Marooned in Realtime

"Marooned in Realtime" by Vernor Vinge contains a mind-expanding vision of exponentially accelerating AI. I kind of never stop thinking about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime

Try his Marooned in Realtime next. Excellent murder mystery!

Non fiction and IT related: Algorithmics The spirit of computing: this is a really great exploration of 'algorithmic' thinking, accessible to anyone: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2378136.Algorithmics Soul of a new machine: the book won the pulitzer, it's about now defunct Data General and implementing a new machine in the early 80's: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_Ma... (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine) Fiction: Marooned in Realtime: Vernor Vinge on a group of people who missed the singularity, and try to understand what happened. A damn good detective story too: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167847.Marooned_in_Realti... (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167847.Marooned_in_Realtime)

I got myself a Sony Reader mid-2009 and started reading about twice more than I had been before. 2009 was also the first year in which I wasn't too lazy to document which books I read (I'm really glad I wasn't). Here're some of the favourites this year: Classics: Kafka's The Process and America - both stunning novels that deserve to be read as much as his most famous, The Castle. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - a trippy collection of tales organised in multiple nested frames. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago. Science Fiction: Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe, whom I hadn't read before, turns out to be in a class of his own. It's literary SF, overwhelmingly masterful and beautiful in its prose and characters, yet it could give any hardcore SF novel a run in terms of its ideas. It demands and richly rewards a close reading. I'll be reading more Wolfe in 2010.…

I basically discovered Vernor Vinge. A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge The Peace War, by Vernor Vinge Marooned in Realtime, by Vernor Vinge Hyperion, by Dan Simmons Mrs. Perkins's Electric Quilt, a fun book about some math and physics problems