The Joel on Software Discussion Group

There are three very geekoid/programmery novels available for free download (Creative Commons license) from my site wetmachine.

  http://www.wetmachine.com/item/1597

"Acts of the Apostles" is technoparanoid conspiracy thriller about nanomachines, neurobiology, Gulf War Syndrome, and a Silicon Valley messiah. Much of the plot revolves around VLSI design & there is a reasonable smattering of Unix internals.  Readers familiar with the DEC "Mill" in Massachusetts and/or Silicon Valley in the late 80's/early 90's will find much that is familiar.

"Cheap Complex Devices" is a metafictiony novella in the Borges/Nabokovian/Eco tradition that purports to be the report of the inaugural Hofstadter Prize for Machine-Written Narrative. There is some compiler theory in here, as well as lampoons of various flavors of artificial intelligence (Minsky et al) and a Hofstadtertarian relationship with "Acts of the Apostles". Also some jokes having to do with APL & Donald Knuth & "Soul of a New Machine".

"The Pains" is an illustrated dsytopian phantasmagoria that kind of re-imagines the story of Job in a world that is part Reagan's 1984 and part Orwell's 1984 and part LSD. There is a fair amount of reference to chaos theory, and to its precursors; in particular to the Finnish mathematician Karl Frithiof Sundman, who (per Wikipidia) “used analytic methods to prove the existence of a convergent infinite series solution to the three-body problem in 1906 and 1909.”  Also references the "Mindpixel" theories of the late Chris McKinstry, known to some people around here.

Search engines can help you find many dozens of reviews of these books. Like I said, they're available for free download, but buying printed copies provides many obvious benefits.

you wrote them?

Indeed. I wrote the books and published them.

I hasten to add that I wrote none of the reviews (of which, as I said, there are probably a few hundred on the net), excepting the reviews by "Hugh Betcham".  Nor are any of the reviews written by my wife, parents, children, brothers, sisters or parents.  Although Lord knows I've tried to get them to pimp these books.  All the reviews are written by actual real-live geeks.

congratulations sir!

have you heard of Simon Haynes from spacejock[1]? he also writes fictions.

i have also wanted to write a book, but never found time to do so. i  admire those who achieved this dream, especially if they are not writers by profession.

[1]: http://www.spacejock.com/

Someone should make a comic book hero out of a fat, unattractive programmer who has no friends, never kissed a girl and is a star trek fanatic.

You mean someone like Silent Bob?

I think "Comic Book Guy" on The Simpsons comes pretty close to that idea.

+1 to comic book guy (though, he's not too diff from SB)