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Ask HN: Recommend any good business/hacker fiction?

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Re: Ask HN: Recommend any good business/hacker fiction?

#41
post #30

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.)

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.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend any good business/hacker fiction?

#45
post #6

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…

Thanks to everyone for the great suggestions - looks like I've got a reading to do!

I just remembered another incredible novel that I haven't read in years - Noble House by James Clavell; it's a novel about two warring business empires, set in 1930s Hong Kong.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend any good business/hacker fiction?

#46
post #39

* 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 Wol…

From your review, I see that you have only read one book out of the BC trilogy. In this case, I'm pretty sure you can't dismiss it without reading all of it. After finishing BC, do a careful re-read of Cryptonomicon. You will find a lot of things that seemed inconsequential on the first read, have a huge backstory behind them and they mesh as smoothly as a planetary gearbox. This is Neal Stephenson at his best. You c…

"In this case, I'm pretty sure you can't dismiss it without reading all of it."

I can and do on a regular basis: books that don't have sufficient merit within a relatively small number of pages aren't going to keep me till the end, and I'm not masochistic enough to read through every single book I start in the hopes of "understanding" it.

Re: Ask HN: Recommend any good business/hacker fiction?

#47
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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