Would add Permutation City. Shades of the matrix, anticipation of public clouds/floating markets for compute(spot instances), interesting 'what is consciousness' re: software copies of a person's mind, etc.
I also learned about Permutation City from an HN thread years ago. It's my favorite book now, and I immediately ctrl+F'd this list for Permutation City because everyone else on HN should know it exists.
I read Permutation City a few years ago now.
It's certainly a very interesting book that I'd highly recommend. Greg Egan is very much an "ideas" man though. I find that his narratives while intellectually stimulating sometimes don't translate well to a novel format. I find Egan's short stories to be a delight (check out Axiomatic if you haven't) but his novels can be a real slog if you are not a subject matter expert.
Neal Stephenson writes in the same "genre" but he has a much more approachable style while not sacrificing on any "hard" elements.
My recommendation for anybody who's never read Egan's stuff is to start with his short-stories first.
I'm a huge fan of Egan's work, but his writing definitely has its strengths and weaknesses.
In addition to being an "ideas man", I think his prose is generally excellent. He has a real talent for crafting sentences that are clear, concise, descriptive, and often evocative. (He's mentioned that outside of his writing career, he's a programmer, and I get the sense that any technical documentation he produced would be a joy to read.) It's a testament to his skill that his work is as comprehensible as it is.
The downside is that he has a tendency to write character dialogue the same way he writes everything else. Every sentence is carefully constructed to advance an argument, or to reveal a specific detail about a character's viewpoint. The characters end up feeling less like fully-realized people, and more like mouthpieces in a Socratic dialogue.
I agree with the recommendation to start with his short stories. Of the ones that are legally available online, I'd suggest "Singleton" (http://www.gregegan.net/MISC/SINGLETON/Singleton.html) as a good starting point.
Hear, hear. It starts with the birthing of a new AI, the proceeds to its education, its migration into a physical form, its migration into space, the migration into encoded form based on the geometry of a biological organism -- and all of this ancillary to the central plot.
'Permutation city' deserves a top spot on any list that has hard, comp and fi in the title. Although it's less about implementation details and more about theoretical CS. Here's an excerpt [1].
As someone who went into it with great expectations based on threads like these, I'll add my contrary opinion: it was a pretty disappointing read. The story is pretty lukewarm and doesn't particularly drag your interest into it, which would be fine if the point was the philosophical/metaphysical underpinnings were the point - but unfortunately those are pretty weak and superficial as well. Overall it felt like a half-baked mediocre work by a talented author.
To be fair, Diamond Age does have a solid section where one of the main characters learns all of the fundamentals of computer science, networking, and the foundations of crypto. Pretty good metaphors for absorbing the general concepts are in there.
If ever there was a book that was deeply foundational to the person I’ve grown up into, it was Cryptonomicon. I read it for the first time in middle school.
So much Neal Stepheson. REAMDE includes a MMORPG money laundering scheme as a centerpiece, Diamond Age sneaks in a tutorial on what Turing machines are.
And his latest book as well... Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. The book explores mind uploading to the Cloud from the perspective of Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, a character introduced in Stephenson's 2011 Reamde
I would add: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. Premise is a software engineer is killed by a car on his first day of retirement and wakes up 300 years in the future as an AI consciousness. It has absolutely loving attention to detail regarding both software and physics sci-fi concerns.
I'd also honorable mention Foucault's Pendulum by Uberto Eco, which has very little comp-sci stuff in it overall, but notably also has the search for permutations of the names of God mentioned in the article, complete with a BASIC program to do it in the text!
Fark yeah, wish the author would finish the series.* He left readers hanging so caveat emptor. Even so I can recommend the audio books as well. Great for doing laundry, mowing the lawn, etc.
May as well copy the last update from Dennis E. Taylor here since I'm not alone in wishing we had more Bobiverse novels.
>And this means that I’m now back to writing the next Bobiverse book(s), working title “The Search for Bender.” I say book(s) because it looks like it’s going to be a duology. And spoiler alert — the end of book one will be a cliff-hanger, and a doozy. Bob and the Bill Wonder will be tied to the front of a Zamboni, while the Penguin and his henchmen–er, no, wait, I’m having a flashback. Sorry.
>So stay tuned–same Bob-time, same Bob-channel–for more updates as they happen.
That is exciting news about the bobiverse. But what do you mean by "wish the author would finish the series"? After finishing the last one, I felt satisfied with the ending and thought that all the loose ends had been tied up.
These books refocused my life's work towards drones and AI. I now know what I want to be when I grow up: an interstellar von Neumann Probe. I might even make my AI butler look like General Akbar as a nod to the series.
Along the same line, Pohl's Heechee Rendevous the main character's sentinence is transferred to a sophisticated database system of sorts allowing him to live on virtually with access to pretty much all info.
It was many years ago I read it and I wasn't sure how it would stand up on a reread, but the fact that it has left a strong impression speaks well for it.
1970s depiction of an AI arising from whatever passed for the Internet back then.
As someone points out in the reviews here, this predates more famous depictions on similar subjects, like Wargames.
Yeah, the computer stuff in it is pretty hand-wavey but it does an awesome job of creating memorable visuals out of totally abstract AI and network stuff. And definitely notable as the seemingly uncredited inspiration for the Matrix.
William Gibson didn't actually know much about computers or networks when he wrote Neuromancer (on a manual typewriter IIRC)... ironic given that he coined the word "cyberspace."
And as far as inspiration goes, it's worth noting that Blade Runner came out as William Gibson was finishing Neuromancer, and he almost gave up on it because he was afraid that by the time the book came out people would think he was ripping off the movie.
I don't think the Matrix needs to "credit" Neuromancer as an inspiration, though. The Matrix draws from a lot of sources, but being cyberpunk, inspiration from Neuromancer is a given.
Ah, fair enough. I guess it's just that the Matrix became popular with a much wider crowd who had never heard of Neuromancer and so weren't aware of the genre's existence or origins and thought it was more out of the blue than it really was.
Interesting about the connection to Blade Runner, too.
"Neuromancer" is at the top of my list of favorite science fiction books, closely followed by Charles Stross "Accelerando". I don't necessarily like everything William Gibson has written, but I will read it all. I am anxiously awaiting his latest, "Agency".
"Genres are often defined by what they are not, so here are some honourable mentions:
[...]
Gibson’s Neuromancer sets the tone for a vast quantity of cyberpunk in its dealings with AI and simulation, though I don’t feel this alone qualifies it."
If we're opening up the floodgate of movies, I feel WarGames really should be up there. IMO, it's just a fun movie all around, but it's definitely computer-fiction.
Tepper's "True Game" series is an old favorite of mine. It's a while since I last read it but I don't recall anything remotely resembling computer programming concepts in it.
This Perfect Day, by Ira Levin. Story of a man's repeated attempts to escape a benevolent automated dictatorship where everything is controlled and everyone is kept sedated.
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein - The moon is a colony of misfits and is suffering increasingly unreasonable demands from earth (1776 in space). One of the computer systems managing part of the colony is discovered to be sentient and is gradually befriended by a sysadmin.
I would disagree wih The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The sentient computer just appears, solves the problem facing the Lunar residents, and disappears. Heinlein never explores any of the implications of a "sentient computer", how it just shows up, or what the effects following the Lunar revolution would be.
He hypothesizes about it briefly. You're lead to believe that consciousness is an rare but possible emergent behavior of a system, given sufficient capacity. For example, from chapter 1 -- "Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half times that number of neuristors. And woke up."
But yes, I agree that generally the story is not about computer technology. Science in general is very important to the plot, but not computer science.
If you think about it in a different way the computation is there, or at least see it in a metaphoric way, the overlords were enabling all civilizitations to be assimilated into a whole
of information. It is a very interesting perspective that is twisting the mind into uncomfortable ways to think about it. The idea in this book stayed with me since i first read it, a long long time ago
His short story "Dial F for Frankenstein" (1961) [1] might be a better candidate for an early example of the genre. No programming is involved, but there's no magic explained away as technology, either.
For prescience, however, I don't know of anything that beats Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" (1946) [2].
Vernon Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky". Includes very well put thoughts on the far future of software. Also his "A Fire Upon the Deep" with a fascinating take on AI, cryptography and more in a slightly alternative universe.
For me, I would like to have the Focus available, lock up a few hundred volunteers somewhere for a few months and have thew rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust or something...
"A Fire Upon the Deep" and its differentiation are referenced in this interesting article [0].
I think Vinge is a genius in these two novels. Great stories, rich environments, superb hard sci-fi, good social commentary, and no magical leaps of faith (aside from the central plot device of A Fire upon the Deep, which is completely up front, rationalistic, clever and exciting).
I haven't really found Vinge's match, although Stephenson comes close.
Most other authors in the genre are hard to read for me. They write gimmicks, or obsess over making plot devices out of memes, or never manage to make it past a collection of sketches, much less build a coherent universe.
The final showdown is between object-oriented and functional programs, and the OO programs have a hard time because the functional programs can use the state monad. I am not making this up.
[1] Yes, David Moles's 'Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom', not Cory Doctorow's 'Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom' [2]; Cory Doctorow had a bit of a project of writing stories with titles reused from previous works - for example, his 'True Names' [3] is not Vernor Vinge's 'True Names' [4] [5] - and David Moles thought that what was sauce for the goose may as well be sauce for the gander
[5] Vernor Vinge's 'True Names' [4] is really worth a read too - a neglected early work of cyberpunk, beats the pants off Neuromancer if you ask me.
[6] Yes, that is a pirate link, but the whole book is about a digital world at the mercy of hackers; you made your bed, Vernor, now you get to lie in it.
I'm going to second 'True Names'. I think Vinge excels at suggesting an idea with just the right amount of vagueness that it makes the imagination run wild filling in the details.
Cory Doctorow's short story from 2002, "0wnz0red", about
programmers who hack their own bodies don't need exercise and never get sick: https://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/
158 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
Neal Stephenson writes in the same "genre" but he has a much more approachable style while not sacrificing on any "hard" elements.
My recommendation for anybody who's never read Egan's stuff is to start with his short-stories first.
In addition to being an "ideas man", I think his prose is generally excellent. He has a real talent for crafting sentences that are clear, concise, descriptive, and often evocative. (He's mentioned that outside of his writing career, he's a programmer, and I get the sense that any technical documentation he produced would be a joy to read.) It's a testament to his skill that his work is as comprehensible as it is.
The downside is that he has a tendency to write character dialogue the same way he writes everything else. Every sentence is carefully constructed to advance an argument, or to reveal a specific detail about a character's viewpoint. The characters end up feeling less like fully-realized people, and more like mouthpieces in a Socratic dialogue.
I agree with the recommendation to start with his short stories. Of the ones that are legally available online, I'd suggest "Singleton" (http://www.gregegan.net/MISC/SINGLETON/Singleton.html) as a good starting point.
(In the sense that a lot of his novels are, at heart, mostly physics exposition, whether of real or imaginary physics.)
[1] https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Excerpt/PermutationExce...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hertling
The first one is essentially about software engineers working at a thinly-veiled Google who accidentally develop sentient AI.
I Also like the hacking and raspberrypi networking on: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30658546-kill-process
Thanks for that William!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
A collection of (mostly) spoiler-free quotes to emphasise my point: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
I'd also honorable mention Foucault's Pendulum by Uberto Eco, which has very little comp-sci stuff in it overall, but notably also has the search for permutations of the names of God mentioned in the article, complete with a BASIC program to do it in the text!
May as well copy the last update from Dennis E. Taylor here since I'm not alone in wishing we had more Bobiverse novels.
http://dennisetaylor.org/2019/01/06/outland-is-in-the-can/
>And this means that I’m now back to writing the next Bobiverse book(s), working title “The Search for Bender.” I say book(s) because it looks like it’s going to be a duology. And spoiler alert — the end of book one will be a cliff-hanger, and a doozy. Bob and the Bill Wonder will be tied to the front of a Zamboni, while the Penguin and his henchmen–er, no, wait, I’m having a flashback. Sorry.
>So stay tuned–same Bob-time, same Bob-channel–for more updates as they happen.
It was many years ago I read it and I wasn't sure how it would stand up on a reread, but the fact that it has left a strong impression speaks well for it.
1970s depiction of an AI arising from whatever passed for the Internet back then.
As someone points out in the reviews here, this predates more famous depictions on similar subjects, like Wargames.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1414021.The_Adolescence_...
And as far as inspiration goes, it's worth noting that Blade Runner came out as William Gibson was finishing Neuromancer, and he almost gave up on it because he was afraid that by the time the book came out people would think he was ripping off the movie.
I don't think the Matrix needs to "credit" Neuromancer as an inspiration, though. The Matrix draws from a lot of sources, but being cyberpunk, inspiration from Neuromancer is a given.
Interesting about the connection to Blade Runner, too.
[...]
Gibson’s Neuromancer sets the tone for a vast quantity of cyberpunk in its dealings with AI and simulation, though I don’t feel this alone qualifies it."
“Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect” another take on the singularity.
What do five points constitute? Five out of five, ten, 50?
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein - The moon is a colony of misfits and is suffering increasingly unreasonable demands from earth (1776 in space). One of the computer systems managing part of the colony is discovered to be sentient and is gradually befriended by a sysadmin.
Skip the "sequels" where he ties in Lazerus Long in...
I would disagree wih The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The sentient computer just appears, solves the problem facing the Lunar residents, and disappears. Heinlein never explores any of the implications of a "sentient computer", how it just shows up, or what the effects following the Lunar revolution would be.
But yes, I agree that generally the story is not about computer technology. Science in general is very important to the plot, but not computer science.
For prescience, however, I don't know of anything that beats Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" (1946) [2].
[1] https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2506
[2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/19/a_logic_named_joe/
I would love it if that series ever got finished. We're stuck on Tines world with the blight's remnant fleet approaching...
"A Fire Upon the Deep" and its differentiation are referenced in this interesting article [0].
[0] https://ristret.com/s/qk8wpt/philosophy_computational_comple...
I haven't really found Vinge's match, although Stephenson comes close.
Most other authors in the genre are hard to read for me. They write gimmicks, or obsess over making plot devices out of memes, or never manage to make it past a collection of sketches, much less build a coherent universe.
https://dmoles.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/down-and-out.pdf
The final showdown is between object-oriented and functional programs, and the OO programs have a hard time because the functional programs can use the state monad. I am not making this up.
[1] Yes, David Moles's 'Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom', not Cory Doctorow's 'Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom' [2]; Cory Doctorow had a bit of a project of writing stories with titles reused from previous works - for example, his 'True Names' [3] is not Vernor Vinge's 'True Names' [4] [5] - and David Moles thought that what was sauce for the goose may as well be sauce for the gander
[2] https://craphound.com/down/download/
[3] https://craphound.com/news/2008/03/13/true-names-part-01/
[4] http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf [6]
[5] Vernor Vinge's 'True Names' [4] is really worth a read too - a neglected early work of cyberpunk, beats the pants off Neuromancer if you ask me.
[6] Yes, that is a pirate link, but the whole book is about a digital world at the mercy of hackers; you made your bed, Vernor, now you get to lie in it.