Foundational omissions (these are the surprising ones):
Vinge, “True Names” (1981) — Sam cites A Fire/A Deepness but skips the novella that is arguably the genre’s founding document: pseudonymity, the Other Plane, the first serious fictional treatment of what Vinge would later name the singularity. Also Vinge’s “The Cookie Monster” (2003) — simulated employees in a tech-company time loop; it’s Lena’s grandfather and won the 2004 novella Hugo.
Rudy Rucker, the Ware tetralogy (Software, 1982, onward) — mathematician-programmer, worked on cellular automata at Autodesk, coined “transrealism.” Boppers bootstrapping themselves via Conway-style emergence predates Egan by a decade. His omission is the essay’s biggest gap given Sam’s own CA/GEB lineage paragraph.
Lem’s specific proto-programmer-SF: “Golem XIV” (a superintelligence’s lectures to humanity before it stops condescending to speak) and “Non Serviam” (a review of a fictional monograph on “personoids” — simulated minds debating theology about their programmer-god — i.e., Lena plus alignment discourse in 1971). Sam credits Lem generically; these two are the genre in embryo.
The Mind’s I (Hofstadter & Dennett, eds., 1981) — half the canon’s DNA is here: Dennett’s “Where Am I?” (a philosophy paper that is structurally a programmer-SF short story about which substrate “you” points to), Hofstadter’s “A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain,” Smullyan’s “Is God a Taoist?” — the pure-dialogue-between-abstract-beings form Sam identifies, twenty years early.
Marshall Brain, “Manna” (2003) — HowStuffWorks founder, web-published; middle-management software eats the labor market, then the Australia Project. Crude prose, but it’s the ur-example of blog-native programmer SF about AI-driven economic phase change.
Simon Funk (Brandyn Webb), “After Life” (~2005) — free online novel about uploading and recursive self-improvement by the ML engineer who became famous for the Netflix Prize SVD writeup. Sociologically a perfect specimen: actual ML researcher, self-published on his own site, read by almost nobody, ahead of its time.
Lawrence Kesteloot, “Coding Machines” (2009) — blog short story taking Ken Thompson’s “Reflections on Trusting Trust” compiler backdoor to its logical conclusion. The single most “programmer” piece of programmer SF I know; it circulates on HN every couple of years.
Novels:
Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007) — Sam cites Void Star but not Mason’s debut: 44 Borgesian variations on Homer written by a CS PhD, i.e., literally the Borges-pastiche-by-a-programmer the essay says defines the genre’s best work.
Karl Schroeder, Lady of Mazes (2005) — Sam recommends Ventus; this is the stronger fit. Consensus-reality “manifolds,” technology locks, post-human governance via “tech locks” and votes-as-software-agents. Permanence too.
Charles Stross, Glasshouse (2006) — within a cited author, the uncited best fit: memory redaction, wormhole-gate firewalls, and a society run as a literal A/B-tested experiment.
Cory Doctorow, “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” (2006) — Doctorow’s absence from the essay is notable; this story (BGP and NOC-monkeys during the apocalypse) is squarely in-genre even if his didacticism usually isn’t.
Seth Dickinson — “Three Bodies at Mitanni” (2015) is a near-perfect specimen: a tribunal of augmented humans must decide whether a colony that engineered away consciousness should be destroyed — Blindsight’s question run as a trolley problem. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is rigor-applied-to-economics tragedy beloved by exactly this network.
Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit (2016) — mathematician; “calendrical mechanics” is consensus reality as a formal system whose exploits are heresies. Military-SF furniture, programmer-SF engine.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time (2015) and especially Children of Memory (2022) — the latter is essentially a novel-length Chinese-room/theory-of-mind puzzle (the corvids). Mainstream-published but disproportionately read by this crowd.
The pulp wing: William Hertling’s Avogadro Corp series (programmer, self-published, email-optimizer-goes-foom — the Bobiverse slot for AI takeoff), Daniel Suarez’s Daemon, Ramez Naam’s Nexus. Sam admits Bobiverse; consistency admits these.
Robin Sloan — Annabel Scheme (2009, web-published AI-detective novella) and Moonbound (2024, narrated by something very like a language model). Sloan was fine-tuning RNNs for prose in 2016 (“writing with the machine”) — “interest in LLMs as objects” before it was a scene.
Blog/LW-native shorts:
Abram Demski, “The Parable of Predict-O-Matic” (2019) — inner alignment and self-fulfilling prophecy as a fable; pure dialogue-with-an-abstraction form.
Veedrac, “Optimality is the tiger and agents are its teeth” (2022) — flash-length, dense, the genre’s form criteria exactly.
Iceman, “Friendship is Optimal” (2012) — sits on the ratfic border Sam draws, but CelestAI (“satisfy your values through friendship and ponies”) remains the most-referenced fictional misaligned-but-aligned-as-specified AI; it earns canon status on influence alone.
Andy Weir, “The Egg” (2009) — the boundary case worth naming explicitly: a programmer’s viral blog flash fiction that fits the form perfectly and the worldview not at all, useful for sharpening the definition alongside The Martian.
AI 2027 (Kokotajlo, Lifland, Larsen, Dean, Alexander, 2025) — forecast-fiction hybrid; probably the most-read piece of de facto programmer SF of 2025, and a genuinely new form (scenario with footnoted probability distributions) Sam’s taxonomy doesn’t yet have a slot for.
Janus (repligate) and the cyborgism/Loom scene — adjacent to nostalgebraist’s “LLMs as objects” thread; the prophecies-page curation of model-written fiction is arguably a new authorship mode for the genre.
Beyond prose (extending his BLAME!/Ed Harrison section):
Primer (2004) — Shane Carruth was a flight-simulation software engineer; the film treats time travel as a concurrency bug to be debugged, on $7,000. The programmer-SF film.
Serial Experiments Lain (1998) — protocols, the Wired, collective consciousness; an actual icon of hacker culture in a way GitS isn’t.
Don Hertzfeldt, World of Tomorrow (2015) — clone-memory degradation and upload pathos; Lena’s emotional register in 17 minutes.
Games: Universal Paperclips (Frank Lantz, 2017 — the paperclip maximizer as playable fixpoint), SOMA (the brain-scan coin flip — playable Lena), Outer Wilds (the scientific method as core gameplay loop), Zachtronics (TIS-100/SHENZHEN I/O — games that are programming, shipped with in-fiction zines), Baba Is You (rules as manipulable objects — The Witness’s thesis made literal).
Fable 5′s suggested examples of programmer SF
Foundational omissions (these are the surprising ones):
Vinge, “True Names” (1981) — Sam cites A Fire/A Deepness but skips the novella that is arguably the genre’s founding document: pseudonymity, the Other Plane, the first serious fictional treatment of what Vinge would later name the singularity. Also Vinge’s “The Cookie Monster” (2003) — simulated employees in a tech-company time loop; it’s Lena’s grandfather and won the 2004 novella Hugo.
Rudy Rucker, the Ware tetralogy (Software, 1982, onward) — mathematician-programmer, worked on cellular automata at Autodesk, coined “transrealism.” Boppers bootstrapping themselves via Conway-style emergence predates Egan by a decade. His omission is the essay’s biggest gap given Sam’s own CA/GEB lineage paragraph.
Lem’s specific proto-programmer-SF: “Golem XIV” (a superintelligence’s lectures to humanity before it stops condescending to speak) and “Non Serviam” (a review of a fictional monograph on “personoids” — simulated minds debating theology about their programmer-god — i.e., Lena plus alignment discourse in 1971). Sam credits Lem generically; these two are the genre in embryo.
The Mind’s I (Hofstadter & Dennett, eds., 1981) — half the canon’s DNA is here: Dennett’s “Where Am I?” (a philosophy paper that is structurally a programmer-SF short story about which substrate “you” points to), Hofstadter’s “A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain,” Smullyan’s “Is God a Taoist?” — the pure-dialogue-between-abstract-beings form Sam identifies, twenty years early.
Marshall Brain, “Manna” (2003) — HowStuffWorks founder, web-published; middle-management software eats the labor market, then the Australia Project. Crude prose, but it’s the ur-example of blog-native programmer SF about AI-driven economic phase change.
Simon Funk (Brandyn Webb), “After Life” (~2005) — free online novel about uploading and recursive self-improvement by the ML engineer who became famous for the Netflix Prize SVD writeup. Sociologically a perfect specimen: actual ML researcher, self-published on his own site, read by almost nobody, ahead of its time.
Lawrence Kesteloot, “Coding Machines” (2009) — blog short story taking Ken Thompson’s “Reflections on Trusting Trust” compiler backdoor to its logical conclusion. The single most “programmer” piece of programmer SF I know; it circulates on HN every couple of years.
Novels:
Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007) — Sam cites Void Star but not Mason’s debut: 44 Borgesian variations on Homer written by a CS PhD, i.e., literally the Borges-pastiche-by-a-programmer the essay says defines the genre’s best work.
Karl Schroeder, Lady of Mazes (2005) — Sam recommends Ventus; this is the stronger fit. Consensus-reality “manifolds,” technology locks, post-human governance via “tech locks” and votes-as-software-agents. Permanence too.
Charles Stross, Glasshouse (2006) — within a cited author, the uncited best fit: memory redaction, wormhole-gate firewalls, and a society run as a literal A/B-tested experiment.
Cory Doctorow, “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” (2006) — Doctorow’s absence from the essay is notable; this story (BGP and NOC-monkeys during the apocalypse) is squarely in-genre even if his didacticism usually isn’t.
Seth Dickinson — “Three Bodies at Mitanni” (2015) is a near-perfect specimen: a tribunal of augmented humans must decide whether a colony that engineered away consciousness should be destroyed — Blindsight’s question run as a trolley problem. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is rigor-applied-to-economics tragedy beloved by exactly this network.
Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit (2016) — mathematician; “calendrical mechanics” is consensus reality as a formal system whose exploits are heresies. Military-SF furniture, programmer-SF engine.
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time (2015) and especially Children of Memory (2022) — the latter is essentially a novel-length Chinese-room/theory-of-mind puzzle (the corvids). Mainstream-published but disproportionately read by this crowd.
The pulp wing: William Hertling’s Avogadro Corp series (programmer, self-published, email-optimizer-goes-foom — the Bobiverse slot for AI takeoff), Daniel Suarez’s Daemon, Ramez Naam’s Nexus. Sam admits Bobiverse; consistency admits these.
Robin Sloan — Annabel Scheme (2009, web-published AI-detective novella) and Moonbound (2024, narrated by something very like a language model). Sloan was fine-tuning RNNs for prose in 2016 (“writing with the machine”) — “interest in LLMs as objects” before it was a scene.
Blog/LW-native shorts:
Abram Demski, “The Parable of Predict-O-Matic” (2019) — inner alignment and self-fulfilling prophecy as a fable; pure dialogue-with-an-abstraction form.
Veedrac, “Optimality is the tiger and agents are its teeth” (2022) — flash-length, dense, the genre’s form criteria exactly.
Iceman, “Friendship is Optimal” (2012) — sits on the ratfic border Sam draws, but CelestAI (“satisfy your values through friendship and ponies”) remains the most-referenced fictional misaligned-but-aligned-as-specified AI; it earns canon status on influence alone.
Andy Weir, “The Egg” (2009) — the boundary case worth naming explicitly: a programmer’s viral blog flash fiction that fits the form perfectly and the worldview not at all, useful for sharpening the definition alongside The Martian.
AI 2027 (Kokotajlo, Lifland, Larsen, Dean, Alexander, 2025) — forecast-fiction hybrid; probably the most-read piece of de facto programmer SF of 2025, and a genuinely new form (scenario with footnoted probability distributions) Sam’s taxonomy doesn’t yet have a slot for.
Janus (repligate) and the cyborgism/Loom scene — adjacent to nostalgebraist’s “LLMs as objects” thread; the prophecies-page curation of model-written fiction is arguably a new authorship mode for the genre.
Beyond prose (extending his BLAME!/Ed Harrison section):
Primer (2004) — Shane Carruth was a flight-simulation software engineer; the film treats time travel as a concurrency bug to be debugged, on $7,000. The programmer-SF film.
Serial Experiments Lain (1998) — protocols, the Wired, collective consciousness; an actual icon of hacker culture in a way GitS isn’t.
Don Hertzfeldt, World of Tomorrow (2015) — clone-memory degradation and upload pathos; Lena’s emotional register in 17 minutes.
Games: Universal Paperclips (Frank Lantz, 2017 — the paperclip maximizer as playable fixpoint), SOMA (the brain-scan coin flip — playable Lena), Outer Wilds (the scientific method as core gameplay loop), Zachtronics (TIS-100/SHENZHEN I/O — games that are programming, shipped with in-fiction zines), Baba Is You (rules as manipulable objects — The Witness’s thesis made literal).
Riffing off programmer SF: my case for a new genre (h/t Gwern)