I read a significant amount of fiction and non-fiction in 2013, including books on founding start-ups, marketing, psychology, english lit (even Shakespeare, Dickens and Jane Austin), and sci-fi.
Surprisingly (at least to me), the most interesting and profound was an obscure sci-fi book called Permutation City by Greg Egan. It was surprising because it was written in 1994 and pretty much nails HPC and cloud computing. It also plays on the ideas of intelligence, consciousness, artificial life and longevity, all of which I think we're right on the precipice of making some pretty significant inroads within the next decade.
The cloud computing aspect of the novel though really blew me away. Most parts seem almost like throw away paragraphs which help support the plot, but you don't have to squint very hard to see the similarities between it and something like the Amazon Spot Market. For me, in 1994, I couldn't even imagine cloud computing. The PC was so completely dominant at the time (I had a 486DX2-50) and the internet might as well have not existed for most people. The web consisted of a handful of sites and only a few people had even heard of NCSA Mosaic.
I realize others might not find this profound, but for me, working in cloud infrastructure and virtualization, it really struck a chord.
Greg Egan is a great visionary, his ideas and ingenuities are profound and intelligent. His works exude a kind of brilliance, a technological devotion to the big ideas, but at a cost: sometimes the ideas take the stage, and characters and plot are bystanders. Overall, they are still excellent, and they're big on the ideas. A warning: it's the hardest hard sci-fi out there, for example, the book Schild's Ladder is full of hardcore mathematics and physics.
Surprisingly (at least to me), the most interesting and profound was an obscure sci-fi book called Permutation City by Greg Egan. It was surprising because it was written in 1994 and pretty much nails HPC and cloud computing. It also plays on the ideas of intelligence, consciousness, artificial life and longevity, all of which I think we're right on the precipice of making some pretty significant inroads within the next decade.
The cloud computing aspect of the novel though really blew me away. Most parts seem almost like throw away paragraphs which help support the plot, but you don't have to squint very hard to see the similarities between it and something like the Amazon Spot Market. For me, in 1994, I couldn't even imagine cloud computing. The PC was so completely dominant at the time (I had a 486DX2-50) and the internet might as well have not existed for most people. The web consisted of a handful of sites and only a few people had even heard of NCSA Mosaic.
I realize others might not find this profound, but for me, working in cloud infrastructure and virtualization, it really struck a chord.