

Ask HN: Recommend any good business/hacker fiction? - jskopek

I just finished re-reading Neal Stevenson's Cryptonomicon for the third time today, and I cannot get enough of the modern part of the story.<p>It's basically about a very HN-ish nerd named Randy who gets embroiled in a huge international venture to create the world's first data haven, with plenty of in-depth discussion on technical topics like Van Eck Phreaking and more absurd ones like pantyhose fetishes.<p>Has anyone here read anything along the lines of this? A book about a hacker/entrepreneur who sets out to change the world and comes across all sorts of wacky scenarios?
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jseliger
* If you've already read Cryptonomicon (see more here: <http://jseliger.com/2006/11/29/cryptonomicon> ), you're going in the right direction, but you should skip the Baroque cycle and Anathem.

* David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk deals extensively with math (<http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2007/12/14/the-indian-clerk>).

* Joel Spolsky's The Best Software Writing isn't fiction but is worth reading.

* I'll reiterate Tom Wolf's The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.

* Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is nominally aimed at adolescents, but people of any age can enjoy it.

* Michael Tolkin's The Player is partially about the business of film, as is its sequel, The Return of the Player.

If you're curious about more, send me an e-mail; I write a book blog at
<http://jseliger.com> , and a lot of the reviews/commentaries would probably
be of interest to hackerish types.

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lutorm
I enjoyed both Baroque cycle and Anathem, they build slowly but I like the
long-term immersion and intricacy.

~~~
jongraehl
Anathem is better than Cryptonomicon.

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bockris
Totally a matter of taste. I, for one, completely disagree. :-)

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ctkrohn
I'm sure you'll get plenty of comments on hacker fiction, so here's some
"business" fiction:

* "The Bonfire of the Vanities" by Tom Wolfe. The classic novel of 80s Wall Street at its peak.

* "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis. A pretty terrifying picture of greed and excess, again on 80s Wall Street. If you've seen the movie, you know what to expect -- only in greater detail.

* "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Some people hate it, but others find it an inspirational novel. The heroes are driven, smart, competitive entrepreneurs; the antagonists are greedy, pilfering government regulators. Whether or not you like this will probably depend on your pre-existing ideological preference.

I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting...

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grinich
Second for Atlas Shrugged. It seems especially relevant right now.

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dangrover
One of my roommates here at the Hacker House uses two copies of Atlas Shrugged
that happened to be laying around the house to adjust the height of his
monitor.

It never occurred to me that the book might have other purposes than that. I
think I'm going to check out The Fountainhead first though.

~~~
whughes
I read both (Fountainhead second), and I preferred the Fountainhead first.
It's a lighter read and will give you a taste for Rand's style. If you can
stand the _heavy_ ideological slant, then you might want to look into Atlas
Shrugged. I don't think that they are for everyone.

~~~
jjburka
Another good introduction to Ayn Rand is the 'Virtue of Selfishness'. Its a
collection of her essays with some that were written by people in her group.
Its pretty short (100ish pages) and in my opinion says about everything she
was trying to say in Atlas Shrugged.

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FiveFiftyOne
Stephenson is in a league of his own when it comes to this kind of story. Snow
Crash was a terrific piece of work, where the main protagonist :) was a hacker
deeply lacking in entrepreneurial skills. Cryptonomicon had a ton of stuff in
it, even down to Bobby Shaftoe getting cracked over the ear with an oar when
he was reunited with his beloved Glory :-)

~~~
tedshroyer
Agreed Snow Crash is very good. It along with Diamond Age are my favorite of
his works. The Baroque Cycle is too long for what it is and might have crushed
my spirit to read his work any longer. I advise avoiding it unless you are an
avid fan of his.

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tesseract
I'll be honest - I couldn't finish the Baroque Cycle. (Maybe I'll try again
someday.) But when Anathem came out I thought I'd give it a chance, as I so
enjoyed Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash that giving up Stephenson altogether
didn't seem like the right thing to do. Anathem starts out slowly but it gets
much better and I'm definitely glad I read it. If you can get through the
first few chapters you will be rewarded. (IMHO, anyway.)

~~~
bockris
While I agree BC was dense, I still think it was very good. I'm not really
into heavy reading like that but I've still been through the trilogy twice. I
whole heartedly recommend any Neal Stephenson. (I wasn't completely enamored
with Diamond Age, but I realize I'm in a minority there.)

On a related note, I recommended Cryptonomicon to a co-worker who was
complaining how much she spent on books (she typically buys one hardback per
week) and how much storage space she had devoted to books. I lent her my copy
of Cryptonomicon and it took her about 4-5 weeks to finish. She was in for a
good bit of teasing about the apparent 'quality' of her normal fare. IIRC, the
term 'bodice-ripper' was tossed about. ;-)

~~~
murrayb
Interesting I also really enjoyed BC and was disappointed with Diamond Age, it
held me to a point and then lost me completely. Judging comments here and
elsewhere I'm starting to think that if you are a fan of one then you probably
won't be a fan of the other.

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jonny2112
I recently read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. It tracks the story of of a
few people through there time in the entry level jobs at Microsoft to there
experiences in a Silicon Valley start up predotcom bubble. A very fun read.

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cjbos
Daemon by Daniel Suarez, it really reminded me of Stevenson's work, highly
recommend it! <http://thedaemon.com/>

Also loved Microserfs and JPod by Douglas Coupland.

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tedshroyer
I remember enjoying Neuromancer by William Gibson

~~~
akeefer
That's a classic; his recent work is pretty good too. I really enjoyed both
Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.

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mdakin
You might like _The Shockwave Rider_ by John Brunner. Not the greatest book
but it's about a hacker trying to change things for sure. And some of the
details and concepts are exceptional.

Best black-hat hacker short story goes to "Burning Chrome" by William Gibson
(last story in the anthology of the same name).

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streblo
I liked Cryptonomicon, but more for the WWII side of the story. If you liked
that part, check out Colossus by Jack Copeland. The Randy Waterhouse side of
the story actually reminded me a lot of Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. Say
what you will about Dan Brown, but I thought Digital Fortress was great.

~~~
weavejester
Are you being serious about Digital Fortress? Digital Fortress is infamous for
its technological and geographical inaccuracies. I found it good for a
chuckle, but I wouldn't really consider it hacker fiction, unless we're
talking about Hollywood's idea of a hacker.

~~~
duskwuff
Example: <http://community.livejournal.com/linguaphiles/3257513.html>

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kiba
I read the Diamond Age, but I didn't finish it(Mostly because I read it in
store). Someday, I'll finish it. What is really interesting to me because it
feature an anarcho-capitalism model of society.

~~~
rsheridan6
Yeah, the idea was that the government couldn't collect taxes anymore due
because they couldn't get an accurate idea of what transactions were going on
due to cryptography. I figured that it didn't occur to Stephenson that, if you
can't crack the crypto one way or another: <http://xkcd.com/538/> You could
just raise property taxes, because it's hard to encrypt land.

But Stephenson made a reference to exactly that idea in Cryptonomicon, so I
don't know what he was thinking.

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Eliezer
Vernor Vinge: True Names (short story), A Deepness in the Sky, Rainbow's End

Greg Egan: Permutation City, Quarantine

(More programmer's fiction than startup fiction.)

~~~
10ren
Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep (to which A Deepness in the Sky is a
presquel). I didn't like Rainbow's End though.

Agree they're more coder-fiction.

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rajah1337
Check out this film:

WEST RUN (2007)

Directed, Photographed, & Edited by Rajah Samaroo Written by Rajah Samaroo and
Andrew Harrar Runtime: 43 mins Genre: cyberpunk thriller

Retired hacker Roland West gets lured back into the game when the headhunter
Sebastian find him living off the grid. The stakes has never been so high, as
West must outwit a conniving group of business leaders bent on collapsing the
world market and US government.

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frossie
I'd like to recommend Melissa Scott's The Jazz. It is out of print but
available on the Kindle. It's a light, fun read, (not Stephenson style, that
is for sure) but quite perceptive in how one can use the net to spin
misinformation. A few of the stories on HN have reminded me of that book -
most recently the twitter fake news story:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577700>

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davi
The Man Who Sold the Moon, by Robert Heinlein

<http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Sold-Moon/dp/0671578634>

(spoilers: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon>)

Then, for fun, go on to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, wherein a great acronym
TANSTAAFL is introduced.

~~~
jjburka
'For us the living' is also another interesting book by him. Sorta the anti-
Atlas Shrugged.

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rsheridan6
>A book about a hacker/entrepreneur who sets out to change the world and comes
across all sorts of wacky scenarios?

Charles Stross's Accelerando fits the bill perfectly, but it's way out there
with singularity stuff, unlike Cryptonomicon, which may not be what you want.
His Halting State is set in the near future, with a robbery of an MMORPG that
involves real money with real bad guys getting involved.

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mike463
The adolescence of p-1, Thomas Ryan The soul of a new machine, by tracy kidder
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

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jlc
JR by William Gaddis

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_R>

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jwb119
"The New New Thing" is not fiction, but it reads like it is.. Basically a bio
snapshot of Jim Clark written by Michael Lewis (author of Liar's Poker,
another good business book about Wall Street)

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pcm
I fully recommend you read Infoquake and Multireal (the first two books of the
Jump 225 trilogy) by David Louis Edelman. It has everything you're looking
for.

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sanswork
I read The first billion by Christopher Reich(ISBN: 0440234697) about a year
ago. It's about tech companies, finance and international crime. Pretty fun
read.

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ideamonk
Founders at Work,

Stealing the Network Series (1st two are great :) ),

Startup.com - the documentary

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bemmu
Why business fiction when there are so many nice stories of real businesses
around?

