https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

I adore Zodiac as well but am in a decided minority in that regard.

Or read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and experience it today. :)

It's excellent.

And no, I haven't read Snow Crash. I shouldn't have to read a novel to get excited about a project...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

I think your comparison with Snow Crash has swung it for me; IJ is definitely on my reading list now

Perhaps, this essay is old though, and by now he is and some of them have been.

Cryptonomicon is very good too. Should be a must read for people who want to make another Tor :)

Incomparison, Reamde is slow and boring.

Reamde was pretty good, and this is an interesting setup.

Edit: Anathem not Anathema (thanks __david__ and lmm)

His middle-period work did nothing for me at all. Just overdone, to my taste.

I haven't read anything after the Baroque Cycle put me off.

In the same vein, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is great as well. Its essentially a parody of cyberpunk but hilariously well written.

IMO it is one of his best works. Nanotech/Networks/Crypto for the masses to understand. I read, loved and was caught up in the VR fever of the 90's via Snow Crash, and love his other books, but TDA is the one I'll never get rid of.

I've yet to read anything by Gibson that approaches anything by Stephenson

If you find the concept interesting, you will enjoy reading the novel.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

How interesting...

(Anyone who read the book can relate...)

It's really good; as I was reading it I would stop and check the date it was authored. It holds up very well.

Michael Marshall Smith's early sci-fi books, Only Forward and Spares, have also had many re-reads.

If you've ever read Snow Crash, the U.S. Government does something similar to exactly what you are talking about. That is why I've stated that at this point we can only delay the fruition of a state level infrastructure. Not stop it.

I also never quite finished Dodge in Hell either but probably will some day.

(I was given Snow Crash 10 years ago. It contained a note explaining that it would become an illegal novel if laws against fictional pedophilia were passed as proposed. They were.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds

Books I actually read which were good:
The Informationist by Taylor Stevens
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

and Halloween,

An anthology of ten stories with a supernatural element that originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

All of them explore the nature of reality and consciousness in some way.

To the parent commenter, please write your story. The world always needs good fiction.

Cryptonomicon is fun, I re-read that recently. I wouldn't really call it sci-fi, though. More like historical fiction..

I'll be interested to see if Joe Cornish is able to pull off the technical aspects of the movie without it appearing too fake.

However.

There is no doubt in my mind that Snow Crash has the finest first chapter I have ever had the pleasure of reading. You should buy the book just for the first chapter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash#Metaverse

Yes, this is feudalism, plain and simple. They're simply abusing basic democratic institutions to obfuscate the fact.

Solid essay on ancient myth and “Snow Crash” here: https://www.cs.unc.edu/~taylorr/snowcrash.html

Edit: Sorry, it's probably just a formatting problem and you were referring to The Shockwave Rider.

Citation needed. While this is under open debate amongst fans of the genre, I don't think Stephenson has stated it's a parody? And deliberate parody or not, I feel it brings a lot of ideas into the fold and observes the spirit of the genre. It's not a mistake to cite it as an example of the genre.

Though the central premise feels somewhat dated now that everybody assumes self driving cars are around the corner.

Of course, the earlier Neuromancer had many of the same themes. Both are seminal works in the cyberpunk genre.

I almost drove off the road listening to him talking about bonds vs stocks and percentages. It was interesting, but definitely not a road trip book.

That said, I finished Snow Crash on the trip, and it was a great book. I think I preferred Cryptonomicon a bit more, but some of the theories in Snow Crash were incredible, and way before their time. Hiro Protagonist and YT are also awesome characters.

Uh, shouldn't that be "Cryptonomicon"? Encouraging first sentence.

I'm very excited about this though. I thought "Anathem" was Stephenson's best since Snowcrash. I wonder how many pages the total effort is going to be.

One of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read, really. It’s unlikely to be true, and unverifiable even so, but is a coherent and compelling frame through which to observe the world.

It's only been some hours, so I'm honestly still processing a lot of it. I'll definitely be rereading it. It's considerably grander in scale than Snow Crash, his only other Novel I've read so far, but I'm quite excited to read his other novels.

'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson - Awesome cyberpunk novel that anyone with an interest in programming.

'The Night's Dawn Trilogy' by Peter F. Hamilton - Fantastically engrossing series of books that are so good you will finish them wishing they were longer. The portrait painted in the books is so vivid that you will remember it for years to come.

(In case you can't tell, I like Sci-Fi :-p)

Now that we know what we know, how will they account for it?

The Bible (Various chaps)

Interestingly I'm reading Snow Crash right now, which takes place in a world that is arguable similar to the one in Blade Runner, but the anarcho-capitalist aspect of the America depicted just really gives me the creeps.

Diamond Age painted a very deep and rich tapestry of future vision.

Going through my email order history also confirms this to be true (in my case) except for programming ebooks. Prices listed for my purchases are kindle prices in USD. I can't lookup the paperback price on my day of purchase but it would be higher otherwise I wouldn't buy the ebook.

May 2015 I bought The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (book 1) for 4.99. Today kindle is 7.99 and paperback is 7.99 (also the ultimate edition paperback with all 5 in the series is 13.31)

May 2015 I bought The Intelligent Investor Revised for 13.99. Today kindle is 16.99 and paperback is 12.39

Jun 2015 I bought Mistborn: the Final Empire for 4.99. Today kindle is 8.99 and paperback is 8.92.

Jun 2015 I bought Soul of a New Machine for 9.99. Today kindle is 9.99 and paperback is 9.79

Aug 2015 I bought Snow Crash for $7.68. Today kindle is 13.99 and paperback is 13.15

And I can keep going but I think you all get the point.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash

The namshubs from Snow Crash are pretty heavily inspired by ideas from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's a very interesting book. Richard Dawkins said of it "It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."

That makes two of us! I always doubted there were others, so welcome to the club :)

I tried to get my wife into it but failed because the intro to the book is very much not like rest. All the talk of implanting guns in the head made it seem like it was going to be action sci-fi. The intro to Snow Crash is also not like the rest, but it is so hilarious that I don't mind. I always assumed that his editor(s) didn't know what to do with it, but knew there was so much awesomeness that they just left it as-is.

"Shortly thereafter, in 1992, just as Berners-Lee's World Wide Web had come to fruition, Neal Stephenson was inspired by the recent invention, which led to him publishing Snow Crash, a science-fiction novel that illustrated much of today's online life, including a virtual reality where people meet, do business, and play.

Even today, many of today's greatest innovators reference Snow Crash as inspiration for their work. Google co-founder Sergey Brin named the book as one of his favorite novels. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was inspired by Stephenson's ideas. At Facebook, the book, alongside Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, is also given to anyone who starts a job at the virtual-reality company Oculus.

What's funny, Stephenson, who is now the Chief Futurist at the VR startup Magic Leap, told Vanity Fair that he was just "making shit up" when he wrote the novel.

Investigating further Accelerando was published after Snow Crash by a fair margin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_%28novel%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_crash

"The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."

So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved—but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: the Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes."

The Wide Lens - Ron Adner (a more complete view for developing projects, foreseeing the inevitable problems beyond your immediate reach)

Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami (just awesome)

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson (tomorrow's world, written the day before yesterday)

And here's all the 40-something book I've read this year: https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/562634

Thanks for the future warning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

I know the transition to this model seems impossible and this is what most people in the blockchain-space blissfully ignore.

> The subtext is that a bunch of finance quants read Cryptonomicon and think the blockchain is the answer to their dream of becoming the gangster bosses of the anarcho-capitalist hellscape from Snow Crash.

This made my day, it's a shame it's too long to tweet

I give Stephenson credit for taking that guarantee to its logical extreme. And while I love the book, it's funny how basically none of the predictions in it came true. No computers that project images on eyeballs, no 'poon guns, no losers walking around scanning retinas with backpack-mounted lasers, and book features working payphone booths!

0. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/22/business/domino-s-ends-fa...

Something I find interesting is that the instructions described in the book, the Sumerian 'Me', actually existed. They were instructions on how to do fundamental things, managed by the priests and which the Sumerians believed came from their gods and goddesses. The concept of neurolinguistic programming by the Sumerians is a nice fiction, or at least there's never been any evidence of it.

A good book on it is Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character, by Samuel Noah Kramer.
https://www.amazon.com/Sumerians-History-Culture-Character-P...

An online version can be found at his university:
https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/...

Interesting bits around the Me are around page 116.

I feel like we're living in the world that the cyberpunk genre foresaw. At least in my home, Houston: the urban sprawl, powerful companies, etc.

On nice days my partner and I've been going to a nearby park, where I'll read Snow Crash to them.

It's a bit like putting a record on a record player. You make a conscious decision to focus on the experience and cut out other distractions.

The Martian by Andy Weir
I very much enjoyed the story and how it was all approached.

Seven Eves by Neil Stephenson
Similar to his other books (Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon) I've gifted these a few times. I really enjoy his method of storytelling and his stories appeal to the geek in me as well.

I do recall the first chapter of ringworld descrivig Louis Wu as having an East Asian appearance.

And also have a digital assistant whose ethnicity changes based on who wanders into my virtual business.

I digress. I’ve read Snow Crash and Ringworld – for the most part they were genuinely fantastic, let’s hope they don’t over-polish (most new productions don’t have “soul” IMHO) and over-stretch the TV adaptations (mini series ought to be enough in these cases).

While they are already at it - time to see a show based on Ursula K. LeGuin’s writings as well.

It's funny, Tron was one of the most memorable movies of my childhood. Later I watched Star Trek with the Holodeck, read Neuromancer and Snow Crash, dabbled with VRML, played with the SGI CAVE at university. I ought to be hugely excited by the progress in VR. But... I'm just not. Because Facebook and friends are not doing it because it's cool or because it will be useful to humanity, to them it's just another siphon to hoover up and monetise your personal data by steering you into purchasing and voting decisions that benefit them, not you. After literally decades of anticipation, I doubt I will bother to participate in VR.

"Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson. It goes from WW2 to modern time.

"Cyberpunk" by Katie Hafner - Read it aeons ago so working from long term memory. 3 real world stories of famous hackers and their "crimes" (Kevin Mitnick, Pengo, Robert Morris).

Daemon, by Daniel Suarez

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers

Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers

Off to Be the Wizard, by Scott Meyer

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

Neuromancer, by William Gibson

The Adolescence Of P-1, by Thomas J. Ryan (from when I was just a kid)

My top 3 were.

1. The Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. This series did a good job of balancing big and little picture, while givings us a neat form of magic to learn about.

2. Stock Market Cash Flow from the RDPD series. In 2016 I had read several books on fundamental(or value) investing, and this book helped me bust out of the thinking that, that style is the only way to look at, and earn in the stock market.

3. Snow Crash. This book was just fun. The characters were enjoyable to watch, and there was some clever stuff in this book.

Siddhartha.

"Ready Player One".

I would also suggest, "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, and would echo "Cyptonomicon".

Approaching Zero: The Extraordinary Underworld of Hackers, Phreakers, Virus Writers, and Keyboard Criminals by Paul Mungo and Bryan Clough is excellent.

The American Boy's Handy Book: What to Do and How to Do It, Centennial Edition
Daniel Carter Beard

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed
Rich, Ben R.

and finally, which is hard to stomach sometimes.

Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code
by Bruce Schneier

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

(POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOLLOW)

Especially the sort of quantum-ex-machina "twist" near the end was kind of off-putting to me. Everything so far was very well crafted and researched, but this part was a lot like "yeah multiple universes or something", but I'm not sure if it even works that way, if true.

Also I found the constant back-translating of scientific discoveries and theorems with-a-different-name kind of tedious. I caught a lot of them, but many also not and I kept feeling like I was missing out on some cool references. Even though (IMHO) I have a pretty broad general knowledge of most important scientific/math theorems.

There were some other bits I didn't like but that's personal taste. I loved the humour in Snow Crash (so much better reading than Neuromancer) and the hi-tech thriller action stuff in Cryptonomicon. Anathem seemed kind of slow, building a whole world and such (as I said, matter of taste, I don't get quite as excited about world-building in fiction/fantasy books, unlike many people).

- Infinite by Jeremy Robinson

- The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson (this series is a rabbit hole)

- Scythe by Neal Shusterman

- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

- Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

I'd rather have neither, but I trust my government more than corporations. Corporations will continuously try to break the law, and work around it. The government will perhaps do this as well, and a danger is when they're being pwned by the chains of another government. However, that could also be done by corporations. Crypto AG, was a corporation on a leash by USA/Germany secret services.

Vernor Vinge single handedly became one of my favourite writers (along side Clarke and Lem) with his short story True Names. I didn't find Rainbow's End as easy a read, I'll probably reapproach it after finishing The Star Diaries or Snow Crash, though.

Googling Anathem brought me to this blog review of it:

http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2008/10/thoughts-after-readi...

which reminded me of this NIH neuro anatomist who studied her own stroke, including during her multi-year recovery.

Her TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke...

YouTube of same:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

She sees the right brain hemisphere as being our "consciousness" wetware connecting us to others.

Parts of the video are esoteric, but it's fascinating to hear this first-person account from a brain researcher, especially of the morning of her stroke when her left hemishphere was damaged by a spontaneous brain hemorrhage.

Edit: couple of typos

I’ve heard good things about Seveneves, but I’m a little hesitant to pick it up given that it’s huge and there are thousands of other books to read.

I've been thinking about how to respond to you. I realize how it must sound for me to say that it amazes me that people will take on whatever is available to them at a particular stage in their life to pay their bills. I didn't mean it in a disparaging way. I meant it more in a, "wow, I would find it very hard, I don't think I'd be cut out for that". I'm not suggesting I'm better or worse. I've had plenty of jobs that didn't inspire me at all but they were still decent jobs by anybody's standards: software testing, software development ... though many people I'm sure couldn't imagine being stuck in front of a monitor 8+ hours a day.

It looks more like VR Idiocracy to me. Especially if you check out twitch and see donation stuff and stream overlays. It's just a platform for vomiting memes. https://imgur.com/ZkJq1cr

On the other hand, if it were super-serious-Deus-Ex-plotting-the-control-of-the-proletariat-VR-Chat, I don't think I could take that seriously either (and would be quickly overrun with Uganda knuckles anyway).

[1] I wasn't a user, but read about it in connection with Snow Crash, another fascinating read http://www.verbalworkout.com/ub/ub130/ub13002028.htm

> Stephenson has said he is not proud of this book. By the time Snow Crash was published, The Big U was out of print, and Stephenson was content to leave it that way. When original editions began selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars, he relented and allowed it to be republished, saying that the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it.

I guess it's possible? I certainly hadn't heard of Habitat in 01992, or indeed until after I met Chip, and the correspondence with the Hindu concept is quite arresting. But then again, I never had a Commodore 64, and Neal Stephenson always loves to be plugged into everything that's trendy. Farmer and Morningstar gave a paper http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html at The First International Conference on Cyberspace in 01990, which seems like the kind of thing you would maybe go to if you were writing a novel like Snow Crash in 01990. But they say Habitat (or rather Club Caribe) only had 15000 users at the time.

> (if you're familiar at all with TVTropes,

I love TVTropes! If we're talking about the cyberspace avatar trope rather than the use of the word "avatar" for it, you could maybe trace that back to Vinge's 01981 True Names, as mentioned in the talk I linked above.

I have limited time. I try to spend it wisely. I'd rather use my wasted time on something far more enjoyable, like playing my NES or reading a book or movie, or even watch something of higher quality and production value (HBO is pretty reliable for that or a movie on my backlog). Or even just get out and go somewhere to see and meet people.

Right now my only subscription service is Funimation ($5/month). I like watching dubbed anime late at night too chill out before bed. Currently (re)watching Black Lagoon (it's so great!) and the Mix Simuldub. With a side of computer science books on my backlog with some related videos or courses as well as a good book which right now is Snow Crash (embarrassingly I have not read this yet).

By the way: I'm not the only one for whom Sobel's bio screamed "John Carmack" from the first page he's mentioned, am I?

The Phenomenon of Science: A Cybernetic Approach to Human Evolution by Valentin Turchin

Paul's 1st letter to the Corinthians

History, Guilt & Habit by Owen Barfield

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran

Dawn by Octavia Butler

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hanh

The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm

Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I tried The Atrocity Archives but I couldn't get past the first half. It felt like a pile of nerd paraphernalia force-stuffed into a story line.

I mean... Neuromancer is a true masterpiece from the story to the concepts to the succinct writing, just perfect. Snow Crash is less perfect, but exceptionally enthralling nonetheless. What would be a comparable read from Stross?

Great read Klint. This is the best quote from the article and I really understand this. I remember having the best of both, working outdoors during University - some money and hard physical work. Undo-able now. Of the bike riders I see on the weekend, a fair portion I imagine are city-boys working in high-stress cerebral occupations like software & finance ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/5646201528/

I've never read anything else quite like it, and honestly don't know what I think of it. Are all of Neal Stephenson's books like that?

Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash are must reads. Anathem is a beast that I just couldn’t get into, though I tried several times.

Description:

When you look up and out over the city, does your mind drift towards questions about how the world works? Do you feel like you could do more than what you're doing now? Deep in the vast blue grand planet there exists a voice calling you, growing from a whisper all the way to a roaring rush of inspiration: Build.

We want to do great things too. We want to inspire this driving voice in others. We're a small group inside of Make (makezine, makerfaire, etc), that is setting out on a journey to explore how people interact, share, and publish their experiences online. This isn't code for stealth mode, you'll be shaping a product from its inception, launch, and beyond.

We're looking for critical thinkers that also want to bring smart talent to the pack. If you enjoy building projects from scratch, wearing many hats, and learning a lot along the way, then this is your place.

These are some of the things we're immediately looking for:

- Full-stack developers with startup experience. (Experience scaling is a big plus)
- JS (Front-end frameworks)
- Rails, Node
- Postgres, MongoDB, MySQL, etc (Use what works)
- Bonus: Having read Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Neuromancer
- Extra Bonus: Interest in Machine Learning

What we offer:

- Typical equipment you would expect: Laptop, Monitor, Food/Snacks
- Free passes to Make events

Our culture:

- On Fridays, we'll build extracurricular software/hardware projects. Want to learn how to use an oscilloscope, code some microcontrollers, build an autonomous robot, or talk to a satellite? Cool. We'll hack on that.
- We have access to awesome amounts of makers. We'll bring some of them in every month to chat with us.
- We're also right by the Exploratorium: Expect field trips.

Find out more:

Send us an email with some projects you've created. Bonus points for launching and having actual battlefield stories.

The beginning is actually really tough going as a completely new reader today. It's just so ridiculous. I can see where he was coming from, as I grew up in that era, but it's actually pretty bizarre now given the reality is nation states, religion and banks turned out to be so much more powerful than corporations.

Which is one of the perils of predictions in ageing sci-fi.

I've been on a sci-fi kick recently of all the classics I never read (William Gibson, Ender's Game, The Mars Trilogy, Forever War, Starship Troopers, A Canticle For Leibowitz, Philip K. Dick, Hyperion Cantos, Ringworld) and re-reading some I've not read for a long time (Foundation Series).

I personally found that Snow Crash is by far the most dated book. Even Ringworld and the foundation series were better.

This was a way to bootstrap human society, ultimately giving rise to free thought and "higher level language" that was not bound by self execution.

It was a pleasant surprise and I found myself enjoying it immensely, even with a bit of suspension of disbelief.

Stephenson's novels in general are like this, although Cryptonomicon for one certainly has better character development than Snow Crash: they're a disorderly jumble of whatever ideas Stephenson thought were interesting at the time, wrapped in a skin of plot, and enfleshed in the characters that surround, encounter, and explore them. Stephenson sometimes jumps the rails entirely, writing long monologues, dialogues, and digressions that barely refer to the characters or plot at all, just because he thought the ideas were neat (most of Randy and Pontifex's discussions in prison, The mathematics of Alan's bicycle chain, a good stretch of Hiro's discussions with the Librarian (although nowhere near all of them), and Hiro's adventures in Flatland on the raft (you can just feel the seeds of In The Beginning Was The Command Line, struggling to get out)), or for reasons known only to him (probably because he thought it was funny) (the TP memo, the stockings/Van Eck... thing). To some people this may be seen as a disjointed, overhyped, overcomplicated mess, but to the right sort of mind, it's an almost magical experience.

Curiously, these sorts of people tend to be heavily into computing, which is why Stephenson pervades that culture.

Or that's wrong, and I'm just completely mad. That's also a possibility.

Almost everyone has read or heard of Ready Player One (2011), which contains extensive descriptions of its own corporate dystopic metaverse, albeit one that I find insufferably cliche and unoriginal.

Metaverse descriptions are descended from the first cyberspace descriptions in Neuromancer (1984) which is a beautiful book worth a read.

I still love his books, because they're full of awesomeness and the ending doesn't make the rest of the book crap (unlike what BioWare did to Mass Effect with the original ME3 ending).

  * Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo. Powerful anti-war story.
  * Vagabonding, by Rolf Potts. Shaped my views on hard work and travel.
  * 1984, by George Orwell. Brilliant and terrifying.
  * The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle. Overcoming mental pain through consciousness. 
  * Planetwalker, by John Francis. Inspired me to walk and put myself into things more.
  * Pure enjoyment: Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), Ready Player One (Ernest Cline), Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons), Red Rising trilogy (Pierce Brown).

> Snowball

It's like Glacier, but it's smaller and moves more quickly. I think this is one of the dumb-codenames-turned-real that crop up from time to time. Fargate is another notable example.

> Chime

A chime is a notification. That's about all I got.

> Route 53

DNS runs on port 53, Route 66 is a famous highway.

> Sumarian

It's a really niche joke about the novel Snow Crash, that popularized the concept of digital "avatars".

The Baroque cycle - you have to like Baroque. All those gold filigrees and cherubs of a Baroque opera house don't compare to the elegant lines of a Gothic cathedral and these three books aren't a lean story.

Anathem - I have to read again to decide if it's simply too long or if there is a point.

Readme - I can only assume he got a massive tax bill or is channeling the spirit of Michael Chrichton on a bad day. The only thing that raises it above Tom Clancy is that his editor managed to cut out 1000pages of weapons specifications.

Snow Crash could definitely make a good series. Of the three I’ve read but didn’t like much, I’d say it’s the one I’d be most likely to enjoy as a show even if it barely deviated from the book, in fact. Hell, it has a better shot in that format than Cryptonomicon would. And anyway, Cryptonomicon’s more speculative elements are probably not aging very well since I read it—too much of it’s become ordinary and mundane.

When I think about all the books I've read in my lifetime, Snow Crash has given me the coolest and most fun mental images out of all books. I'm 40+ years old, and when I'm stuck in traffic, I still think about latching on to cars in front of me and escaping the grid I'm sitting in.

I pretty much gave up Stephenson after I got half way through "Cryptonomicon". (Really enjoyed "Snowcrash" and loved "Diamond Age"). But then I read (half of) it after I'd just finished Singh's "The Code Book".

It just felt like Stephenson's science and drama subtracted from the real-world science and drama the book was inspired by.

My theory was that after "Diamond Age" he couldn't get an editor that dared cut his manuscripts in half any more. But I'm willing to give some of his newer books a chance -- I see they're quite well received by people that seem to like other good books :-)

If you enjoyed "Snow Crash", you might also enjoy (or hate...) Bruce Sterling's "Islands in the Net".

"A Deepness in the Sky" was REALLY good. The Forever War was good for the concept.

In short, yours looks like a great list I will come back to, thank you.

However, I do strongly dislike Remembrance of Earth's Past / The Three Body Problem - it's vastly overrated in my opinion and the characters make no sense. The best part of it was the intro to the first book which gave an interesting glimpse at history.

Some things just don't make sense to me. Why are the default settings for something like Facebook public? Why not friends by default?

- Revelation Space

- Armada

- I, Strahd: The Memoirs of a Vampire

- The Sleeping Dragon

- Wizardry: The League of the Crimson Crescent

- Snow Crash

- Scythe

- Off to Be The Wizard

- Spell or High Water

- An Unwelcome Quest

- Thunderhead

- Everlost

- Replay

- Stranger in a Strange Land

- The Amulet of Samarkand

- Everwild.

I'm currently reading A Conjuring of Light and The Way of Kings.

I was able to read so much more than I usually can because of audiobooks. I had a long commute for a couple months, so that helped me knock a book every week or so off my list.

Of the books I've already read this year, I think I would recommend Scythe and Thunderhead the most, but Snow Crash is a must-read, and Stranger in a Strange Land is pretty interesting, but I think a lot of it was lost on me because of the time period-specific language used throughout; it made it hard to understand the interactions between people.

As far as what surprised me? Probably Snow Crash. For some reason, I read somewhere that Ready Player One ripped off Snow Crash and while reading it, I just couldn't understand why they would think that... the two are really nothing alike. Pretty much the only common ground is a virtual world...

For me it's in his top three books along with Snow Crash and Diamond Age. It's also on a very short list of "books I will definitely read again at some point".

If the Baroque Cycle doesn't appeal up front, you're probably fine skipping it. I liked them, but I really had to push myself through large parts of each book. I kind of felt like they needed to be edited down a bit.

Really? I mean sure, on the scale of "everything written in the English language" it may not be top notch, but I think it's one of Stephenson's best crafted works. The allusive density and rhythm of the prose is delightful, and it's packed with juicy, gritty metaphors. Who could forget:

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters... You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Yeah, it may not be provocative, life-altering science fiction, but dammit, Snow Crash is good storytelling.

If characters in Snow Crash or Diamond Age were "earning badges" or tweeting, I'm pretty sure I would have put the book down. Why can't the "social" interactions take on a more mission-critical function?

I had tried (and failed) to read Crypto about 3 times before I finally broke through and realised his plotting wasn't bad, he just couldn't set it up right, or something.

But I did chuckle at Piketty's Capital being on unlimited.

Here's a HN comment I wrote shortly after reading it last year:

> Snow Crash is so bizarre. It launches you straight into the story with no explanation, starting off with some crazy pizza delivery man in a rocket car with swords and an electric zapper thing for people who don't pay the bill. The whole book is like that--it never explains how, why, or when, leaving you to piece it all together yourself. The entire time I was reading it, I was waiting for a 30000 feet view of the world. But then it ended, never having fully explained itself.

> I've never read anything else quite like it, and honestly don't know what I think of it. Are all of Neal Stephenson's books like that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19704665

For me, Stephenson's masterpiece is Diamond Age, hands down -- minus the ending, if that could be a thing. The last chapters are too obscure just for the sake of obscurity, I've read it three times and I can't get any "deep" meaning to it, just a bunch of wow-cool-but-irrelevant text.

Regarding Cryptonomicon, the first three books, they're straigtforward, interesting, and with a lot of references and trivia but it doesn't try too hard like the "Gods" part of Snow Crash. I really, really enjoyed them.

Unfortunately, I found the Cryptonomicon prequels a nice adventure book in the traditional sense, but the characters were too flat and un-relatable, and it bored me.

Anyway, that's my opinion. Diamond Age introduced me to cyberpunk and, to date, it's my favorite novel of the genre. I've recommended it to many people and they've always liked it. I still dream of the day when we have matter compilators, and victorians look like a bunch of hipsters to me, which is both funny and very realistic. In a world full of technology, rich people will want to go back to a more... simple and comfortable age. It blew my mind.

I listened to this one in the car (10+ hours for books a week thanks to my drive). Maybe it was a rough week but I had to stop halfway through because it completely lost me. Maybe it gets better but having read the spoilers I really can't imagine how.

But hey, your mileage may vary.

I wasn’t a fan of Quicksilver, but as that was the first historical novel I’ve listened to, and as it was award winning, I assume it must be more about my tastes than the quality of the writing?

This book looks like it might be a bit in the same spirit in the sense that our home planet is abused a bit. Part three of Seveneves is about the aftermath of essentially terra forming Earth in the distant future after it gets destroyed in part 1.

People think about other planets when it comes to terra forming but of course our home planet might be the easiest one to practice on and doing so might get a bit urgent as we seem to be destroying it. Great premise for a near future science fiction novel.

If you are looking for recommendations. Ian Banks can be a bit hard to read but can be very entertaining. Arthur C Clarke wrote some awesome science fiction. More recently, The Martian (Andy Weir) was great. And Andy Weir just published another book that's on my list to read soon. The expanse series of books (James S. A. Corey) is a good read. 2312 (Stanley Robinson) is also worth a look.

And of course if you at all enjoyed Seveneves, you might want to read the rest of what NS wrote. Anathem is great. Snow Crash, the Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon are classics at this point.

I couldn't even get through Cryptonomicon, and Jack Shaftoe did not strike me as a believable genius, nor his story. Anathem kind of strafed the line - it had SOME character development, and SOME action, but was mainly world-building / intellectual exploration. Stephenson's other books fall too far on that spectrum for me.

If you liked this story, you are required to have read Snow Crash.

Now I could see liking those early books and disliking the later output of both authors; they became wordier, softer, more pretentious - while keeping a lot of merit.

Clearly there are two styles of Stephenson books, and we like the opposite ones.

[edit]

Maybe I should try finishing Seveneves to see if I like the ending?

I was an early backer of the original Oculus for the promise of something like this. I've been excited about the idea of a programmable VR world since reading Snow Crash.

I'm just a little disappointed it's happening via Facebook, which I don't use, but at least they have the resources to really make it work.

Webaverse (https://webaverse.com/) is building an immersive virtual world in the browser where users can socialize, game, and monetize their creations in. We have raised a seed round and are looking for gamedev-minded web hackers.

We‘ve built a fun and free way to create digital assets on our site, in-game, or using our unique discord bot built with web tech. Our technology is centered around an Ethereum sidechain and cross-signing technology that enables tokens to cross blockchains.

The tech is 7 years in the making, and is open source: https://github.com/webaverse

We're looking for Engineers that meet the following requirements:

  ** Strong web engineering skills (JS, profiling, optimization)
  ** Understand WebGL shaders + rendering pipelines
  ** Experience/interest in Crypto/Web3 applications
  ** Comfortable in greenfield startup projects
  ** Self-starters that can quickly learn something
  ** Enjoys working on and documenting bleeding edge code
  ** Good at written and verbal communication

We are mission driven to bring ownership, self-expression, and less friction into building the best version of the Metaverse.

You'll be working with the founders on the hardest and most valuable interoperability problems in game development. If you're interested in sci-fi concepts and/or enjoyed reading Snow Crash feel free to say hi.

Email: hello@webaverse.com

Cyberpunk was thinly-veiled xenophobia about the Japanese and this was really the zeitgeist of the 1980s. Granted the ideas of virtual reality, what we now know as the Internet (to be fair, the Internet already existed in the 1980s in nascent form) and personal enhancement were fairly new ideas at the time but we're now living in that future and it is of course nothing like the dystopia predicted.

It's really no coincidence that the heyday for all this was the 1980s (Blade Runner, Neuromancer and so on). I wouldn't be surprised if this is what the project is stuck on: interpreting and translating this story to the small screen in a modern way.

Cryptonomicon is fun, Baroque Cycle is great, Anathem is his best work (from a literary perspective), and Seveneves is 2/3rds awesome 1/3rd bad scifi pulp.

Snow Crash is how most people first encounter him. It's a warmed over cyberpunk book that repeats a lot of what Gibson did, but is also good.

The Diamond Age is one of the best pieces of speculative fiction written in the last 20 years except that it fails badly to have a coherent story with an ending that makes sense. Which is a shame considering the ideas in the book are so good.

REamde is shit and should never have been published. Dude was playing too much World of Warcraft at the time and decided to write a novel about playing too much World of Warcraft. Bad book. Avoid.

"Ender's Game" and "Speaker for the Dead" by O.S.Card. (Do not touch Xenocide without a hazmat suit. And if you do, burn it before reading.)

"Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson.

"Rendez-vouz with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke.

If you're up for some thought-provoking stuff, "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Heinlein. Not the easiest read but your carve-out basically rules out "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".

"Embassytown" by China Mieville.

EDIT: I forgot "Hyperion" by Dan Simmons.

I find that reading recharges my creative thinking. I used to think it was purely relaxation, but now consider it as essential as sleeping / eating well.

Then there is the fact that both video games and books can teach, but there are diminishing returns. When I first read Snow Crash and Neuromancer, they taught me a lot of things. Now there is virtually nothing I can draw from most sci-fi.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40651883-snow-crash

I have since dabbled a bit with Stephenson, and amazingly his other books fall along the same divide for me. Zodiac is amazing, the Victorian sci-fi series (Diamond Age?) are unreadable. One book, Seveneves, the first part is amazing Neal Stephenson, the second is lazy, naive and dumb Neal Stephenson. Super puzzling, almost as if he has (really bad) ghost writers.

I have since gone back to Snow Crash (could not finish it the first time), and with some overbearing, it is not entirely unlikable.

It was, for lack of a better description, a callous novel.

As someone who's been into martial arts for some time I'm very sceptic about this. There's a lot more to realistic fighting than just swinging and clashing swords: footwork, body movement, weight transfer...

Nevertheles, even if it won't turn out to be perfect it could stil be a lots of fun. I'll be watching their progress.

- "Hello Summer, Goodbye" by Michael Coney

- "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood (the first book in the Maddaddam trilogy)

- "The Fifth Season" by N. K. Jemisin (the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy)

- "The Mechanical" by Ian Tregillis (the first book in the Alchemy Wars trilogy)

- "Nexus" by Ramez Naam (the first book in the Nexus trilogy)

- "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson

- "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton (part of the Commonwealth Saga)

- "Hyperion" and "Fall of Hyperion" by Dan Simmons

- "Lock In" by John Scalzi

- "Blindsight" by Peter Watts

> On a related note, I remember Dawkins spoke about memes and how ideas can be seen as some kind of virus that are subject to evolution.

I haven't read his books yet, but this stands to reason. Memes share a lot of characteristics with organisms, and humanity has built a great eco system for them in recent years. The first time I realized that ideas are actually evolutionary programs was in the 90s when I read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

  Male Character .... Check
  Female Character .. Check
  Nuclear Weapon .... Check
  => James Bond with iPhones

[Edit] Obviously I should elaborate a bit: Snow Crash is precisely the type of book, where it is really easy to make an disappointing movie. It has enough action scenes to fill 90 minutes without ever mentioning any of the interesting concepts of the book.

It is nearly 25 years since I read Snow Crash, and read the description of the virtual earth - able to dive down form Space, and look round cities, seeing data feeds in real time, including your own position...

We are soooo close. Just don't trust the guy with the glass knives

[#] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

Yes, it is! But one thing I've learned in managing online communities is that you don't give people the ability to do something you don't want them to do. I don't feel having perfect electronic recall should be a feature without more context sensitivity.

> For trade secrets, etc, you do what any high security facility does

Except for the Steve Mann argument: it's a prosthesis. When you take the hardware away from him, you're disabling him. He becomes disoriented and cannot function as well. It's like taking away a wheelchair, or crutches, or a hearing aid. And when more and more of your potential employees rely on these devices 18 hours a day, more and more will be negatively impacted. No, I think it's something that has to be fixed in the legal system or fixed in the entire design of a wearable system.

> Works of fiction I've found interesting in this vein

The novel "Snow Crash" has wearable computing used only by a subset of wired individuals derisively called "gargoyles." Everyone else still uses workstations.

The "Old Man's War" series of books has soldiers with embedded computers, including a subset of soldiers who have them embedded since birth.

The novel "Permanence" also has them, but used for pervasive IP rights enforcement.

The novel "Signal to Noise" has an elite intellectual class with implants that work with pervasive wireless sensors and fully immersive workstations.

The film "Stranger Than Fiction" has AR-style overlays at least during the opening sequences.

The short film "Sight" touches on AR and behavorial control a bit: http://vimeo.com/46304267

This kottke.org piece covers a few other shorts: http://kottke.org/12/04/the-real-google-glasses

I've also read Cryptonomicon, and he dials it down a lot more in that one (although it's still present), and I found it a lot more readable.

That said, Lucky Palmer is too young to have grown up with this stuff, but is apparently such a big fan of the book that he asks all new hires at Oculus to read it before their first day on the job.

The book contains alot of analysis on the nature of information and how it spreads, and the methods in which you can literally re-program a person with language.

I think its an apt analogy, your buddy is a programmer that has been exposed to Snow Crash, a virus of misinformation, and has shut down a part of his functioning.

======

"You're a hacker, that means you have deep structures to worry about, too."

"Deep structures?"

"Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?"

"Sure."

"You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them - the axons split and pushed their way between the dividing glial cells - your bioware self-modifies - the software becomes a part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable - all hackers are vulnerable - to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."

"What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?"

"Just don't stare into any bitmaps..."

Edit: It's been on his "Still Haven't Read" list since 2010. Maybe it's some sort of inside joke at this point...

Whenever I read the first book of a book like Dune, or Foundation, or Earthsea, or Anne Leckie's Ancillary Justice, or the Diamond Age (or Snow Crash) I end up wishing for more from that same universe of Lore. Sometimes this ends up being something amazing, like the Foundation series, other times the sequel fails to hold me, or goes off the deep end like some fantasy serieses seem to.

I think I end up gravitating towards trilogies. I know there's more to the story arc than just one book, and but enough written that I (in theory) won't be left in the lurch. :-)

Then again, I also read all [at the time] of the Honor Harrington series, because I loved the characters and political story arc(s), but ended up getting burned out and never reading the more recent novels. I don't even know or recall if it was a feeling that it jumped the shark, I just didn't feel I had the energy to devote to it.

I am not looking forward to the TV show because it will be a different experience. (I watch very little TV these days anyway.) I will probably just avoid it. Altered Carbon had some success but I believe the second season is terrible despite it being my favorite book.

On style/tone, Snow Crash is a bit zanier, more satirical, and boisterous, while The Peripheral is by and large sharper, more grounded, and spare (typical Gibson).

In terms of story/plot (spoilers, obviously), while Snow Crash revolves primarily around a world-domination plot and a world-spanning chase to unravel that plot and the development of a seekrit cyber-weapon, The Peripheral focuses on a much more mundane, chance encounter that spirals out (unraveling much more like a whodunit, including the reveal) that takes place primarily in 2 "locations" (with the central conceit/twist described in the linked article about a historical/simulated world and the future-present) - so in other words, they're totally different, and I'm surprised you'd make any sort of plot connections from the article's description!

While it wasn't perfect (I also reread Neuromancer last year, so maybe The Peripheral suffers in comparison), it was a pretty fun read and had a bit to chew on so I'd certainly recommend it if you're an SF fan.

As far as adaptability of Stephenson goes, I could see Zodiac, or maybe REAMDE, that would work in a way that resembles the books. Maaaybe Seveneves, though you have to deal with the significant separation between Part 2 and Part 3.

The rest of his books, including Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash, are too intertwined with "theoretical" concepts to make much sense in an adaptation. I mean, yes: you can have a show or movie about a pizza deliverer/hacker named Hiro Protagonist who swordfights in the metaverse; or Jack and Eliza's Adventures in Enlightenment Europe; or whatever. But the real underpinnings of the story aren't going to make it in and that's what makes Stephenson's books interesting.

Ready Player One was a fun read but ultimately a Willy Wonka type of story - impractical and its explanations of the actual VR implementation were questionable at best (or omitted entirely? I don't remember exactly, since my only impression at the time was that it was trivial).

For better ideas on how a virtual world could work, including reasonable hard science to back up claims, read Snow Crash (Stephenson), True Names (Vinge), or Rainbow's End (Vinge) instead. After that, you will quickly realize why many VR purists absolutely detest Oculus's acquisition.

As a side note, I distinctly remember Oculus PR in the past claiming they were "building the Metaverse" a la Snow Crash, but I guess they quickly jumped ship to Ready Player One's image instead. Makes sense, seeing as how spoiler alert the fictional monopoly that develops optical hardware in Snow Crash ends up completely corrupt and a perfect example of Schumpeter's classic theories on economics and innovation. I guess Oculus pictures their future selves to be enlightened, benevolent multibillionaires like Og in Ready Player One. Unfortunately, with FB in the mix and the choices Oculus has made, seems like Stephenson's vision is much much more relevant.

"Wait a minute--this Snow Crash thing, is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"

"What's the difference?"

This was the original definition of a "meme" as coined by Richard Dawkins: instead of humans choosing what to think, what if ideas self-replicate using human minds as hosts? Religions, languages, agriculture, chemistry, the word "like", uptalk, literally any thought or behavior pattern can be framed this way.

See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...

Fiction:

Douglas Copeland's "Microserfs"

Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash" and perhaps especially "Cryptonomicon" (the early randy chapters and anything about Eiphphyte in particular)

Real Genius (the film).

Nonfiction:

Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. All the elder gods are here.

Cliff Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg.

I haven't read Snow Crash or Diamond Age, but I'm about a quarter of the way through Cryptonomicon right now and it's starting to get good. I find Stephensen's books tend to start off slowly then quickly pick up steam.

Some books should just remain books, and both Snow Crash and Neuromancer are in that bucket. If Gibson wants to be a screenwriter, then he should write a story for the screen.

Examples include arguing over the definition of sexism, saying stuff like "that's just the difference between men and women," or coming up with hyperbole about how it's not now possible to talk to woman without being labelled a creep.

I do wonder how much is because, to badly misquote Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, of males believing that they're too intelligent to be sexist.

But he writes with wonderful detail and humor, and seems really great at writing believable near-term futures, which I imagine are much harder than writing about the distant future (where everything can be fantastical).

If you have to use the Google products in a school, and the school has a contract with Google, that seems like a utility and/or common carrier. The analogy that I use with my friends is "You have Verizon for your mobile phone, yeah? I have ATT. We can call/text each other, right? Of course - that's how phones work. What would you think if you could ONLY call Verizon customers, and if you wanted to call/text me, you had to get an ATT phone? And what about all those land lines, customer service lines, etc... how annoying would it be if everyone had to have the same phone company, and the companies kept coming and going in and out of vogue? All the older people user Company X, Millennials are all on Y, and the kids are all about Z...."

Most people think that's an awful, terrible world to imagine. That said, it reminds me a little of Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" ~ one review says "Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous.... you'll recognize it immediately"

I want to like Stephenson, but Anathem and Cryptonomicon only seem to appeal to a very narrow range of readers whom I don't understand.

I have no idea how you can cope with all that utter irrelevance in this. While reading I started thinking that Stephenson tried to create a "moment" by overstreching. A scenery. Something you see in those slow artistic movies for example. But then there is another problem. Stephenson is unable to describe the environment in which the scene plays. Instead he concentrates on completely irrelevant details in the current area. A good example for this was when the protagonist traveled a region where former cities were. It looked like that: "...traveling along those dead cities we've learned to distinguish the time period in which the cities have been build...". But he describes not a single one. You end up having absolutely no picture of the environment. He tells you that there are launch pads and anti-missile turrets but not how they look. Instead he drags you through several sentences regarding the steel rubble they get from the cities. Spoiler: it's rusty. Same poor writing goes for character development (main character is supposed to be clever according to the context but is plainly stupid and really slow...), basic aspects like the love story or the weird way he describes women.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just too demanding but I currently read through some of Alestair Raynolds works and it makes Stephenson look like a rich school boy whos private teacher was afraid to mark the basic mistakes for him.

I've read Snow Crash many years ago. When Neuromancer and the art of those times was still in my head. Fortunately because it was exactly the same thing. Please read Snow Crash again and try to focus on the world he un-describes. I had the feeling like Stephenson took it for granted that you've already read Gibson or Sterling and knew how the world is supposed too look like so he can concentrate on world details that are completely irrelevant for the story and make no sense without describing the place they stand in.

You see...I fell twice for Stephenson which was a mistake on my side so I'm pretty angry on myself and try do divert the fault to him...

I'm surprised you didn't say Snow Crash. Same author (Neil Stephenson), and also about coders. Specifically, languages, viruses, and reality. It's also much, much more accessible. I usually recommend that people start with Snow Crash and move to Cryto, if they like Stephenson's stuff.

I see we disagree on "The Unberable Lightness of Being", but that is fine, I guess.

I think Murakami is at his best in "Norwegian Wood" and "South of the Border" -- in different ways. You might also enjoy "Chrome Yellow" by Huxley.

For something a bit different, try: "American Essays" edited by Shaw (http://www.amazon.com/American-Essays-Charles-B-Shaw/dp/B000...).

If you enjoyed the books on Steve Jobs, you might enjoy "The new new thing" by Lewis (on the founder of SGI and Netscape).

I don't know if you've read any William Gibson, if not, at least read "Burning Chrome" (and everything else he's ever written ;-).

Finally, you should read "The Code Book" by Singh.

Nothing about the scenario in the article actually suggests a loss of free will - if anything it suggests a gain of super-free will in which people are more able to have their desires fulfilled by accentuating and enhancing what the real world can offer.

The sad fact is that America is no longer a country that makes things, and as a result we no longer find ourselves in a position to employ people in positions that are actually worth a damn. Or that pay a salary worth a damn.

We still make some things. Software. Circuit designs. Entertainment. Product design (to sell things to ourselves). Pharma. People who work in these areas are paid well.

Oh, and the financial industry. Which, despite demonstrating a wonderful ability to make itself mountains of cash, has failed to demonstrate how it benefits the rest of the country. (obviously, its ability to provide lines of credit is valuable, but we had that long before investment banking came to dominate the entire financial industry)

I remember reading Snow Crash for the first time and coming across this line:

  There's only four things we do better than anyone else: 
  music 
  movies 
  microcode (software) 
  high-speed pizza delivery

Need to re read it.

I read somewhere stuff like Second Life, Google Earth etc were directly inspired by Snow Crash.

There's some other themes in Snow Crash we are just starting to see as well:

-Government difficulties with taxation of digital goods and currency

-Companies competing to attract drivers/messengers etc (basically the uber/gig ecconomy)

-For profit surveillance and commercialization of intelligence data

- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

I guess the thing that you should realize though is that this isn't a degree in computer programming, or IT - it's a more or less a mathematics degree. As the saying goes, "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

If you want to get ready for serious computer science, I'd recommend a few things which are what I think I got out of my undergraduate degree:

1. A solid understanding of algorithms and data-structures. To this end, topcoder.com/tc is invaluable and some serious study will quickly bring you up to speed. CLRS (Introduction to Algorithms) is a great resource, as is train.usaco.org.

2. A basic understanding of theoretical computer science. To that end, I found this a really useful book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321455363

3. Basic understanding of networking and operating systems. Not sure the best route here, there must be online courses. Not too many great self-study books in this area, unfortunately. So find some online courses.

4. A decent math background: linear algebra, calculus, combinatorics, and probability. For self study:

    Calculus: Stewart's Calculus is great.

    Linear Algebra: I've yet to meet a linear algebra text I liked, so not sure here.

    Probability: A First Course in Probability is an outstanding textbook.

    Other: Concrete Mathematics by Knuth is an incredible book, very VERY hard and took me a long time to get through, but packed with useful and interesting information. I'd recommend it after the rest of these.

Also, keep writing lots of code. Daily practice is the secret to everything.

I've found that Snow Crash is one of those books that pretty strongly divides readers. Some people are very fond of it; others bounce off of it, often commenting that something about it rubs them the wrong way. Not many readers are in the middle.

I'm definitely in the former camp, even though I can see the book's weaknesses from a writing perspective. In the essay, I wanted to express some thoughts on why the book's fans respond to it, to the point that it has been rather influential in the world beyond fiction.

Everyone should read Snow Crash.

Maybe the problem is that it was written in 1992 and so much has been inspired by it that now the book seems tired and cliche. But if you're recommending it to a 14 year old, they're already going to be familiar with some of the works that have been inspired by Snow Crash, and they will likely find it as insufferable as well.

And isn't Ready Player One heavy into the 80's pop culture? A 14 year old was born in 2001... they don't know what the 80's means.

I've also enjoyed all of Willam Gibsons books, including the latest trilogy "Pattern Recognition", "Spook Country" and "Zero History".

If you bothered to read through "Cryptonomicon" you'll either love "the Code Book" by Simon Singh more than I did, or hate it :-)

Assuming you've picket through the classics shelf, you might have missed out on Samuel Delany - "The Einstein Intersection" might be a good one to try on for size -- although I actually found "Neveryóna" to be maybe his most interesting book (of the ones I've been able to get hold of) [edit: After "Dhalgren", that is. But I think "Dhalgren" is a bit like Joyce's "Ulysses" -- a classic I haven't gotten around to yet. I spent the better part of ten (10!) years reading through "Dhalgren", picking it up on odd holidays - never loosing touch with the intricate unreality within, readily satisfied after reading a few pages or a chapter -- like nibbling on a choice ham that didn't spoil. It's rather more complex than any of the other books I've listed here].

Also worth mentioning in the "might be overlooked" section is Jerry Pournelle's "Falkenberg's Legion" (republished as "the Prince").

I'm afraid I've been mostly digging through second hand books lately, so the only other semi-recent book I could recommend would be "Broken Angels" by Richard Morgan (technically it's number two in a trilogy -- but I find it stands better on its own).

To be honest Cryptonomicon is the only NS book which I really and wholeheartedly recommend. Diamond Age and Anathem are definitely interesting and I'm glad I read them but they have their flaws, Snow Crash comes across as juvenile, and the Baroque Cycle is approximately five hundred pages of a fantastic book bound at random with twelve hundred pages of boring.

I'd recommend Altered Carbon and it's sequels. There's also a Netflix adaption with a solid first season (although s2 went a bit off the rails)

A personal favorite of mine is Snow Crash. It's a very self aware cyberpunk novel (could maybe even be considered a parody, at least in part). If you're not familiar with Stephenson's writing style, be aware that you won't miss too much if you skip the 10 page infodump on Sumerian grammar that pops up in the muddle of the book.

Every time I've heard someone mention having a VR setup, in a social/non-work setting, someone has asked them if they've checked out porn on it. In fairness, we've all read Snow Crash etc. and wondered how close we're getting to that stuff in the real world. Now, the big question: do you want Facebook to have a record of porn you've viewed, even if it was for 5 minutes out of curiosity? Can you imagine the "interesting" ads you might start getting if you did that?

I consider this similar to "why do you care if you're being watched if you have nothing to hide?". I'm not doing anything illegal there, but I don't want a camera in my bathroom. Similarly, even if I'm not doing anything illegal online, darned if I want Facebook to have a record of everything I do.

You've bound yourself by artificial limitations on your thought process. Please do not act as if people who do not share those boundaries must be idiots.

Edit: By the way, since you brought it up, I've never read Snow Crash. I really don't know anything about it other than a brief synopsis I read at some point years ago. It's unwise to assume anything about my opinions comes from pop culture, as I'm largely disconnected from it.

a) I now think of scifi as any work intended to do more than tell a story or explore a world. Focussing on just hard scifi causes great works of social and sociology fiction like The Dispossessed to be left without a clear pigeonhole. Which is a great pity, IMO.

Perhaps the biggest chunk that gets miscategorized is cyberpunk; works like Snow Crash and Hardwired are clearly about more than whether the ending is happy or sad, or whether the hero gets the girl. Doesn't seem right to categorize them as fantasy. Better to narrow Arthur C Clarke into the sub-category of hard scifi. Loosening my uptight definition caused me to better appreciate Snow Crash in particular on a second reading a decade later. It's aged wonderfully.

You could even imagine a book with fantasy 'props' that feels scifi-like. I haven't seen it yet, but I have no doubt it can be done. (Any recommendations from others?)

b) Not even everything Arthur C Clarke wrote was hard. Rama series, c'mon! Kim Stanley Robinson is a great author, but I fail to see how he's 'more hard' than Asimov or Heinlein. Somebody described the Red Mars series to me as a reality show with dune buggies, and that seems about right. You certainly couldn't call it 'more hard' than Anathem.

Anyways, for hard scifi readers the top author today is probably Greg Egan. That I think everybody can agree on. I have other recommendations elsewhere on this thread.

“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

There certainly is a problem you'll see on HN because they think every company is out to get them because they read Snow Crash.

But Cambridge Analytica was not real for instance, it was just marketing fooling people. Palantir's biggest cheerleaders are the paranoid.

Marketers have done it for 100 years. So, yes it's all fake, you're hiring someone to fool people, see the problem, but I'm not sure it's a bubble if it never pops.

Anything in the Slammerverse could be made into a serial form, again with a little work to preserve continuity. It's already got a lot of material in the anthologies, so it shouldn't be too hard. Hell, if you could get Drake to revisit the Lacy and His Friends universe, it would be rather timely.

A series based on Niven's Gil the Arm protagonist would be fun for a series or two--the writing chops required could be found in anybody with experience writing crime dramas or who-dun-its, with a bit of extra worldbuilding for organlegging and telekinesis.

Maybe something based on The Stainless Steel Rat? Harrison is dead and buried (sadly!) so he wouldn't be too offended.

Honestly, the problem with a lot of science-fiction books is that, once the core ideas are explored and the conflict resolved, it's best to kind of move on.

EDIT:

Actually, a post-apocalyptic series based on Lucifer's Hammer or War Day would be great. Jericho actually had its moments, but went too soon.

Comedy option for HBO: The Stone Dogs.

Even better option: a port of Turtledove's World War alternate history.

I recently re-read Snow Crash. I love that book. A lot of that stuff looks a lot less like science fiction these days.

snow crash was impressive, to me, because of the sheer quantity of new concepts, tightly integrated. Stephenson created a plausible future that dealt with what people would deal with in all conceptual scales, from highfalutin cultural organization of government and religion all the way down to teenagers interests in food and clothing. I feel, he did a pretty great job of avoiding the mundane that's pretty much the same as today, while highlighting stuff that's different, like skate wheels.

Snowcrash is a cartoon, it is a caricature of a future with new stuff. It's not a good book, not like coherent like Vonnegut, or even Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, but it is indeed a window to the future. Neromancer was written on a typewriter, and snowcrash was written in flatland.

The Hyperion cantos (Simmons) is sadly not taken seriously by very many authors of top-100 lists. It's usually Dune or Stranger in a Strange Land or Ender's Game or Forever War. And heaven forbid they include Neuromancer or Snow Crash or Altered Carbon, or an eco-scifi book like Stand on Zanzibar or Zodiac.

Dune could be a nod to the classic science fiction aficionados who don't care for any of the newer stuff, who love Asimov, Niven, Clarke, PKD, Bester. Is Heinlein too politically charged, perhaps?

The spells that witches cast are analogous to the code that hackers develop. They are both writing in esoteric languages that can create things and cause actions. Witches' power is magical, but hackers' power is virtual. Neal Stephenson uses the Sumerian word namshub to describe this idea in his novel Snow Crash.

    SP: Two-thirds of the way into your novel,
    Seveneves – in fact, on page 569 – you do
    something kind of crazy. The story suddenly
    skips ahead 5,000 years. What’s the idea here?

Also, I was occasionally distracted at the beginning when snippets of dialog from Anathem were reused in the form of exposition in Seveneves.

But, that said, I think the book is worth reading, especially the first 2/3's.

My personal, quick, rough ranking of Stephenson's bibliography:

    * Anathem
    * Snow Crash
    * The Diamond Age
    * Seveneves
    * Cryptonomicon
    * The Baroque Cycle
    * Zodiac
    * Reamde
    * The Interface
    * The Big U

    * The Cobweb
    * The Mongoliad

It is a bit of a dumb action movie, in many ways. A guy with a sword takes on an entire flotilla, if I recall correctly. The coolest moment in the entire book involves somebody saying "I'm sure they'll listen to reason" and then pulling out an enormous gun labelled "REASON". So if the movie turns out to be full of dumb action sequences it'll only be consistent with the book.

Another major flaw of the book, as written, is that it has chapters upon chapters of exposition which are basically dialogue scenes between Hiro and the librarian program. Most of the actual overly complicated plot stuff winds up getting explained in these scenes.

The third problem with the book is a rather dated view of the future... or by now a rather dated view of the immediate past. Both Hiro and the other dude are reasonably young guys whose fathers fought in World War 2, which puts a fairly stringent limit on how late you can possibly set it (unless you play around with which war it was; I think the fact it was WW2 was fairly vital to the backstory though).

Anyway, I'm not against a Snow Crash movie at all, I'm just pointing out that it needs some serious work to be adapted, and that may wind up throwing out some of the bits that many people like best about it.

Also important, I think, is that a huge contributing factor to events and technologies developing similarly to those of human civilization, is that the humans were actively manipulating information and events on the planet from the moment they arrived.

I agree with you about Stephenson being fantastic; his books make you think. While I've enjoyed what I've read from Vinge, in some sense it feels much closer to the fantasy genre.

I'm curious as to what folks here thought of The Baroque Cycle. I loved Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Anathem... but Quicksilver seemed to drag, and I didn't have the heart to pick up the next one in the series.

Ubik is my favorite PKD book followed closely by Electric Sheep.

The His Dark Materials isn't really sci-fi so much as fantasy but it is quite a good read (though if you didn't have a kindle it might be embarrassing buying them from the young adult section, they are quite adult though).

I think a huge thing missing from your list is the Foundation series from Asimov (I recommend going in order of publishing, start with Foundation move onto Foundation and Empire then Second Foundation and more if you are into it).

My 2 cents.

Isaac Asimov - Foundation (and the rest of the trilogy)

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land / Starship Troopers / The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man / The Stars My Destination

Jack Vance - The Dying Earth

Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / The Man in the High Castle

Larry Niven - Ringworld

etc. etc.

A list of Hugo Award winners[1] might come in helpful.

Another advantage of having read "the greats" is that if some critic says that new author X writes "in the style of Y" you have a slightly better idea if you might like it.

Tastes vary, of course. Personally I never got what's supposed to be so great about Ender's Game. Teen Mary Sue geek power fantasy with questionable morals. Then again, lots of people said similar things about Heinlein…

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

I think my visualization ability is about average, although I do very well with visual thinking. Not sure what the correlation is there.

I've been a prolific reader since about 11 years old. I would say that in general, I don't try to visualize what the author writes. Whenever the author spends a lot of time going into setting up the environment with lots of visual details, I only lightly skim that. I don't bother trying to visualize exactly what the author is trying to convey.

So sometimes it does lead to a little bit of confusion later on in the story if something I read doesn't match up with my made up visualization, but generally I might only get a blip of confusion a few times during a book, it doesn't really amount to much or affect my enjoyment.

I'm not sure how much time Neal Stephenson spends on visual details in Snow Crash, but I remember the first 200 pages of Anathem being a chore to get through because of the incredible amount of time he spent on setting up the environment. Because I largely skipped the visual details in Anathem, there were parts later on in the story that were confusing due to the fact I didn't have a grasp on the layout of the monastery and such. Assuming he didn't make mistakes at any point.

Did you ever read Stephenson's Snow Crash? You just described what the CIA becomes in that novel: crowd-sourced intel uploaded to a central site.

I'd also argue that Cyberpunk does not mean "everything is terrible", nor does Post-Cyberpunk have a softer and lighter view where "not everything is terrible." Rather, the difference is whether social control is rooted in 1984 or Brave New World.

From this point of view, Ghost in the Shell and Minority Report are still Cyberpunk (edit: settings); the viewer is just seeing things from a point of view other than the completely marginalized. Shadowrun is a Cyberpunk setting whether you work for a corporate power or in the streets.

Cryptonomicon I am at about 15 reads (including audio book listens a few more), and maybe a handful for Snow Crash, Anathem and Reamde.

My book of choice for re-reading is Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, by Jeffrey Archer. I must be at 50 re-reads of that now, and I own two first editions. Strange what catches your mind!

From Wikipedia: The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus, similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter-program which he called a nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).

Even though it's not essential in any way to read them in that order, The Diamond age is hinted to take place later on in the same world as Snow Crash so if you've got no preference for which order to read them, you might as well go that route. There a couple of winks to Snow Crash readers in The Diamond Age.

I enjoyed reading Snow Crash, but I have to agree with the other posters -- it's a good story, not a great book. The prose is ...weak, to say the least, and it felt like science fiction for the sake of science fiction -- which is not to say that's bad in of itself, but it lacks the thrust and weight of Vonnegut or Pynchon (both of whom I recommend reading if you want to see 'smart').

It was exactly that.

I participated on one SGI demo around 1995. It included tehnology demo and the grand vision from some guy I don't remember.

They had few the these bad boys (bigger refrigerator sized models) and very fast internet running Netscape browser. They wanted us to start to develope for this to this new thing called Java that would allow code run everywhere.

They demoed what they thought internet would look like after 3-5 years:

* 3d browsers with VRML. HTML is replaced with 3d virtual rooms with 3d surround audio.

* you can attach pieces of Java code to the VRML and freely interact with objects

* people would buy stuff in the internet using micropayments possibly using new fancy new digital currencies like DigiCash (this was still hand waving). There was also this thing called E-gold few years later.

* the demo included virtual kitchen design app, virtual rooms with water fountains and java controlled robots, and fish that responded to their environment.

It was all mindblowing technologically, but none of the ideas were new to me because I had been reading Snow Crash (1992) and others. Jaron Lanier and VPL Research were also known to work with these things.

In fact, it looks like we are repeatedly trying to bring the same vision alive. Every wave of attempts is getting us little bit closer but always falling short little bit.

In the current wave Nvidia has replaced Silicon Graphics and there are new technologies doing the same things in VR and AR. Now we have cryptocurrencies, javascript, Wasm, WebGL, mobile GPU's, 5G. Most of the current bleeding edge will crash when the next recession hits around 2020 or so and some of it will survive. I'm looking forward to the next generation of technology emerging around 2025 ...

Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon are great books but each has their own style and you would think it was a different author if you didn't know better.

That's why I like Stephenson so much. He takes a topic and researches it so much that he brings it to life.

Whether he's writing for Wired about expats in South East Asia (which dove tails nicely with Cryptonomicon) or extra dimensional aliens in Anathem, he makes the world come alive and the technology and methodologies clear.

He also makes me laugh out loud. Very few books have done that.

Cyberpunk is essentially retro-futurism now. That's an inherent problem in something that extrapolates to the very near future. I think the only thing I've seen that comes close and ages well is Serial Experiments Lain, and that's more of a post-cyberpunk work.

When I first read it I felt a little like a snickering boy looking up dirty words in the dictionary, reading about failed institutions and government military and intelligence services as spun off corporations.

Now if you skim off the entertaining over-the-topness from the book, you have today. Booz Hamilton anyone? That program's never going away, there's too many jobs, billions, and lobbying money at stake.

I was also a big fan of Stranger in a Strange Land! I'll have to check out Scythe and Thunderhead.

William Gibson's "Matrix" from Neuromancer was more of a visualization of data as it flew about a virtual world, doing whatever it is data does when you watch it. Certain servers are protected by layers of "ice," which you have to "drill" through in order to gain access, etc.

There are a few working groups that appear to also still be working on standards for the Metaverse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse

I listen to or read Snow Crash at least once a year. I just enjoy most everything about it. Anathem required a couple listens, and a third listen was just for comfort food.

The Altered Carbon trilogy has depth and sublime world-building that I have now enjoyed at least a half dozen times.

I second mentions of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (and will mention The Long, Dark Tea Time of the Soul as well).

Ender’s Game is also comfort food for me.

Breaking from the speculative fiction reco’s above...
The Power of Vulnerability (Brené Brown) is more lecture series than audiobook, but as for non fiction I’ve recently given multiple listens to, that tops the list.

I borrowed “Landline” from the local library, read it twice and then bought it so I could continue to read it when I want to. I think I was in just the right age group and life situation for this novel to hit home for me. Your mileage may vary, but IMO read it without knowing anything about it in advance if you’re going to read it. That means don’t read the back cover etc.

(Blind borrowing of books from the library is fun and can be eye opening, try it sometime! Most places, you can borrow eBooks and even digital audiobooks without even leaving your home as long as you have a library card.)

I worked on VR projects for SAIC and Disney about 25 years ago, and as much as I criticize Facebook over privacy issues, I like Mark Z’s vision here, in addition to Microsoft’s vision of shared virtual workspaces and AR augmentation. Being an Apple fanboy, I also anticipate their future products and systems in this space.

I have been joking/teasing family and friends for many years that governments would fade to black and corporations would rule all. I am 70 and retired so it feels like being naked no longer being associated with a large corporation (I may un-retire). I am channeling William Gibson here, but affiliations to corporations may become the new citizenship. Entrepreneurs will exist to service corporations with new tech and ideas but with little chance of forming mega-corporations themselves.

Snow Crash, despite being a train-wreck in terms of narrative cohesion, plotting, and basically every other measure of fiction as a craft, is just about perfect mind-candy. I reread it about two years ago, and it was almost as good as the first time.

Later work like Anathem, I think, starts showing him as a mature author[1], finally paying as much attention to the craft of writing as the ideas.

Diamond Age... I dunno. Certainly had its moments, and the exploration of 90s-era anarcho-capitalist crypto-anarchy themes was solid, but it really didn't grab me that much. The writing was less uneven than Snow Crash, but a lot of the crazy brilliance was missing.

[1] Still flunking Fictional Narrative Endings 101, but apparently that's intentional.

Permutation City, by Greg Egan -- a bit of a mind-uploady brain-simluation story. Fairly philosophical, but not impenetrable.

Accelerando, by Charles Stross -- Focused on the technical singularity brought about by increasing computing power. Somewhat cheeky, a little frenetic.

Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin -- Algorithms and game theory plots regarding solving a civilsation-destroying puzzle.

Diaspora, by Greg Egan -- Post-trans-humanist shenanigans.

Other things of note:
Neal Stephenson writes a lot of cyberpunk computer-adjacent fiction. Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon all come to mind. The Baroque Cycle is a fiction series about the beginnings of computation and cryptography. He does have a propensity to navel-gaze though.

Vernor Vinge was a computer science professor. Rainbow's End and The Peace War are worth reading. Anything else he writes is worth reading too, actually.

Anything else by Stross, not just Accelerando, will have a bit of a tech bent to it, but is often not very serious and a bit handwavey.

The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet has an AI character with a backstory that forms a significant chunk of the book, but isn't super computer-sciencey.

Unfortunately, it has a few cringeworthy moments and tropes[1]. It is definitely precocious at parts and not hard to draw the parallels with the whole Übermensch/Singularity thing (though to my understanding, the author has distanced himself from the organization and is currently at MIRI).

My chief criticism would be that it is overly bashful of the original Harry Potter story logic but lacks a tight plot through the second half. (Admittedly something very difficult to do with serialized fiction.) Up until chapter 87 I got the feel the story went off the rails, but the last few updates have been very interesting (no spoilers.)

If you enjoyed Snow Crash and do not mind fantasy, you would probably be into this. Don't take it too seriously and keep in mind it is about 1000 pages now.

[1] In particular: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue / http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MartyStu

That being said, back when everyone was reading "Snow Crash" and trying to be the guy/gal who created the metaverse, there was some good research into just what sort of 'group event' you could reasonably hold in a network space. (sadly they don't pop up easily on citeseer but they were in the late 90's early 00's about network group meeting events and the people congregating via digital networks).

The bottom line of the research was that it was really hard to build a workable mesh network protocol (basically which provided any to any connectivity / traffic amongst a modest sized group) in the presence of any traffic loss whatsoever.

One of the outcomes of that research was what most people think of as CDNs which push audio/video content amongst a number of servers and try to distribute the load of "Large" events. A more or less practical example was the 40 user 'raid' that the MMORPG World of Warcraft started with, provided co-ordinated events amongst 40 individual users located across the globe. It had a hard time pulling it off but was successful. 100 or 200 users in the same 'area' often killed the servers.

Color is shooting for 10's of thousands of people in the same space. This is P2P "gone wild" and not a solved problem by any means.

So kudos for failing fast, now to see what happens next.

I'll choose Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow (http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman-ebo...).

The way it changed my life was to make me actually think more about the way my mind operates, the decisions I make and the way these decisions affect my life. As a consequence, there were a few books I read later that were loosely related to this one in the way that they all refer to the way people think.

Barry Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice

Steven Pinker - How the Mind Works

Nassim Taleb - The Black Swan; and Fooled by Randomness

Leonard Mlodinov - The Drunkard's Walk (quite similar to Fooled by Randomness)

Carol Dweck - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Neil Postman / Andrew Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death

Rolf Dobelli - The Art of Thinking Clearly (just started)

On my reading list now:

Quiet by Susan Cain - mentioned already

The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker

Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel

Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday

Also, did not quite change my life, but very recommended:

Neal Stephenson - Anathem.

You may have to struggle through the beginning, but as soon as I understood the way the world he devised operates, I was thrilled completely.

I miss those moments I had when I was younger, reading Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and the Diamond Age for the very first time. Certainly they all played a driving role in orienting me toward what I ended up spending my life doing. The stories and the characters mattered, but the technology drowned it out.

To paraphrase Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, one problem is guys believing that they're too smart to be sexist.

I also believe that a lot of people involved can't handle the idea that they're being bullies, and so further attempt to rationalise their actions with terrible analogies and arguments that boil down to "I'm a geek - I'm incapable of oppressing someone!"

“My question is, you are covered from head to toe in protective padding. So why don’t you wear a helmet?”

“The suit’s got a cervical airbag that blows up when you fall off the board, so you can bounce on your head. Besides, helmets feel weird. They say it doesn’t affect your hearing, but it does.”

“You use your hearing quite a bit in your line of work?”

“Definitely, yeah.”

Uncle Enzo is nodding. “That’s what I suspected. We felt the same way, the boys in my unit in Vietnam.”

[…]

“Our job was to go through the jungle making trouble for some slippery gentlemen carrying guns bigger than they were. Stealthy guys. And we depended on our hearing, too—just like you do. And you know what? We never wore helmets.”

“Same reason?”

“Exactly. Even though they didn’t cover the ears, really, they did something to your sense of hearing. I still think I owe my life to going bareheaded.”

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter-wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro’s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

edit: saw this [1] comment

[0] http://everything2.com/title/Central+Intelligence+Corporatio...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9603605

Below quote courtesy http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1824 :

"At the same time, she jerks the manual release on her cervical collar and goes into full Michelin Man mode as tiny gas cartridges detonate in several strategic locations around her bod. The biggest one goes off like an M-80 at the nape of her neck, unfurling the coverall's collar into a cylindrical gasbag that shoots straight up and encases her entire head. Other airbags go off around her torso and pelvis, paying lots of attention to that spinal column."

Snow Crash - Sergey Brin

Dune - Michael Arrington

Stranger in a strange land -Michael Arrington ,Linus Torvalds

Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy - Michael Arrington

Ender's Game- Mark Zuckerberg

Anathem - Michael Arrington

Source: my hobby site http://vipreads.com

Links to individual people:

http://vipreads.com/sergey-brin

http://vipreads.com/linus-torvalds

http://vipreads.com/mark-zuckerberg

http://vipreads.com/michael-arrington

For those of us who grew up reading Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and other cyberpunk yarns: that is today, we are living in that world at this moment.

1. Neuromancer - William Gibson

2. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

3. Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy

4. How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

5. Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

6. The Pragmatic Programmer - Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

7. The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

8. Code - Charles Petzold

9. The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner

10. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become
Book - Peter Morville

11. Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

12. The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman

13. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - Fred Brooks

14. Decline and Fall of the American Programmer - Ed Yourdon

15. Cube Farm - Bill Blunden

16. The Philip K. Dick Reader

17. The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll

18. The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli

19. The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene

20. The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross

21. Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System - Bill Gates

1 - Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)

2 - The Trial (Franz Kafka)

3 - Beyond the door (Philip K Dick - short story)

4 - The eyes have it (Philip K Dick - short story)

5 - Seven brief lessons on Physics (Carlo Rovelli)

6 - I have no mouth, and I must scream (Herlan Ellison - short story)

7 - The art of simplicity (Dominique Loreau)

8 - On anarchism (Noam Chomsky)

9 - The difference engine (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling)

10 - Utopia (Thomas More)

11 - Sophie's world (Jostein Gaarder)

12 - Rete padrona (Federico Rampini - essays about the 'dark side' of the corporate web)

13 - The art of discarding (Nagisa Tatsumi)

14 - Symposium (Plato)

And a couple of very short philosophy booklets by Zizek (about the Matrix) and Baudrillard (about 'cyberphilosophy')

But that is NOT what the Snow Crash Metaverse is about, and there are countless science fiction stories that do directly approach this subject matter.

Stephenson's Metaverse is very much the WWW with 3d goggles and a semi-constrained semi-realistic physics. It has people playing games, like the web. It has people mingling socially, it has people mingling for business, and it has places where those lines blur, like the web. It has people telecommuting to work, even, and it looks a lot like using a VPN. It has spammy ads, like the web, and savvy clients have plugins that try to identify and block those ads, like the web. Except for the extrapolation that we'd want 3d intput for everything, and the extrapolation that we'd want computer-vision cameras converting the upper half of our bodies into input devices, it's basically a very conservative extrapolation of the web, with only minimal changes. It's the single least far-reaching speculation in that novel; nearly every page discussing something OTHER than the Metaverse is way-out-there stuff (franchise nation-states, the whole nam-shub thing, man-portable fusion power (for Reason), smartwheels and microradar as consumer-grade goods, rat-things, it just goes on and on).

As for stories that DO actually talk about this (unlike Snow Crash), my favorite is God Is An Iron, a short story by Spider Robinson, that he later expanded into the novel Mindkiller. And not that I'm the hugest fan of Niven, but Niven's Ringworld has, as a side point, the same thing going on (Ringworld is the book that Bungie basically lifted whole-cloth to write the plot for Halo, ha ha).

And I actually got out on my bike the past two weekends without working, got some computers built to hopefully find their way into the homes of school kids who need something simple at home, and I'm about 18 chapters deep into Snow Crash, which I feel REALLY BAD for putting off for so long. Never read it before.

The CIC brass can't stand these guys because they upload staggering quantities of useless information to the database, on the off chance that some of it will eventually be useful. It's like writing down the license number of every car you see on your way to work each morning, just in case one of them will be involved in a hit-and-run accident. Even the CIC database can only hold so much garbage. So, usually, these habitual gargoyles get kicked out of the CIC before too long.
</blockquote>

-- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992)

Almost as quaint has "three megabytes of hot RAM".

But if you want to give Stephenson a second shot, I suggest Diamond Age.

  The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
  Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
  Gridlinked - Neal Asher
  Neuromancer - William Gibson
  The Reality Dysfunction - Peter F. Hamilton
  The Dreaming Void - Peter F. Hamilton
  Fallen Dragon - Peter F. Hamilton
  Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan
  Market Forces - Richard Morgan
  Blindsight - Peter Watts
  The Electric Church - Jeff Somers
  Tunnel in the Sky - Robert A. Heinlein
  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein
  1984 - George Orwell

    bash..$ sqlite3 books.sqlite
    sqlite$ create table books ( title varchar(128), author varchar(128) );
    sqlite$ insert into books (title, author) values ("Snow Crash", "Neal Stephenson");
    sqlite$ .quit
    bash..$ echo "select * from books;" | sqlite3 books.sqlite
    Snow Crash|Neal Stephenson

The Emperors New Mind - Roger Penrose

Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglass Hoffstadter

Brocas Brain - Carl Sagan

The (mis)Behavior of Markets - Benoit Mandelbrot

The Black Swan - Nicholas Nassem Taleb

Fiction

Gates Of Fire - Stephen Pressfield

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

Hardwired - Walter Jon Williams

Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan

Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson

Space - Stephen Baxter

Enders Game - Orson Scott Card

Skeleton Crew - Stephen King

I've given away a lot of books. I'm old.

I actually played Second Life before reading Snow Crash. So imagine the chills I got when I started to read, and found this past vision of the future predicting Second Life with such uncanny accuracy. I found out later that the guys who made Second Life had drawn inspiration from Snow Crash. Human nature bridged most of the gap between the implementation detail of Second Life and Stephenson's vision.

On the ground level of Embarcadero, as we left to trudge into our bunks across the bay, there was one of the first headset-VR shop/setups, running .. I think .. 'Dino'. It made me puke if I played for a few minutes, but it was neat that 'VR', back then, 'was coming .. soon'.

A few years later, there were the flight-sim centers around the SGI neighborhood. HUD's of pixels, or something.

Anyway, I still like to read Snow Crash every few years or so. Next month I'll probably do a workshop with some Dutch friends in Den Haag, with their new Occulus Rift headsets.. so to this old grizzly, it seems people want VR, even still. Gotta solve the puke factor, at least in my case, first though ..

- 1990, Don Hopkins uses the PizzaTool to fax a pizza order.

- 1992, Snow Crash is published. Readers imagine interconnected virtual worlds and action packed pizza delivery. Often quoted book in regards to internet, MMORPGs and pizza.

- 1994, Pizza Hut's Pizza Net allows users in Santa Cruz to order pizza.

- May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz buys two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins (valued at around 30 USD at the time).

BOOK - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (http://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash-Neal-Stephenson/dp/05533809...)

ARTICLE - The Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment (https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin...)

PAPER - Are we living in a simulation? (http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf)