For twenty years, I have worked with the data dungeons of large corporations. A synergy of people, systems, and IT. An organism that no one designed but grew haphazardly over the years. A cybernetic system. I have been a database admin, analyst, and data visualizer, and most recently, I was employed as a data scientist for a large Fortune 500 corporation. There, I am currently researching how to use large language models and which business questions can tolerate the fuzzy answers and hallucinations they bring. Despite loving these mindbenders, most of my writing features strong themes of Exploration, Technology, and Optimism (ETO).
This artificial therapy company is so good you’ll never log off (and won’t notice the ads.)
This book is a near-future science fiction about ideas you will see in your lifetime: brainwave reading, synthetic ads personalized to your brain, digital addictions delivered via phishing scams, small nation states doing banned AI research, weaponised disinformation, and more. Technical evolution is at work, but who or what benefits remains to be seen. This is big idea sci-fi pondering the fate of humanity in the grips of super emotive AI.
Personally, it cemented my idea that I wasn’t the crazy one. Society was doing insane things. Many things in our times made little sense when examined. Take the twenty years of wars in the Middle East. We gave weapons to the Afghanis, then we attacked them. We gave arms to the Iraqis; then we fought them twice!
Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?
And to top it off, the Department of Defense was once called the Department of War! Man-made institutions in our society deliver the opposite of their stated goal. Mass surveillance, memory hole, thought crimes, doublethink. This novel is full of things we see in our lifetime. Also, the recent invention of ChatGPT is literally ‘averaging’ the language into Newspeak. Read it again with fresh eyes!
1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates. In Oceania, the Party's power is absolute. Every action, word, gesture and thought is monitored under the watchful eye of Big Brother and the Thought Police. In the Ministry of Truth, the Party's department for propaganda, Winston Smith's job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine and live independently takes hold of him and he embarks on a secret and forbidden love affair. As he writes the words 'DOWN WITH BIG…
In a list of brain benders, PKD had to be on the list. Though he has written better ones, I felt like this was as tight of a novel as you will get from Phillip K. Dick. It details the unfortunate madness we all suffer internally, of a mind trying to do what is ‘right’ even though the system (and another part of themselves) are rigged against them. Of the good and virtuous person getting dragged into the mud by chaos.
I liked this one mainly for the ending, which was dark but still made so much sense. Also, the surreal humor, descriptions, and internal dialog. Oh, and the bugs.
A brilliant sci-fi novel from one of the last century's most influential pop culture figures
Substance D - otherwise known as Death - is the most dangerous drug ever to find its way on to the black market. It destroys the links between the brain's two hemispheres, leading first to disorentation and then to complete and irreversible brain damage. Bob Arctor, undercover narcotics agent, is trying to find a lead to the source of supply, but to pass as an addict he must become a user, and soon, without knowing what is happening to him, he is as dependent as…
This book is my favorite indie sci-fi novel. It starts with a broken and jumpy storyline that coalesces inwardly as the characters fight a cataclysmic horror. The premise is there are ideas, like those randomly generated passwords, that are simply very hard for a person to remember.
I read this during the COVID craziness. It was precisely why I write, as an escape from the media trying to drag you down with infinite worry. Rest, relax, and enjoy a fun story of someone else’s trials.
This is indie sci-fi at its best. It was a major inspiration and may have gotten a nod in my novel (I can’t remember.) What is great is that the second read-through differed from the first but was still just as enjoyable.
For a novel on the list, I have only read once, and a long time ago, I still keep thinking about this. It asks: Can we learn about the universe without first learning about ourselves?
It also goes into the limits of science. There are simply things science cannot tell us. The planet’s colloid sea is nonlinear, the math unsolvable, and the alien is potentially hostile. I choose to believe the planet is attempting to heal some deep-forgotten hurt of the narrator. What is the purpose of bringing up a disastrous relationship? To heal or learn? Or perhaps the alien is simply toying with them?
I read it soon after changing my life's trajectory and attempting to be more peaceful, creative, contemplative, and less frantic or consumptive. I need to read this again.
When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface he is forced to confront a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others suffer from the same affliction and speculation rises among scientists that the Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates incarnate memories, but its purpose in doing so remains a mystery . . .
Solaris raises a question that has been at the heart of human experience and literature for centuries: can we truly understand the universe around us without first understanding what…
I loved this book for its wild story. It has three main sections, and each of them has its own delight. It covers so many transhuman topics. From orphanogensis, the creation of a new mind in a digital world, to multiple nested universes, each section amazed me.
Not as mindbending as the others, in the sense of not being able to trust your own data, this book scratched the itch I had after The Three-Body Problem. Virtual Realities, interstellar topics, the future of man, and the possibilities for which consciousness expands into the universe and those who do not are left in peace (mostly.)
The author inspired me to keep writing simply because I know there is a market for high-concept hard science fiction.
A quantum Brave New World from the boldest and most wildly speculative writer of his generation. "Greg Egan is perhaps the most important SF writer in the world."-Science Fiction Weekly "One of the very best "-Locus. "Science fiction with an emphasis on science."-New York Times Book Review
Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive…
I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie’s aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program.
Stefan promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his story, has grown sympathetic to his cause and complicit in his pushback against prejudiced accusations. Their mutual attraction is stymied when Stefan’s older brother, Joachim, who stayed behind, becomes embroiled in the resistance, and Stefan is compelled to return to Canada. Sadie, concerned for his safety, impulsively follows on a trajectory doomed by cultural misunderstanding and oncoming winter.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through the pitfalls of young adulthood. Hundreds of miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are forced off their land by multinational energy companies and flawed treaties. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie's aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program. Stefan, whose own father died in prison while on a hunger strike, promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his…
