Slashdot Asks: What Are Your Favorite Technology Books and Novels?

It can be a nonfiction book, or a fictional narrative where technology plays a key role. I recently started to read 'The Rise of the Robots' by Martin Ford. It talks about how robots are threatening mass unemployment more than they ever did before. I also found Andrew Blum's 'Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet' quite insightful. I would like to read 'The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers'.

What are some of your favorite tech-centric books? And which book are you currently reading, or recently finished?

Comments

Nonfiction

[cecurry]

- Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

The Expanse series

[Kethinov]

I didn't think good sci-fi was getting made anymore until I came across The Expanse. The novels are terrific (especially the 5th novel) and Syfy's TV adaptation is surprisingly good as well. Both are worth a look.

The premise is a near-future sci-fi setting with as little magic tech as possible. Almost all sci-fi tech in the story consists of reasonable derivations of current technology. Newtonian physics in space is respected. There's no inertial dampeners. There are no relativity-busting star drives. Gravity in space is through rotation or constant acceleration. And the story is solid.

It's up there with BSG and Firefly in terms of emphasis on depicting space realistically (by comparison to the looser realism of Star Trek/Farscape/Stargate/etc anyway). I still enjoy BSG's and Firefly's stories and characters a bit more, but The Expanse is far superior in terms of scientific accuracy.

Notably, for any Game of Thrones fans out there, George RR Martin is a fan of The Expanse and it is frequently referred to as the Game of Thrones of sci-fi.