100 books like Versality

The late American master sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, or just PKD, wrote 44 novels and some 121 short stories. Even if you have never read one of them, you’ve seen the many movies and TV Series based on them.

This novella was the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s classic movie Blade Runner (the original). Like the movie, it portrays sci-fi as the mirror opposite of the bright Star Trekian sci-fi. Here we get cyberpunk (or tech-noir)—ubiquitous neon lights barely illuminate the dark shadows of this future world.

Mankind has been forced off-world, but those who remain on Earth collect any living creature. Those who can’t afford them can buy them from companies who create animals so realistic they are indistinguishable from the real thing–horses, birds, cats, and…sheep. But these companies can build humans, too. Earth bans these “replicants,” and our protagonist, Rick Deckard, is a bounty hunter commissioned to hunt… show more.

I’m going old-school, back to one of the grandfathers of science fiction, Robert Heinlein.

Not only is his book a masterful example of character-driven storytelling, but it takes a critical eye to many of the things our current society takes for granted as being “true” and “right,” finding them wanting. It’s also been a huge influence on me in my writing, as have many of Heinlein’s other works, and I couldn’t not put it in here.

This collection of robot-themed short stories is the overspill from Asimov’s more famous I, Robot, but I think it contains some of his better ones. It includes Satisfaction Guaranteed, which provided part of the inspiration for my book. Key to the book’s appeal to me when I first read it as a teenager was the way several of the stories show the human side of steely spinster robopsychologist Dr. Susan Calvin. I wanted to be her at age 14! My persistent favourite was Asimov’s favourite too, Galley Slave, about a proofreading robot; perhaps the reason for both of us is because it so obviously draws on his insider knowledge of book production.

This book attracted my attention when it was new and I was a teenager, although I only actually read it many years later; the female roboticist central character with a hint of impetuosity and romance appeared to offer an alternative role model to Isaac Asimov’s Susan Calvin. Sheila MacLeod is a literary author, not a regular SF author, and she imagines a mildly dystopic near-future in which humanoid robots are being taught to have sensibilities by reading romantic literature, from the great to the trashy. I was both intrigued and amused by her portrayal of how a machine mind might relate to such literature, and how such machines might conduct themselves when they become more empowered in their personal choices.

A fantastic, non-techy read that cuts through the AI fear-mongering in a way that is both hopeful and practical. 

The authors work well together to craft a story of how we arrived at this point in time, where our ever-evolving research could lead us, and the practical solutions needed to enable us to move forward in a world governed by the complex and rapidly changing landscape of AI.

This was the first book I read that brought the concept of artificial intelligence to my attention. The staggering amount of property damage that these massive war machines are capable of redefined my understanding of battlefield carnage. Laumer’s insightful portrayal of what AI can be still holds up today. I really like the way these machines are imagined; they are so very human.

This book seems a bit strange at first, when the story begins with Moon-Watcher, the leader of a tribe of early ape-man, who struggles for survival during the brutal Pleistocene ice age. After an alien monolith appears, it seems to advance the way he thinks, leading him to develop crude weapons. When the same monolith is discovered in the future, we seem fated to find the answers behind the eerie structure. Skipping to a team of astronauts who travel aboard a ship to further investigate, things take an unexpected turn when the ship’s A.I. called HAL-9000, gets very confused about keeping secrets. Something about the way it remains so polite while it deceives the crew, is enough to give anyone a nightmare.

This book provides a good introduction to the current state of machine intelligence through interviews with many leading practitioners including Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Stuart Russell, and Demis Hassabis (DeepMind). You will get a sense of both of AI’s recent accomplishments and how far it falls short of full human intelligence.

Technology is always moving on. And so it should be forgiven the author that many of the concrete examples in this book are now somewhat dated. They provide some interesting insight into the history of computing and media technology, but the real value of Roszak’s argument lies in his analysis of how—thanks to computer technology—society has become obsessed with “information”. It’s almost a cult. But information is not knowledge, data does not in itself provide understanding. In fact, in a peculiarly paradoxical way, the more information we have, the less we actually know. Thirty years later, as we swim daily in the disinformation of the murky waters of social media and disappear down Youtube rabbit holes, Roszak’s point seems more pertinent than ever.

The dystopia in Bash Bash Revolution is a bit closer to reality than the others on this list: it’s set specifically in 2017, but in a world pushed far closer to the brink of nuclear war than ours, with a much more psychotic version of Donald Trump in charge. Main character Matthew Munson’s mad programmer of a father creates an AI that might save the world from its own destruction, but only by locking every person into a solipsistic nightmare run on video game technology. In a way this book is about choosing between an apocalypse and a dystopia, which is something you don’t see very often.