Ask HN: What novels or other fictional works have Linux in a significant role?

5 points by gregoreous 12 years ago | 6 comments

It's summer and time to put together a reading list. My suggestion is Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. And thanks to dragonwriter for the assist in wording the question correctly.

ajarmst 12 years ago |

Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon frequently references "Finix" ("Finux"? something like that), an obvious stand-in for Linux. IIRC, Stephenson chose the pseudonym to avoid geek rage if he mis-reported some tiny detail of Linux.

gregoreous 12 years ago | |

I vaguely remember that. I also remember one of the characters recoding his camera on the fly to take pictures of people ogling his computer at a meeting. Not too realistic, but cool.

mindcrime 12 years ago |

There are, IIRC, a few of the Laundry Files novels - by Charles Stross - that mention Linux, although I'm not sure if you'd say it is featured in a "significant role".

totoroisalive 12 years ago |

I would recommend Digital Fortress by Dan Brown, I would not say Linux plays a significant role, but the whole cryptography background going on it's really fun and entertaining.

thegeomaster 12 years ago | |

(Spoilers ahead)

Digital Fortress is probably the book with the most bullshit representation of computers and cryptography ever. Dan Brown goes out of his way to do as little research as possible on subjects he's talking about. In Angels and Demons, the Illuminati want to blow up Vatican using jars with antimatter they stole from CERN. Jesus Christ. The Da Vinci Code is similarly flawed.

It baffles me how he manages to be so full of shit as to say that the descriptions, historical events and whatnot are accurate in his novels. In Digital Fortress he describes how the Spanish healthcare system is subpar and hospitals are filthy, when in reality it's ranked way above the US by some satisfaction index or whatever. Not to mention the NSA's supercomputer ("made by soldering together millions of processors over 10 years") which gets fed some ciphertext and a virus infects it... BECAUSE IT WAS ACTUALLY NOT A CIPHERTEXT BUT MALICIOUS CODE!!!11!1

I hate Dan Brown, dammit

gregoreous 12 years ago |

Surely, there are more than these. I have to confess that Dan Brown would not be my "go to guy" on anything factual.