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Books I like that contain things that are kinda computer-sciency: Permutation City, by Greg Egan -- a bit of a mind-uploady brain-simluation story. Fairly phil
by hug 7y ago
Books I like that contain things that are kinda computer-sciency:
Permutation City, by Greg Egan -- a bit of a mind-uploady brain-simluation story. Fairly philosophical, but not impenetrable.
Accelerando, by Charles Stross -- Focused on the technical singularity brought about by increasing computing power. Somewhat cheeky, a little frenetic.
Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin -- Algorithms and game theory plots regarding solving a civilsation-destroying puzzle.
Diaspora, by Greg Egan -- Post-trans-humanist shenanigans.
Other things of note:
Neal Stephenson writes a lot of cyberpunk computer-adjacent fiction. Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon all come to mind. The Baroque Cycle is a fiction series about the beginnings of computation and cryptography. He does have a propensity to navel-gaze though.
Vernor Vinge was a computer science professor. Rainbow's End and The Peace War are worth reading. Anything else he writes is worth reading too, actually.
Anything else by Stross, not just Accelerando, will have a bit of a tech bent to it, but is often not very serious and a bit handwavey.
The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet has an AI character with a backstory that forms a significant chunk of the book, but isn't super computer-sciencey.
- jspru 7y agoFire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky by Vinge I felt were really interesting from a CS perspective, when thousands of years in the future you have billions of lines of code running ships, etc. that no one exactly knows how it works anymore, code archaeologists, etc.
- sideshowb 7y agoI'm partway through Rainbow's End and feel that (as with most cyberpunk) it is more about social consequence of computing than computer science. Am I wrong? Contrast Snow Crash for example which although still tongue in cheek cyberpunk, is heavier on the CS with the plot focusing on a mind virus and all those discursions into how language programs humans