On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Wei Dai wrote:
It's strange that there are so few science fiction books that talk about cryptography at all, except maybe at a very low level of detail and sophistication. The only book I can remember that even mentions public-key
It's also strange that there are relatively few science fiction books which talk about math. There are some noted short story collections (_The Mathematical Magpie_ and its sequel), short stories (Asimov's story about rediscovering "graphitics," Heinlein's "And He Built A Crooked House"), and authors (Rudy Rucker), but nowhere near the volume of SF based on physics. Perhaps it's that there are fewer people familiar with math than with physics - which leads to fewer people writing such fiction and a smaller market for it. The same is true for crypto, except more so.
cryptography is Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_. Does anyone have other examples?
The obvious one would be Stephenson's _Cryptonomicon_. I wonder if Greg Egan has written anything in this vein; he seems to have interests in computer science, and he even had an alternate history/worldline travelling story about Turing in Asimov's last year ("Oracle"). -David