash".

Yes. Except Blit was published in 1988 and Snowcrash in 1992.

Or any of Stanislaw Lem's books of "fables for robots" like "The Cyberiad".

>I hoped for actual fiction, like "The Laundry Archives" (where computation can summon demons),

Does Stross actually manage to use real theoretical CS in that series?

Words are used in a manner that indicates he clearly knows what they are (which is not surprising given his background), but, generally, I'd say no. There's never been a point in the series where I feel like I super-extra understand something because I have a computer science background. But it's also at least plausible enough that I don't have to turn that part of my brain off.

He implies that such things exist. I think he cites something Turing was supposed to have written (in-universe, I mean) that crossed over between CS and demonology. It doesn't go beyond plausible-sounding titles and breezy one-sentence synopses though.

You can read a bit early on in the first book of the series where he talks a bit about this stuff, on Google books, page 17: https://books.google.ca/books?id=GfSGzhDcU2UC&lpg=PP1&dq=atr...

Stross mentions a suppressed volume of Knuth, can't remember in which book

I'd forgotten about that. Stross's book shows its age here, it's volume 4. The bit is on page 134: https://books.google.ca/books?id=GfSGzhDcU2UC&lpg=PP1&dq=atr...

> He implies that such things exist.

This looks pretty damning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petersen_graph

(Don't email it to cstross, I already did ;-)

Another of Stross's short stories, Antibodies [0], examines the consequences if P = NP, a key problem in theoretical computer science.

[0] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/to...

Reminds me of Traveling Salesman (2012) [1], also set in P = NP and discussing the ethics of selling the algorithm to the government. (Literally discussing, it's a low-budget 4-men-in-a-room movie).

I can't say the whole film is worth the time, but I really loved how in the first minutes it establishes it's alternative history by a single sentence: introducing a scientists who "in 2008 was awarded ... the fields medal for his proof of the nonexistence of one-way functions"

[1] http://www.travellingsalesmanmovie.com/

Whoa, that was a good read! Thanks, going to buy some books by Stross :-)

[when I said "reminds me of Traveling Salesman (2012)" I just meant examining the consequences if P=NP; that was before I followed your link and was reminded how good sci-fi _should_ be — it absolutely pales in comparison to Antibodies.]

There are actual fiction books in the small italics at the bottoms of the blurbs.

Just finished The Atrocity Archives recently. Very entertaining.

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

I enjoyed

> I hoped for actual fiction, like "The Laundry Archives" ...

I think this subthread fills that desire nicely. :)

You are like an urban gardener ...

Ken Macleod's The Restoration Game has some fun CS plot twists, especially at the end of the novel...

Yes, it feels much more like Computer-Science Fiction.

I've been looking for good hacker-fi!! Danke!

Here is one of my favourites: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v402/n6761/full/402465a...

(Despite the domain name, it is a science fiction piece. Nature publishes short science fiction under their 'Futures' column.)

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