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 |
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.
Octagon - an AI backdoor created by the early inventors of computers is inadvertently "activated" by a youth.
"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
The best answer.
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.
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
Edit: the audiobooks are well done too!
Obscure and a bit dated but Bruce Betkhe's Head Crash is hilarious if you've been deeply immersed in the software industry.
# 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 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816.Cryptonomicon - *Anathem* — Philosophical Science Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2845024-anathem - *The Diamond Age* — Nanopunk https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827.The_Diamond_Age
## Fred Saberhagen - *Octagon* — AI, Techno-thriller https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1891958.Octagon
## Lois McMaster Bujold — Vorkosigan Saga - *Series Overview* — Space Opera https://www.goodreads.com/series/40946-vorkosigan-saga
## Richard Powers - *Galatea 2.2* — Literary Fiction, AI https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45104.Galatea_2_2
## Scott Meyer - *Off to Be the Wizard* — Comic Fantasy with Computing Themes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18616975-off-to-be-the-w...
## Daniel Suarez - *Daemon* — Cyber-thriller, AI https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6665844-daemon
## Thomas J. Ryan - *The Adolescence of P-1* — AI, Classic Sci-Fi https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218059.The_Adolescence_o...
## Ernest Cline - *Ready Player One* — Sci-Fi, Gaming, Pop-Culture Adventure https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9969571-ready-player-one
## Dennis E. Taylor - *We Are Legion (We Are Bob)* — Humorous Sci-Fi, AI, Space Opera https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29475817-we-are-legion-w...
## Ted Chiang - *Stories of Your Life and Others* — Speculative Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223380.Stories_of_Your_L... - *Exhalation* — Speculative Fiction, Philosophy, AI https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41160292-exhalation - *The Lifecycle of Software Objects* — AI, Digital Consciousness https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9166173-the-lifecycle-of...
## Charles Stross - *Laundry Files Series* — Math-based Magic, Techno-Fantasy https://www.goodreads.com/series/50764-laundry-files
## Ken Liu - *The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories* — Speculative Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11289614-the-paper-menag... - *The Hidden Girl and Other Stories* — Speculative Fiction, AI, VR https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51008178-the-hidden-girl...
## Ellen Ullman - *The Bug* — Tech Industry Literary Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703.The_Bug
## Cory Doctorow - *Radicalized* — Techno-sociopolitical Speculative Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40604122-radicalized
## qntm (Sam Hughes) - *Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories* — Speculative Fiction, Computing Themes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56516939-valuable-humans...
## Roger Williams - *The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect* — AI, Post-Singularity SF https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/258140.The_Metamorphosis...
## Greg Bear - *Eon* — Hard Science Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/924843.Eon
## Vernor Vinge - *A Deepness in the Sky* — Hard Sci-Fi, Space Opera https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/175303.A_Deepness_in_the...
## Terry Pratchett - *Going Postal* — Comic Fantasy, Satire of Bureaucracy & Tech https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64222.Going_Postal
## Bruce Bethke - *Headcrash* — Cyber-satire https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213465.Headcrash
## Mary Shelley - *Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus* — Classic Gothic Sci-Fi https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35031085-frankenstein
## Douglas Adams - *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy* — Comic Sci-Fi https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11.The_Hitchhiker_s_Guid...
## Jorge Luis Borges - *The Library of Babel* — Metaphysical Fiction https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7844213-the-library-of-b...
## Greg Egan - *Permutation City* — Simulation Theory, Hard Sci-Fi https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156784.Permutation_City
## Cixin Liu - *The Three-Body Problem* — Hard Sci-Fi, First Contact https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518872-the-three-body-...
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 systems rather than human intention. It challenges the legal, biological, and metaphysical definitions of “life.”
The manga’s key concern:
When minds become software, what counts as a person? What counts as being alive?
It’s high-speed political action wrapped around deep questions about autonomy, embodiment, and consciousness.
--- Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface ---
Man-Machine Interface is not a continuation in the conventional sense, but more of a "post-human" sequel.
Here, Motoko Kusanagi, the main character from Ghost in The Shell, no longer exists as a single embodied entity. After merging with the Puppet Master at the end of the original story, Motoko becomes something new: a distributed, multi-bodied, evolving posthuman intelligence often referred to as Motoko Aramaki or Motoko 2.0.
The sequel follows her as:
- a partially decoupled consciousness running across networks
- an entity capable of switching avatars, bodies, and instantiations
- a mind that operates above nation-states, legal frameworks, and even human-scale cognition
Plot-wise, it deals with:
- AI-industrial warfare
- megacorporations fighting over distributed intelligences
- metaphysics of identity in a world of multiple selves
- data-ecologies and collective minds
- the emergence of “post-persons”
But the real shift is tone and philosophy.
Where the first manga explores the crisis of identity, the sequel explores post-identity.
Its main question:
What does “self” mean when consciousness is fluid, redundant, multi-threaded, and no longer tied to one body or one narrative?
Man-Machine Interface is dense, maximalist, metaphysical, and sometimes abstract , much closer to Lem’s Golem XIV in its treatment of posthuman consciousness than the first part.
Third, another set, Peter Watts’ Blindsight and its sequel Echopraxia.
--- Blindsight ---
Hard sci-fi first-contact novel about a crew sent to investigate an alien signal. The aliens they encounter demonstrate astonishing intelligence and adaptability, but seemingly zero consciousness. The book’s central question is brutal:
Does consciousness provide any evolutionary advantage at all? Or is it an expensive, unnecessary hack?
It’s one of the most rigorous modern explorations of intelligence without awareness, cognition without qualia, and post-biological life. Also features resurrected vampires as humanity’s most efficient problem-solvers.
--- Echopraxia ---
A follow-up set in the same universe, focusing more on Earth, zombies, hive-minds, military religious cults, and what Watts calls baseline humans becoming obsolete. It complements Blindsight by following the implications of a world where non-conscious “intelligence engines” outperform conscious humans.
Finally...
--- Greg Egan's Permutation City ---
At its core:
A group of people upload themselves as software (“Copies”) into a virtual environment where consciousness is implemented as a computational process. But Egan pushes the idea far past “mind uploading” into deep mathematical and philosophical territory.
The central premise:
If consciousness depends only on logical consistency, not computation performed in real time, then a simulated mind does not require a universe running on stable physics or an external computer at all.
Egan calls this the Dust Theory.
What the novel explores:
1. Copies — software persons - Human consciousness is scanned and instantiated as a digital mind. These Copies struggle with:
- psychological trauma from being disposable
- questions about their moral status
- fears of erasure
- pressure to perform labor for “real” biological humans
They are conscious, but economically and ontologically precarious.
2. The “Autoverse” A lifelike world governed by artificial chemistry and evolution. It explores how complexity and life can arise from arbitrary rules, not carbon-based biology.
3. Dust Theory A mind is simply a pattern, not a process. If any arrangement of matter in the multiverse instantiates that pattern, even for a moment, consciousness exists.
This implies that a mind could “run” without a computer — as long as the pattern exists somewhere, even scattered across physical chaos (“dust”).
Permutation City becomes a sandbox for minds that no longer require a substrate.
4. “Permutation City” itself The ultimate simulation, constructed to be self-sustaining in a way that breaks free from dependence on any external reality. Inside it, Copies evolve new forms of existence beyond human constraints.
Why it’s important:
It’s one of the most serious, mathematically grounded attempts in fiction to grapple with:
- the ontology of simulated minds
- the meaning (or irrelevance) of physical reality
- identity as a computational equivalence class
- consciousness divorced from biology or substrate
- universes that exist because their patterns are self-consistent
It anticipates debates around:
- substrate independence
- functionalism
- consciousness as pattern-matching
- AI personhood
- anthropic reasoning
- simulation theory
Before most of those ideas entered mainstream discussion.