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In a hard SF rather than contemporary context, A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge, is an absolute delight (and a Hugo winner for best novel). Vinge was a mathematics and computer science professor, and very much knows what he's talking about.

Part of the fun is that, on a 5000 year old spaceship set arbitrarily far in our future, long past the end of Moore's Law, all the systems are still running Unix. And one of the jobs on board is "Programmer-Archeologist", digging through generations of code to try to find useful bits from the past. But story-wise, there's some outstanding hacking ideas going.




Same author wrote _True Names_, which pre-dates the internet and yet nails a bunch of internet crime concepts (it's not about black ICE it's about someone doxing you, etc). Some sci-fi authors had a vision of the future, Vinge went on a 3 month vacation to the future.


I found the first 20% hard to get through, but after that, the book was one of my favorites of all time. The compelling technical aspects combined with quality storytelling made the book extremely worthwhile.


A more cybercrime themed Vinge short story would be True Names. It's out of print AFAIK but you can find it online.




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