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by iudqnolq 2359 days ago
UNSONG. Magical fantasy set in a Silicon Valley where Microprosopus (Microsoft), Gogmagog (Google), Amalek (Amazon), and Countenance (Facebook) have figured out how to brute force discovering Divine Names of God through the magic of independent contractors.

Every chapter begins with a quote from a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible, SICP, and ESR. For example:

> It is good practice to have your program poke around at runtime and see if it can be used to give a light unto the Gentiles.

The first chapter begins

> The apocalypse began in a cubicle.

> ... Upon the floor was a chair and upon the chair was me. My name is Aaron Smith-Teller and I am twenty-two years old. I was fiddling with a rubber band and counting the minutes until my next break and seeking the hidden transcendent Names of God.

> “AR-ASH-KON-CHEL-NA-VAN-TSIR,” I chanted.

> That wasn’t a hidden transcendent Name of God. That wasn’t surprising. During my six months at Countenance I must have spoken five hundred thousand of these words. Each had taken about five seconds, earned me about two cents, and cost a small portion of my dignity. None of them had been hidden transcendent Names of God.

http://unsongbook.com/

3 comments

I would say Unsong is a lot more theology and theodicy than computer science. (if it can be said to be about computer sciience at all.)

It is an excellent and hilarious read nonetheless. One of the best web serials I have read.

I'd say it's as much about the programming industry as the other books mentioned on this page. It's certainly not hard science and no one here will learn anything new about computer science from it.
It certainly does poke a lot of fun at big tech.

It also helps that I think out of all of the reads mentioned on this comment thread so far, Unsong is definitely my favourite of the lot.

This reminds me of the Nine Billion Names of God (Clarke)

https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm...

I hadn't seen that before. I enjoyed it a lot. It may well be an inspiration. However, while in Clark's story finding the name of God is the end, in UNSONG that's just the beginning of their adventure...
Borges’ The Library of Babel works with similar ideas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

Sort of, although I think it doesn't allude to the exploitation of workers for something allegedly holy like the other two?
I guess. I found the Borges story infinitely richer and intellectually interesting. Kind of lends credence to the idea that Kubrick was the real genius behind 2001 (Clarke co-wrote the screenplay).
If you liked UNSONG and want (one of) the core philosophical cosmoligical premises on its own: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/15/answer-to-job/

I don't actually know that UNSONG is literally Answer To Job only long (excellent) fiction, but I don't know it isn't ;)