

Grok This: Forget The Business Books, Go Sci-Fi To Stoke Your Imagination - blackswan
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/05/grok-this-forget-the-business-books-go-sci-fi-to-stoke-your-imagination/

======
BobbyH
I love sci-fi, but rather than recommend "sci-fi" books, I would recommend
"speculative fiction" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_fiction>),
which is "a fiction genre speculating about worlds that are unlike the real
world in various important ways".

Good sci-fi is speculative fiction, but bad sci-fi is just "a story told in a
sci-fi setting".

This is a good way of distinguishing between Dune by Frank Herbert (which
speculates about many things, including the kind of universe that exists after
a computer AI suppresses the human race and is then overthrown) and Hunters of
Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, which is a crap book that
speculates about very little in a sci-fi setting.

If you think about it, starting a company that makes a new product is
basically speculating about a world that is unlike our current world because
of your product! Also, you should be speculating about how other technologies
and products will affect our world, so you can adapt your company before it
becomes extinct...

------
mcu
I had this thought a few months ago. I decided to read every Nebula / Hugo
winner. I would also add, listening to good comedy albums and playing board /
video games often.

I worked at a company where the President loved, Loved, LOVED pop business
books. He hopped on every trend, told Seth Godin's stories as if they were his
own (has a purple cow w\ the company logo, etc), and even tried to create a
style of management based on Survivor.

When "seeking" knowledge he looked away from rigorous research and observation
to the Amazon top lists.

I've never seen unhappier employees.

~~~
amichail
Do you really need to read entire sci-fi novels to extract whatever cool ideas
they may have? In terms of getting ideas for startups, 99% of a novel is
probably irrelevant and it might be better to have a resource that just gives
you the 1% that matters.

~~~
mcu
You, my friend, have completely missed the point.

Any given idea in sci-fi (are they going to make us refer to it as syfy now?)
may or may not be particularly useful in and of itself. Most ideas is sci-fi
are completely impractical anyway, so why fret about it?

Art / literature / music / what have you are not resources that can be mined.
You can't freebase Heinlein (though I like the thought) or take a bump of
Ernst.

Follow your interests, experience works as a whole, and don't expect to be
changed.

I would argue that the difference between sci-fi and pop business is that few
people truly enjoy business books (not to mention the fact that most business
books have a shelf-life of 12 minutes.)

They read them because they believe that they will put them on the path to,
well, I don't know what. True there's wisdom to be had out there, but, you
usually can't buy it for $19.99+S/H, regardless of genre.

You can read "Time Enough For Love" or just the "Notebooks of Lazarus Long."

You can drink wine with your friends or dash your brains out with 190-proof
Everclear.

The value is in the experience, not the proof.

1) Live life.

2) Don't be a douche.

3) Stop thinking about money.

4) Be genuinely interested in what you do.

5) Profit.

~~~
mcu
<http://www.bobgod.com/lazaruslong.html>

"Yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again."

------
endtime
I've read about half that list, and half of what remains is on my list. But
it's a pity Charles Stross's Accelerando isn't on there. You can read it
online for free here: <http://www.accelerando.org/book/>.

~~~
jodrellblank
Don't, though, it will just make you miserable.

(Do, but be prepared for a very dystopian and worryingly likely feeling
future)

~~~
dejb
Miserable? It had the opposition effect on me. I found it inspiring. What a
fantastic future if we can develop that sort of technology. Of course a novel
has to have a few things go wrong to make a compelling story but I don't see
them as being inherent in the possibilities being presented.

~~~
endtime
I'm just looking forward to conversations with sentient networks of Russian
lobster brains.

------
swombat
There are countless books that could go on this list, but you have to start
somewhere. This is a good place to start. The books on this list are all worth
reading, though I'm sorry to say that I found that the Foundation Trilogy had
aged really badly :-( I'm glad I read it 3 times as a child, because I doubt
I'll be reading it again...

I'd add a couple of modern authors to the list. Vernor Vinge has been
mentioned. Another interesting one is Charles Stross (I recently came out of
reading Accelerando... full of interesting ideas). I found Paulo Di Filippo's
short stories generally great too.

Ultimately, you have to make your own list, from your own personal tastes and
journeys. This is definitely a good starting point, though (at least as far as
Science Fiction is concerned).

~~~
biotech
I'm curious why you think the Foundation Trilogy aged badly? I recently re-
read Foundation; it's still one of my favorites. It takes a completely unique
perspective on the future of human civilization.

~~~
swombat
Well, it was my impression. It seemed to me that the language and concepts
seemed really _old_ , in a way that furiously contradicted its sci-fi
nature... When I read Dickens, for example, I don't get a feeling that its
thinking is old-fashioned. Although written centuries ago, the thoughts are
still fresh and powerful.

When I last re-read parts of the Foundation series (I didn't get through the
whole of it), there were so many things there which seemed... passé. Part of
it was the language, and part of it was, I guess, the technology.

I think this is the curse of science fiction. Because it gambles on predicting
the future, and predicting the future is so damn hard, it invariably diverges
from the real future more and more as time passes. And the more it diverges,
the more the science seems pointless and outdated.

I shudder to think how "hard sf" novels like "Red Mars" will read in 30 years,
when another bunch of major technological revolutions will have come to
pass...

~~~
jerf
I think what you're sensing is that curious aspect of science fiction before
the mid-1980s, which is the near-complete absence of computers. I say "near-
complete" because computers often still showed up in some token, simple role
of administration or navigation, but the general-purpose networked computer as
suited to 3D-gaming as it is to wordprocessing as it is to video-conferencing
with someone on the other side of the world, all of that in a device that fits
in hand, with the associated social changes, is missing from sci-fi until sci-
fi authors started to get a sense of just how far Moore's law was going to go.

(And I don't mean to imply that's the endpoint of electronic development
either, it's just something I can definitively say that the future, that is,
"now", definitively already possesses.)

Now hard sci-fi faces the other side, which is that there's no evidence that
it's going to stop before completely rewriting the universe as we know it (see
endtime's link to Accelerando).

Asimov lived long enough to ret-con a sort of explanation in, as I understand
it ("Robots suppressed computers!", although that still preserves the weird
way in which robots were invented long before computers in his universe which
makes no sense at all), but the lack of computers is still shot through his
fiction and all fiction of that era, with just a few fragmentary exceptions
here and there.

~~~
njharman
> curious aspect of science fiction before the mid-1980s,

Star Trek TOS had computers galore. Tricorders, medical bays, the ships main
talking computer, I'd argue all those screens and buttons and that thingy
Spock looked into were all computers. Not to mention all the computer
antagonists and various backdrop pieces.

They also had cell phones.

~~~
jerf
True, and Star Trek was broadly ahead of the game on that front.

But go back and watch some of the episodes; it's still thin compared to the
reality of today, let alone the reality of the future. Communicators that are
like cell phones, sure, except that they _only_ do voice transmission. My
real-life cell phone is more powerful than my first couple of computers and
has the apps to boot... and I have a piece of crap generic cheap cell phone,
not even an iPhone. Talking computers that get asked very simple questions and
are "working" for several loud seconds. No computer graphical enhancement of
anything on the viewscreen (until the movies). Mainframes that generally need
to be walked up to and used. The feel of the tech is very different.

Please understand I'm not complaining. This is one place where Star Trek has a
legitimate claim to being ahead of the curve (although they pretty much jammed
in that one spot and are now way behind) and I tend to be down on Star Trek at
this point as my parenthetical shows; my point is that even so, the computers
aren't as well integrated into people's lives as they are even today.
Obviously, in the 1960s the special effects technology wouldn't have been
there even if a time traveler from the real-life 21st century came back and
tried to do it right with local tech and on a budget.

------
clay
Usually saying "that list was missing X" type stuff is pretty silly, but with
a title like that, that list seriously needs some Verner Vinge.

~~~
jlees
Well, since others are doing it: William Gibson.

~~~
juliend2
which one of his books do you particularly recommend?

~~~
jlees
I'd actually recommend Pattern Recognition. Neuromancer's good, too, but
there's something about PR that's very real.

------
jgilliam
Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" was very influential with
me.

<http://craphound.com/down/download.php>

------
azharcs
I really think "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card should have been on that
list of Sci-Fi Books.

~~~
sofal
"Ender's Game" is like the Harry Potter of the sci-fi genre. It's good
adolescent reading, but I prefer more sophisticated science fiction; like
Vernor Vinge, for instance.

------
njharman
Does anyone else hate Stranger in a Strange Land, and Robert Heinlein in
general?

I find that whole era/style of sci-fi silly, dated, and Heinlein in particular
to be a chauvinist pig. These writers, many of them (wannabe)scientists,
believed in and wrote about scientist super men. Lone men(always men) of bulky
IQ and suave manners. Who save the world/universe/multiverse/timeline/whatever
and get a girl as reward in the end.

Basically whatever would appeal(read sell books) to pubescent teenage nerds
and adults who never grew out of that phase.

------
rms
Props to Doctorow's Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom.

The other freely available (this one under copyright) great post-singularity
work of sci-fi is The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
<http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html>

------
sketerpot
I'd like to recommend "Startide Rising" and "The Uplift War", by David Brin.
Aside from being very enjoyable books, they're a big source of new ideas --
these books singlehandedly made me appreciate the goals of the Internet
Archive.

Also, I've never understood the popularity of "Stranger in a Strange Land".
I've always been a big Heinlein fan, but Stranger in a Strange Land always
struck me as a book that _was_ important and shocking and ground-breaking once
upon a time.

------
trefn
I am especially fond of near-future scifi. Reading Stross, Stephenson, and
Vinge always leaves me with a feeling of wonder - their novels are brimming
with technological & sociological insight.

Often a novel is a thought experiment. If you read Vernor Vinge's _Rainbows
End_, you will find a plausible and well thought out speculation on wearable
computing. This is the kind of thinking we have to do in a startup - we take
the current state of things and extrapolate.

------
DannoHung
The only problem is that after you read enough of them, you're spoiled on
ideas. Oh, a culture where money is irrelevant and people can have backups of
their brain and do completely stupid things without risk? How trite.

I am, literally, at the point where I don't even get a rise out of any book
unless it's humorous. And Douglas Adams is dead.

------
Eliezer
Peter F. Hamilton. Marc Stiegler. Vernor Vinge _obviously_ , who is he even
kidding?

------
andymoe
I would have to add "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

~~~
shaunxcode
The Dispossessed (same author/universe) always gets my juices flowing when I
start considering developing software for managing vastly complex systems
(i.e. society). I especially enjoy how she confronts the issues, blatant and
subtle, which would arise from such systems.

------
ccarpenterg
Recently I've been playing some games on PlayStation and Wii to help myself
brainstorming ideas for my ui. It's a source for inspiration especially for
visualization.

~~~
utku_karatas
Finally an acceptable excuse for some extensive procrastination! Thank you ;)

~~~
ccarpenterg
Unfortunately I can't say the same about my nicotine addiction! ;)

------
nazgulnarsil
here is a reasonable list for someone who actually reads a lot of books. this
is a list weighted by voting, critical reception, and awards
[http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_books...](http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_books_rank1.html)

------
kwamenum86
Philip K. Dick has some great SciFi works as well. Any of his short story
compilations are great reads.

------
sho
I would like to register my strongest possible endorsement of the article's
mention of Iain M. Bank's _Culture_ series. Since discovering them a few years
ago, I have basically been obsessed with them, to the point of sort-of
beginning to believe that the greatest possible mission in life is to work
towards bringing about the soonest possible advent of a Culture-type society,
any enabling technology, any small step.

------
c00p3r
Anime (as an art) is a delicious food for imagination.

And in general, an art of faraway countries, even movies and translated books
is a very big deal.

