Not only does Ullman tell us what it was like to be an engineer during the dot-com bubble, but she does it in prose that many professional writers envy.

I am teaching a class this summer called "Digital Futures." It is going to be a seminar-style class where I'm making students read a lot of books about "the future" and then talk about technology, ethics, their relation to the world, and all of that fun stuff.

So if you have any favorite books (fiction, nonfiction, theoretical), games, or films about "the future" please post them in the dang comments.

Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment at Oxford.

John Wiley & Sons (1997), Paperback, 224 pages

We know it's insane. We know people will ask why on earth we think that an 1875 British satirical novel is the book you need to read right now—or, for that matter, why it even made the cut. The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is. What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways. Which is why we'd like you to sit down with Anthony Trollope, and these 49 other remarkably trenchant voices.