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

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

[fatnlazy]

along with his follow-up Freedom.

Re:Daemon by Daniel Suarez

[hey!]

Those books were garbage. I'm actually surprised anyone on slashdot liked them. Cheesy poorly written action books with all the tech so stupidly wrong it's offensive to anyone who knows how computers work.

I have a theory that power and accessibility in books are largely orthogonal. Power comes from having something to say that resonates with someone. Accessibility from from craft. Sometimes you read a book and it passes through your head effortlessly without making a ripple or leaving a trace. That's a very, well written book with nothing interesting to say.

When a book's message and themes hit you in the right spot, you can't see its faults. Lord of the Rings is a brilliant book, but it's a hot mess (with a sprinkling of sublime bits) all the way up to the Council of Elrond. That's painfully obvious for someone who is not getting into the book as he reads it. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is likewise a brilliant book with serious first-novel-itis. And we all know how dreadful the dialog and scene pacing in Twilight is -- but the people who love that book don't. And it's OK. Had Twilight been better written, it might have found a larger audience; but it found a large enough audience, and if they enjoy the book I'm not going rub their nose in its faults.

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's prigs who try to make people ashamed for liking things that they think are bad. If you read hard enough, everything starts looking bad. Someone in my book club recently disparaged a potential novel as "Gun sci-fi". I knew exactly what he meant, and I suspect that book is not for me; but there are people out there who want to read that stuff and if they enjoy it, good for them. Sure it looks better to them than it does to me, but there's stuff I like that they probably would find ridiculous too.

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

Stephensons

[101percent]

With the introduction of things like "every student gets an ipad" and young people literally not even owning a laptop, I think Stephenson's In The Beginning was the Command Line is probably his most valuable work that becomes more precious every year.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

[ytene]

Although his later works (such as Anathem) felt like they went off the edge of the world, Cryptonomicon combines a clever story, a prescient look at the emerging internet age, and some thoughtful nods to encryption schemes, all in a decent story. IMHO one of his best, and a good all-round sci-fi yarn...

Martian Chronicles

[phantomfive]

Martian Chronicles are at the top of my list. Maybe not exactly realistic, but a great read.

I vote for The Cuckoo's Egg

[sconeu]

Cliff Stoll's account of how he tracked the CCC hackers is a very good read.

Richard Stallman

[101percent]

Stallman's Free Software, Free Society if you're too lazy to connect to gnu.org/philosophy. Say what you will, but rms is simply a legend and too important to overlook whether or not you agree or disagree with his views.

Re:Richard Stallman

[101percent]

He is more consistently more correct than anyone else in technology. His early research with Sussman is also still relevant. And his code Emacs is still the most non-trivial ported FOSS software in existence. He's certainly going to be relevant for the next several decades.

Culture books from the late Iain M Banks

[shanen]

Basically daunted by the topic, but I read a lot of books. Started with classic SF such as Heinlein and Asimov, but trying to pick the best is an overwhelming challenge. I do see mention of those two above, but Iain M Banks seems to be missing. His Culture books are ultimately optimistic about the future in the same way that Star Trek is. Too well written to dismiss as space opera, though grandiose enough.

Re:Godel Escher Bach : hofstadter

[ArmchairAstronomer]

Yet another vote for Gödel, Escher & Bach. I was blown away when I read it. It is now my favorite non-fiction book by far. I go back and re-read at least one chapter every year just for fun.

Surely You Must Be Joking Mr. Feynman

[hambone142]

An entertaining book on Richard Feynman's pranks and interests.

Re:Classic Sci-Fi Books .. but why just novels?

[Jason1729]

I'm nto sure why you want to look at cheesy dumbed down action shows that make a mockery of sci-fi and and then ask why TV is excluded.

Take a look at the Honor Harrington or Lost Fleet series. They try vey hard to get the physics perfect, but it's all about the human/social issues. The Troy Rising trilogy by John Ringo is also excellent and very much about the people.

We're talking Tech, not Science, right?

[hey!]

And not literary sophistication, right?

If we're talking pure joy of tech, for me it has to be EE Doc Smith's SPACEHOUNDS OF THE IPC, originally published in Hugo Gernsback's AMAZING STORIES in 1931.

Now remember for readers in 1931 radio was high tech. Ever build a crystal radio set? Did you wonder what the point was? Well if you were a kid in the early 20s, with a wooden plank, a spool of wire, and a hunk of galena, you could build yourself the most advanced, high tech communication instrument on the planet. When the story was published in 1931, the hottest new tech was the vacuum tube radio. This took a few more premanunfactured parts -- the vacuum tubes obviousl, but still if you were ambitious and clever with your hands and could solder wires and cut and bend sheet metal, you still could build the most sophisticated communication receiver on the planet.

The story takes place in a high tech future that seems plausible for someone in '31. There is regular spaceliner service between Earth and Mars. Interesting side note -- these spaceliners operate by a kind of remotely broadcasted power, and use that to power their reactionless drives. If you were *very* sophisticated at the time, you would realize this avoids all the rocket equation related implausibilities of ships that have to carry the reaction mass to maintain constant acceleration. The ships are guided by beacon stations (radio of course!), but the station keepers have been getting sloppy, so the line sends their best computer (a *person* of course!) to pin their ears back.

The liner is attacked by an alien spaceship, cut apart, and towed in pieces to Jupiter.It is built in many small airtight compartments (like an OCEAN liner) so most of the people are still alive, including our hero who is stuck in small piece with a beautiful (yay) rich (double yay) girl. He manages to escape (I forget how), and they crash on Ganymede, which turns out to be just like Earth but with lower gravity.

Now here's the problem: the line is building a new supership; if they only knew everyone was being held at the moons of Jupiter they could rescue them. But as far as they know the liner just disappeared.

So what our hero and is lovely, plucky helpmate must do is something familiar to every red-blooded Depression era nerd: BUILD A RADIO SET! Only they've got nothing; they've got to work their way up from paleolithic tech all the way up to (their) present, figuring out how to smelt metal, blow glass, generate electricity, and reverse engineer the very latest high tech vacuum tube.

This kind of story represents a way of imagining the future of tech that we we never be able to believe in again; one in which a single heroically brilliant nerd can really master everything from banging the rocks together all the way up to the very cutting edge. You can imagine the hero of this book figuring out how to melt silica and blow glass, but you couldn't imagine him improvising a chip fab.