'In "Snowcrash" Stephenson won the enduring adulation of geeks everywhere by delivering two fabulously cool metaphors for what the computer could offer the world -- the Metaverse, an online reality in which hackers donned their favorite personas and acted out their fantasies, and the Librarian, a helpful digital entity, not unlike a real-life librarian, who is also a really, really neat way of imagining how we puny humans might some day be able to plumb the database of all recorded information. Then in "The Diamond Age," he went a step further, entrancing his readers with the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer," a "smart" book that delivered lessons in life and computer theory disguised as interactive fairy tales, all with the intention of educating its young female owner in how to thrive in a treacherous world.
In "Cryptonomicon," Stephenson cuts to the chase. Instead of elaborate metaphors for how the computer works or might work, he brings us directly to ground zero: Alan Turing, the creator of the first digital computer, is even a character in "Cryptonomicon." As the novel flips back and forth across the last 50 years, we see both the birth of the computer and its current state-of-the-art implementation. Stephenson goes so far as to include actual code for an encryption algorithm in the text.' -- http://dir.salon.com/books/int/1999/05/19/stephenson/index.html?pn=3
Cory Doctorow (born July 17, 1971) is a blogger, journalist and science fiction author in favor of liberalizing copyright laws, and a proponent of Creative Commons. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, filesharing, socialism utopias (though he is not himself a socialist) and Disney [...]
Doctorow's first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is a utopian novel set in a future Walt Disney World where scarcity has been abolished and economic transactions are mediated through a reputation system similar to Slashdot's "Karma," measured in units called Whuffie. It was published in January 2003, and was the first novel released under a Creative Commons license. The license allowed readers to freely circulate the electronic edition, and that electronic edition was released simultaneous with the print edition [...]
Doctorow's second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, was released in March 2004 in hardcover and will be published in paperback in spring 2005. It concerns "tribes" of management consultants whose common bond is their sleep schedule. It revolves around a "traffic Napster" for car-to-car file sharing, something that has subsequently been experimented with as an actual technology. As with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe was released in a freely distributable electronic edition licensed under Creative Commons terms simultaneous with its print release."
-- From the Wikipedia entry on Cory Doctorow
Greg Egan's homepage. 'The good news is that you have just awakened into Eternal Life. You are going to live forever. Immortality is a reality. A medical miracle? Not exactly.
The bad news is that you are a scrap of electronic code. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy.
The good news is that there is a way out. By law, every Copy has the option of terminating itself, and waking up to normal flesh-and-blood life again. The bail-out is on the utilities menu. You pull it down...
The bad news is that it doesn't work. Someone has blocked the bail-out option. And you know who did it. You did. The other you. The real you. The one that wants to keep you here forever.' - Amazon.com description of Egan's 'Permutation City'
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