Foucault's Pendulum

Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth

What Hacker News says

antonvsAug 2026

It’s hard to know what anyone considers the “usual greats”. Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature, but she doesn’t seem to make it into the “average” person’s greats list, possibly because her use of language is very much not grade 5. Try The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark, The Grass Is Singing, The Good Terrorist, The Fifth Child, or the series that starts with Shikasta.

E.L. Doctorow is another such example. Try The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, Loon Lake.

In the scifi genre (aside from the Shikasta series already mentioned), M. John Harrison is worth a look. He’s got a long bibliography but Light might be a good starting point.

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum.

Some of Ursula Le Guin’s more serious books might fit the bill, like The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness.

Someone already mentioned Mervyn Peake, he definitely fits this category.

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TimorousBestieJan 2026

The book is okay (I think I gave it three stars on Goodreads?) but in my opinion it suffers from Neal Stephenson syndrome: the book kinda just ends without a whole lot of anticlimax or resolution. The pacing is all over the place and the supporting cast are more like character sketches than characters.

I think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.

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SubGeniusFeb 2025

If you want the Snow Crash version of Da Vinci Code, then you might like The Illuminatus Trilogy. Robert Anton Wilson is something else. Umberto Eco's book Foucault's Pendulum is a slightly different vibe, but very entertaining read.

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JoelMcCrackenJan 2025

Reminds me of Foucault's Pendulum. Great book, worth reading, and extremely relevant to our day.

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rexpopJan 2025

Oof, another syncretic hermeticism, and with the usual pinch of antisemitism!

Bro, read you some "Foucault's Pendulum" and touch grass.

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sevensorNov 2024

Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) by Umberto Eco. A novel about how easy it is to build meaning around the meaningless.

The Last of the Wine (1956) by Mary Renault. Athens on its way to losing the war with Sparta. You know what’s coming for Athens, but the characters do not. The atrocity at Melos echoes through the whole book.

Strong recommendation for both; they feel very much of the present, age notwithstanding.

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