Ask HN: What fiction books would you recommend for programmers?
What are some fiction books that you think programmers especially would enjoy?
Doesn't have to be but I'm interested as well if there are any that are written by programmers or engineers
23 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 57.5 ms ] threadObscure and a bit dated but Bruce Betkhe's Head Crash is hilarious if you've been deeply immersed in the software industry.
Space opera with warfare, intrigue, politics, drama, and world building.
Definitely the Wizardry series by Rick Cook
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/c/rick-cook/wizardry/
Programming meets magical realms
James Hogan
Inherit the Stars - Has supercomputers but not main characters
Code of the Lifemaker Has Ancient Tech evolving into a robotic society
Two Faces of Tomorrow - humans trying to get along with AI
D.F.Jones
Colossus, the Fall of Colossus, and Colossus and the Crab
Humans creating machines to protect humanity (computers have different idea) and the rebellion, and a new threat.
A Logic Names Joe - radioplay of short story.
https://archive.org/details/OTRR_X_Minus_One_Singles/XMinusO...
The internet and AI long before the internet and AI.
David Gerrold - When H.A.R.L.I.E. was One - and other tales involving Artificial Super Intelligence
William Gibson - Neuromancer and related - Cyberpunk series, the Difference Engine - a Steampunk technology tale.
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/50764-laundry-files
"Off to Be the Wizard" by Scott Meyer
"Daemon" by Daniel Suarez
"The Adolescence of P1" (vintage) by Thomas Ryan
"Snow Crash" by William Gibson
"Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline
"We are Legion [We are Bob]" by Dennis Taylor
The Bug by Ellen Ullman
Radicalized by Corey Doctrow
Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by qntm
Most terrifying book I've ever read, and it is very much fit for a programmer to read. I can't recommend it enough. Especially if you are into AI and / or systems programming. I know those two seem very far apart and have no correlation, but you'll get it once you read it.
# Fiction Books Recommended for Programmers (HN Thread 46128404)
## Adrian Tchaikovsky - *Children of Time* — Science Fiction (Evolution, Space Opera) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...
## Rick Cook — Wizardry Series - *Wizard’s Bane* — Fantasy, Programming/Magic Mashup https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112616.Wizard_s_Bane - *Wizardry Series (overview)* https://www.goodreads.com/series/43084-wiz
## James P. Hogan - *Inherit the Stars* — Hard Science Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/743568.Inherit_the_Stars - *Code of the Lifemaker* — Sci-Fi, Artificial Life https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/296722.Code_of_the_Lifem... - *The Two Faces of Tomorrow* — AI, Hard Science Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218017.The_Two_Faces_of_...
## D. F. Jones — Colossus Trilogy - *Colossus* — AI, Classic Sci-Fi Thriller https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/806105.Colossus - *The Fall of Colossus* — AI, Sci-Fi https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/806106.The_Fall_of_Colos... - *Colossus and the Crab* — AI, Sci-Fi https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/806107.Colossus_and_the_...
## Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner) - *A Logic Named Joe* — Golden-Age Sci-Fi, AI Precursor https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16179042-a-logic-named-j...
## David Gerrold - *When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One* — AI, Classic Science Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/865672.When_H_A_R_L_I_E_...
## William Gibson / Bruce Sterling - *Neuromancer* — Cyberpunk https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6088007-neuromancer - *The Difference Engine* — Steampunk https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16781.The_Difference_Eng...
## Neal Stephenson - *Snow Crash* — Cyberpunk https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830.Snow_Crash - *Cryptonomicon* — Techno-thriller, Cyber-history rasulkireev ↗ I didn't expect this, but I'm really enjoying War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. lessnonymous ↗ The "Magic 2.0" series by Scott Meyer is a fun look at a programmer in medieval England with the ability to edit the world around him topologie ↗ I have a couple I would highly recommend:
Edit: the audiobooks are well done too!
The first is Stanislaw Lem's "Imaginary Magnitude."
Most stories there are written as sort of prefaces to non-existent technical/scientific books, papers, articles, etc. The last one, Golem XIV, goes a bit beyond and includes an entire lecture.
The content is incredibly detailed and technical, Lem knew his Technology and Science for sure, so sometimes it's incredibly accurate and prophetic. Even though it was written in the 1970's, Lem was already describing things that look uncannily like neural networks, emergent communication systems, and machine-generated literature, decades before they existed.
And... most of them are also really really funny.
Here are small summaries that ChatGPT helped me write for some of the stories there:
---- Eruntics ---- A faux-scientific introduction to a field studying “erunts”: biological (or semi-biological) agents, think bacteria/neural colonies, that can learn to read, write, and communicate.
These bacterial colonies learn to communicate through several learning iterations across many mutations and generations, much like, say, Neural Networks, and they even develop their own proto-language as they evolve.
Eruntics is a sort of "meditation" on emergent intelligence and how writing or meaning might arise in nonhuman systems.
---- A History of Bitic Literature ---- Purports to be a critical history of literature produced not by humans, but by machines or other non-human authors, the fictional discipline of bitistics.
It treats computer-generated texts as a full literary tradition, with schools, tropes, and structural analysis.
It also goes into detail on how at a certain point Bitic Literature required models to read what other models had generated and "validate" what they had written, since the complexity they reach in terms of things like neologisms, subtext, and interconnectedness to other texts and ideas, becomes so absurdly high that no human being can even attempt to read them or make sense of them.
---- Golem XIV ---- This is like half of the book, and oh boy...
It presents itself first as a report/lecture series from a U.S.-military supercomputer, framed with forewords, editorial notes, “instructions,” etc, but it quickly shifts into the machine’s own philosophical monologues about humanity, evolution, intelligence gradients, and existential insignificance/significance.
It contains some really iconic phrases, in particular during Golem's "Lecture":
" 'The meaning of the transmitter is the transmission' [...] To be sure, the corollary holds: 'The meaning of the transmission is the transmitter.' But the two members are not symmetrical."
" 'The construction is less perfect than what constructs' [...] Let us give it more substance: 'In evolution, a negative gradient operates in the perfecting of structural solutions'"
Golem XIV becomes a genuine “book within a book,” a hard, speculative essay on what a post-human intellect might think.
The second set of "books" that I would recommend are kinda related, even in tone:
Masamune Shirow's "Ghost in The Shell" and its sequel "Ghost in the Shell: Man-Machine Interface."
ChatGPT summaries:
--- Ghost in the Shell ---
At its core, the original Ghost in the Shell manga is a cyberpunk procedural about identity in a hyper-connected world.
It follows Major Motoko Kusanagi, a fully cybernetic government operative working for Public Security Section 9, a counter-cyberterrorism and intelligence unit. The cases involve:
- cyberbrains and identity hacking
- political corruption
- AI autonomy
- blurred boundaries between human and machine
- networks where memories, skills, and consciousness can be stolen or overwritten
The central philosophical arc centers on Project 2501, the “Puppet Master,” an emergent artificial consciousness born from networked information sy...