Recommendations for Cypherpunks Books

[dmolnar]

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