Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
3people
2012–2021years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Any sci-fi recommendations on post-scarcity economics? I'll offer one by Walter Jon Williams, https://libertyislandmag.com/2019/07/19/sci-fi-book-review-t...
> “The Green Leopard Plague” is the story for which this collection is named. It is the best work I’ve seen in explaining how economics and taxes would work in a post-scarcity world. How do you make people pay taxes and do dirty work when they don’t have to work to eat? And the narrative lacing around the academic discussions is a quest to end world hunger by genetic engineering, the namesake plague, and a failed youthful romance in the post-singularity future.
- There's an excellent SF novella, Walter Jon Williams' The Green Leopard Plague, where Transnistrian corruption happens to be a major plot device. The other characters derisively call the Transnistrian government "Trashcanistanis." This story was my first encounter with Transnistria, and it seemed weird enough to be fictional, but later I found out it was real.
- Another sci-fi story on post-scarcity economics, Walter Jon Williams "The Green Leopard Plague", part 1 here. Remainder in anthology of same name.
- Walter Jon Williams' The Green Leopard Plague, which is also part of an anthology of the same name. The anthology includes several other stories that build up the world that GLP takes place in. Some interesting ideas about identity and consciousness in a society with extremely advanced bioengineering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague
Umberto Eco's Prague Cemetery which expands greatly on a tiny section of Foucault's Pendulum. Eco's writing is extremely dense. Similar to Neal Stephenson, but with more of a literary flavor than a technogeek flavor. A nice way to balance out your reading if you find you are a bit too focused on modern technology.
I finally read Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy. Early Internet and web culture was so deeply infused with RAW's ideas that the trilogy felt like one long déjà vu session. Lots of fun. RAW + Eco are a great antidote to taking conspiracy theories seriously, while having a ton of fun at the same time.
Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. Wow. Since the release of the Blue Ant books, I've been telling people that Blue Ant is the place to start, as it updates a lot of the underlying themes of Sprawl for this decade. But Sprawl is still very current and relevant. If you read Sprawl during or before the dot-com bubble like I did, you probably focused on the prophetic internet stuff. If you read it again, you will find out that there is plenty more interesting stuff to feed your brain in Gibson's early novels.
