Fiction Book Recommendations

Reading List
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Science Fiction

The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks

The Culture is a society formed by various humanoid races and artificial intelligences about 9,000 years before the events of novels in the series. Since the majority of its biological population can have virtually anything they want without the need to work, there is little need for laws or enforcement, and the culture is described by Banks as space socialism. It features a post-scarcity economy where technology is advanced to such a degree that all production is automated. Its members live mainly in spaceships and other off-planet constructs, because its founders wished to avoid the centralised political and corporate power-structures that planet-based economies foster. Most of the planning and administration is done by Minds, very advanced AIs.

Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

The Laundry Files, Charles Stross

Eldritch horror, spies, workplace humour.

Halting State, Charles Stross

AR for Police called CopSpace. Virtual currency theft from an MMO.

Accelerando, Charles Stross

Describes essentially DAOs & smart contracts.

Artifact Space, Miles Cameron

  • covers gender roles, a far future “post scarcity” human and alien space future
  • there’s an internet like thing covered, which talks about “juried” information, which is factual and free of bias
  • lots of interesting concepts in a rags to riches story
  • sword fighting in space, a “merchant navy”

Miles Cameron aka Christian Cameron

Artifact Space published by Gollancz UK.

SciFi for Product People

via Bill Seitz. Links are all digital garden links deeper into his site, should replace with book links.

If you’re on a software Product Team, in any role, you should read scifi books to see futures. (Movies could work in theory, I think, but rarely are as deep, and require more re-viewing to learn anything from.) Why? For pattern-recognition in seeing-futures, side-effects, ethical issues, and raising the bar in human progress.

Hieroglyph stories, History Of The 21st Century In 100 Objects

Cory Doctorow: Walkaway, Homeland/Little Brother, etc. (almost everything)

Neal Stephenson: SnowCrash, Diamond Age, and every other book with a scifi bent.

Bruce Sterling: Distraction (Sterling Distraction), Maneki Neko…

Daniel Suarez: Daemon and FreedomTM

William Hertling: Hertling Singularity Series

Charlie Stross: Rule34, Halting State, Accelerando…

Vernor Vinge: Rainbows End and others

Robin Sloan: Sourdough and Mr. Penumbra

Simon Morden: Metrozone series

William Gibson: Peripheral

David Brin: Earth (Brin’s Earth)

Michael Crichton: Jurassic Park

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That series sounds epic. It’s like the trolley problem played out on an intergalactic-multigenerational space-time scale!

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The Vorrh, B. Catling

Incredible, genre-defying fantasy set in post-WWI Africa. A mysterious and powerful forest draws people to it to meet with their destiny or with madness.

The author is first a sculptor, second a poet, and most recently a fiction writer. This book is deeply literary and poetic. It can be a bit of a slow read because the language is dense and evocative. I found myself re-reading some paragraphs three or four times, savoring them, before moving on.

I had the opportunity to meet the author at a book signing. Apparently he tried for years to write the book, but couldn’t get past the first couple sections. One day he finally broke through and the rest of the book (and two subsequent books!) came flooding out of him.

It should be easy to find an online preview of the first few sections of the book. Would recommend reading that to decide if this book is for you or not.

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