Looking for an indie scifi publisher and a book published under them

L Ron Howard

I'm looking for a book that was published under an indie scifi publisher.
I had purchased the book about 5 years ago or so.
They sold mainly online through their own store, at the time they weren't on Amazon at the time. Without knowing their name I'm pretty much unable to find them, so I'm hoping maybe someone can at least kinda help me.

The book I'm looking for was set in our (Earth's) future where we didn't discover faster-than-light travel, so we suffered our way through the galaxy like that. Things are ruled by giant mega-corporations, and alliances change all the time as is pretty typical in a grimdark space-future kind of genre.
The thing that I remember most was that as well as computer programmers, they had computer archaeologists, which would delve into the code because in the future we apparently forgot the basics of computers, as we have developer languages upon languages that are built on wrappers built around wrappers.

Basically I want to get another copy of the book as I thought it was pretty well written.
Would anyone have any ideas?

see317

The setting sounds kind of like A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
But that was published by Tor, which is about as not-indie as you can get in sci-fi.

Are there any aliens or specific events you recall in the book?

L Ron Howard

There were no aliens at all. Thanks for the suggestion, see, but that isn't it.

A good part takes place on a barge going from Earth to somewhere else. The crew is all part of one mega-corporation faction. Somewhere in the middle of the trip, they receive word from Earth that their corporation was bought out, the place they were going to be delivering their goods to has changed sides, so they were not to deliver it there any more. And this was somewhere in the middle of a many-year trip. Then they're stuck for a while figuring out what to do. They can't really head back, but they can't keep going forward. And mind you, the communication took at least months to get to them, so considering the volatile nature of things, they kinda have to keep going and hope that things change in the future.
I don't recall offhand if it was a collection of short stories, though I'm questioning myself that it is. I know that there was a completely separate part (remember, it's been 5+ years) about the technologist spelunking through code, basically trying to figure out what happens between the code written and the computer, as apparently we forget in the future.


I guess, after some Googling, if it's not published by a major publisher, it's called 'speculative fiction' and not actual 'science fiction'.

Librarian

Doesn't have anything to do with the kind of publisher, speculative fiction is just a fancy word to use for fantasy/scifi.

Librarian

Was it maybe a book by Vernor Vinge or James P. Hogan? Both apparently deal with computer archeology in their works.

RadicalTurnip

I hate to say this because I haven't actually read these yet (but at least I'm ashamed about it, and it's on my list!) but that sounds a little bit like the setting of the Foundation series by Asimov...I'm probably wrong, as I said, I haven't read them, so I have no idea what the story is, I just know a little about the setting...and archaeologists trying to figure out stuff like that sounds familiar.

L Ron Howard

Thanks for the tips, guys.
I know it isn't done by Asimov. It's much too dark and gritty. I'm pretty sure it was written this century.
I'll take a closer look at Vinge and Hogan.