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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
'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].
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.
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.
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.
Hear me out. This is a comedy novel in the vein of Pratchett or Douglas Adams. But the central conceit is that a hacker finds a large configuration file on a system he hacks into. He finds his name in the file, and information about himself, including his x,y,z co-ordinates. He discovers that if he changes those co-ordinates, he teleports in reality. He has infact found the configuration file that runs our reality. He rapidly gets himself into legal trouble and so - to escape - teleports himself to England in the Middle Ages to pose as a Wizard.
Its a very silly novel but programming takes center stage and - if you accept the central conceit of the configuration file - the programming is all realistic.
Recommended. Scott Mayer is also a cartoonist who does the long running 'Basic Instructions' webcomic.
Daemon by Daniel Suarez (a database engineer) definitely deserves a place on this list. It starts with the death of a famed and wealthy game engine programmer due to brain cancer... and develops from there. I don’t want to spoil it.
I unequivocally recommend Daemon. If you liked reading The Martian, you might like Daemon. They both read very much like a screenplay.
The Martian is a great book and a great movie, and if I didn't know which one came first I would be hard put to say which is an adaptation of which. I don't know if Suarez is in talks with anybody to get Daemon produced as a feature film, but if he's not, he ought to be.
The sequel / conclusion, Freedom, is a very different novel, but also compelling and brings a decent enough end to the themes from Daemon.
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.
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.
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].
Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects. What happens when support for the platform for your artificial mind is deprecated? (or in this case, your child's). Warning: heartbreaking.
This is the book I came here to recommend. If we ever get to true general AI's, I think the processes described in this book are likely how it's actually going to happen than anything more top-down. Also, like you said, a (good) gutpunch, too.
His first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others is also excellent. They don't technically fit the description of hard comp-fi, but they have a similar sensibility, even when they're dealing with magic and religion (which makes sense--his day job is technical writing).
Readit News
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
A collection of (mostly) spoiler-free quotes to emphasise my point: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
https://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.
[1] https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Excerpt/PermutationExce...
Hear me out. This is a comedy novel in the vein of Pratchett or Douglas Adams. But the central conceit is that a hacker finds a large configuration file on a system he hacks into. He finds his name in the file, and information about himself, including his x,y,z co-ordinates. He discovers that if he changes those co-ordinates, he teleports in reality. He has infact found the configuration file that runs our reality. He rapidly gets himself into legal trouble and so - to escape - teleports himself to England in the Middle Ages to pose as a Wizard.
Its a very silly novel but programming takes center stage and - if you accept the central conceit of the configuration file - the programming is all realistic.
Recommended. Scott Mayer is also a cartoonist who does the long running 'Basic Instructions' webcomic.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/43084-wiz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series)?wprov=sf...
The Martian is a great book and a great movie, and if I didn't know which one came first I would be hard put to say which is an adaptation of which. I don't know if Suarez is in talks with anybody to get Daemon produced as a feature film, but if he's not, he ought to be.
The sequel / conclusion, Freedom, is a very different novel, but also compelling and brings a decent enough end to the themes from Daemon.
Personally, I found Freedom™ to be a much weaker endeavour and... prefer to forget about it.
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.
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...