Fiction
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Beautiful prose and imagination.
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño. Beautiful and surreal prose, but completely unpretentious.
Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by qntm. I had already read most of these but they are very, very good, and it was a pleasure to read them again.
⭐️ Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Usually when I hear “it’s a 900 page Russian epic about three generations of a family living through a tumultuous time” I roll my eyes and assume it’s some 19th century slog that people only read to say they have read it. Life and Fate is not a slog. It is 900 pages, and the dramatis personae is so long it’s divided into multiple sections. But it’s great. It’s kind of like Legend of the Galactic Heroes but it’s the Second World War and in particular the battle of Stalingrad.
⭐️ Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. The trials and tribulations of a generation ship on a 160 year long journey to Tau Ceti. Pair with A City on Mars. The characters despair over their ship: a reactor fails unpredictably, the ecosystem degrades more and more each year, humans are born stunted for unknown reasons. Finally they arrive at Tau Ceti, and find a habitable planet, but it’s saturated with deadly prions.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I liked the prose style.
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. The first half is hilarious, but at the half-way mark it turns into pointless meandering.
Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman. Demonic horror in the Black Death. A bit movie-brained but enjoyable.
The Fractal Prince and The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi. The last two Jean le Flambeur novels. Beautiful prose style and great imaginal depth. The Sobornost, a slave economy of uploaded human minds, is one of the most interesting science-fictional societies. Like Neuromancer, you have to read them very detainedly, because the prose is very sparse—no infodumps whatever—so you have to put together the world from brief, tangential clues.
Unsong by Scott Alexander. Very funny.
⭐️ Darkome by Hannu Rajaniemi. Neuromancer but it’s DIYbio. It’s rare to read a novel that is intelligent and compelling and set twenty minutes into the future in a way that feels plausible rather than instantly dated. It felt incredibly realistic throughout.
Collected Fiction by Hannu Rajaniemi. A wonderful collection of short stories. I will probably read it again soon.
Beyond the Rift by Peter Watts. A collection of short stories from the great Peter Watts. Dark and full of beautiful imagery. Never dull.
The Plains by Gerald Murnane. The first half is beautifully written, magical-realist, full of surreal and interesting imagery. But by the second half it’s tiresome and repetitive.
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke is interesting. The prose is bad, the attempts at humour are bad, the lack of cultural imagination—it’s the distant future but everyone lives this tiresome mid-century life of cocktails and sexism—it’s all so bad. And yet. And yet, something kept me going. It’s like he dumped all his character points into “technical imagination” are left everything else at zero, so it feels awful, but I kept reading to the end.
⭐️ Starfish by Peter Watts. This was great. It was on my list since 2013 but I finally got around to it. Three kilometers under the Pacific, on the Juan de Fuca ridge, a geothermal plant—“floats tethered above the seabed, a gunmetal-gray planet ringed by a belt of equatorial floodlights”—staffed by humans surgically-modified to live and work at that depth. Everyone is psychologically fucked because it’s a Peter Watts novel. The prose and the images are great. Let me quote you this little bit:
Everywhere else, living constellations punctuate the dark. Here, a string of pearls blink sexual advertisements at two-second intervals. Here, a sudden flash leaves diversionary afterimages swarming across Clarke’s field of view; something flees under cover of her momentary blindness. There, a counterfeit worm twists lazily in the current, invisibly tied to the roof of some predatory mouth.
The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts. One of the stories in Watts’ Sunflower cycle, about the crew of a ship on an eternal voyage, building jump-gates between the stars, which is a fun inversion of the tired old sci-fi trope of “ancient aliens built all these stargates and conveniently left”.
Non-Fiction
The End of Time by Julian Barbour. I’m usually very negative about pop-science. There is no royal road to mathematics, and all the pop-science I’ve read has been worthless compared to going through the first three chapters of a textbook on the relevant topic. And, while interesting, this book is no different, because ultimately, how can I judge whether it’s a sensible or ridiculous idea? I would need years and years of training in mathematics and physics and mathematical physics to even be able to think rigorously about this.
⭐️ In the Beginning…Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson. Funny and synoptic.
Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky. You can tell from the quality of the prose why Chomsky was so successful.
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. Very compellingly written and open-hearted.
Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte. Short case studies in graphic design for visualizing complex information. Lots of railway timetables.
What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task by Nikolai Fedorov. Fedorov is interesting to me because he was arguably the first transhumanist. The book talks about controlling the climate to end famine, using wind energy to free coal miners from their labour, the physical resurrection of the dead, the settlement of space.
Advanced Automation for Space Missions by Robert Freitas. An instruction manual and bill of materials on how to build a self-replicating factory on the Moon.
⭐️ A City on Mars by Zach and Kelly Weinersmith. On the difficulty of settling space. Very entertainingly written. About half the book is about technical aspects: the health effects of microgravity, the fact that there’s no carbon and little water on the moon, etc. A lot of this is stuff that as a space nerd you think about from time to time (“why does nobody mention that we have no idea if embryos can develop in less than 1g?”) but it’s nice to see all of it articulated, end-to-end. I tend to agree that, without a lot of transhumantech, space settlement is an absurd idea.
Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum. Weizenbaum was a critic of AI when AI was just Eliza and SHRDLU. I wonder what he would make of LLMs. It’s an interesting critique of, in a sense, the self-domestication of humanity.
Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall. An encyclopedia and history of the ideas that led to the Great Stagnation. I expected also that the flying car think would just be a hook, but actually a lot of the book is about the physics and engineering and human factors and societal factors of flying cars. Which was interesting. I kind of want to own a gyroplane now.
Textbooks
Handbook of Practical Logic and Automated Reasoning by John Harrison. If you’re a programmer and want to learn logic, this is a great choice. It’s a learn-by-coding approach, which logic is especially suited for, so you can play with the concepts “in your hands”, so to speak.
Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang. I read some of it earlier this year while consulting for Iceberg. It’s very good. It has enough material that I rarely needed to consult other textbooks or reference information, and it’s a good, gentle introduction to the subject with an appropriate level of rigor.
The Machinery of Life by David Goodsell. Beautiful illustrations that convey the scale and complexity of biology at the nanoscale. Great for developing intuition for biology.
Understanding Data: A 21st Century Approach to Statistics and Data Science by Alan Garfinkel and Yina Guo. A modern introduction to statistics. The basic idea is a lot of contemporary statistics (and science, as a result) is bad because it relies on simple formulas which require maintaining easily-broken invariants. This was useful in the 1930’s when all you had was a slide-rule, and so you needed to use deductive cleverness to simplify your calculations as much as possible. Other methods are more robust, but more computationally invensive. Since today we have computers, we should use those methods.
Molecular Neuropharmacology: A Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience by Nestler et al. The basics of pharmacology and signal processing in the brain, plus the neuroanatomy and physiology of things like sleep, attention, etc.