Accelerando
Just discovered this a while ago after installing and using FBReader on some of my Android devices. There apparently is a free eBook edition of “Accelerando” by Charles Stross. An interesting note from the web site for my and your entertainment…:
“… “Accelerando” is a creature of its time, and that time is the late 1990s. I spent most of the 90s on a kind of sabbatical from writing fiction (my first love), with my head stuck up the fundament of the software industry. In the early 90’s I worked for SCO (back when it was a UNIX company, rather than the unholy terror that came back from the dead to haunt the free software movement). Then I discovered the web, back around 1993. I remember a wee daily email bulletin titled “what’s new on the web” that came from an address at NCSA; I used to visit all the interesting new web sites every day, until the volume grew too great some time in late 1994. I was supposed to be writing UNIX manuals, but I distracted myself by learning Perl – and was inadvertently responsible for the development of the robot exclusion protocol (by writing a web spider that annoyed people who knew more about what they were doing than I did).”
– as I indeed also used learning / writing Perl code to distract myself from more important things at more or less the same time, maybe I am pretty much target audience of this book, but it’s highly recommended to anyone into both science fiction (or that sub-genre they used to call *cough* “cyber-punk” throughout a certain period of time) and into entertaining novels depicting one possible idea of what a “future” might look like. You don’t need much of an IT or computer science background to enjoy this, but of course this doesn’t hurt (neither here nor elsewhere). I’ll finish my reading now and then see where to dive in to refresh my Perl skills, and be it just for the sake of distraction ….. 🙂