Fans pick 100 books like Bandwidth

When I closed this book, I set it down and said, “Wow.” I really enjoy reading science books—the ones written for non-scientific folks like me…books by Michio Kaku and Brian Greene—and this one combines my love of thrillers and science in a fantastic way. Jason Dessen is kidnapped and begins a long journey to return home, but to do so, he visits many alternate versions of Chicago.

As every chapter ended, I wanted to continue reading to find out what happened to Jason and his family, to see some new version of Chicago, and to see how or if Jason succeeded. The novel kept surprising me, and Crouch played with the implications of some wild physics concepts.

I really like this book because it's a thrilling tech story that gets you thinking about how technology might change our world. The book made me realize how powerful and risky AI can be. I love how fast-paced the story is and how it makes you consider issues of control and freedom.

The way the author talks about technology and its effects on people really got me thinking. The book makes you wonder about how society and technology come together, and it's interesting.

The oldest book on the list, Lucifer’s Hammer seems to be an end-of-the-world tale. And it is to a degree: the world is forever altered after a comet enters the earth’s atmosphere and breaks apart, the huge pieces slamming into the West Coast.

It’s the aftermath, though, where things get interesting. How do people survive? How much of their humanity survives with them? This is the story Niven and Pournelle tell, with a level of realism that echoes people’s attitudes and actions witnessed during the COVID pandemic.

With a clash between rival forces leading to a showdown that dictates the survivors’ future, Lucifer’s Hammer has continued to resonate with me years after reading it.

To me, Crichton’s strength was taking scientific knowledge/achievements and crafting stories that showed how they could impact us.

Yes, he took those to extremes (DNA sequencing to create dinosaurs, robots that revolt against their human masters, and so), but that’s the job of a writer. Prey is not his best-known work but is mesmerizing in terms of the type of future that could exist. His story uses a mix of swarm technology, biology, and AI to craft a cautionary tale, with a main character who has to fight to save his loved one.

Crichton uses biology as part of his support for how his future could take place, with implications that I think few consider as we develop more sophisticated technology. A scary future indeed.

By exploring today’s rapidly changing world, Friedman helps you take a step back and consider how we might be able to live life at a reasonable pace. Thank You For Being Late serves as a guide for how to respond to the speed of change around us. By understanding how the world is changing through the possibilities and dangers of Moore’s Law (technology and the internet), the Market (globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change), Friedman encourages us to consider our own adaptability. Rather than complaining and being static as individuals, Friedman suggests we need to embrace change and look at what is in our control to adapt, learn, look forward and still achieve what we want to.

For my final choice, I recommend a work of fiction that made me think deeply about the future of money, markets, institutions, and society. I started reading Ari Juels’ book out of polite interest since I met him, and I can personally testify to his smartness and niceness.

Once I started reading it, however, I couldn’t put it down! It’s a very well-crafted story that draws the reader into the world of blockchains and digital assets with, I thought, very human and believable characters. I can tell you firsthand that trying to write a novel about the future of money is incredibly difficult—I’ve tried! I take my hat off to him for this excellent work, which I hope will cause more people to take the future of money and all it implies more seriously. 

This book completely changed how I thought about the technology that surrounds us, the electric grid, assembly line production, the military-industrial complex, and on and on.

I grew up at the end of the time period Hughes writes about when all these huge technological systems were in place. I didn’t give them a thought. They were like the air we breathe. But they were created during this century, and it was amazing to read about this transformation of our world.

Reading this book, for me, was like learning to see the world I live in anew, to feel the air we breathe.

This is a breathtaking exploration of how ideas of time and space changed between the 1880s and World War I. Stephen Kern’s mastery of all genres of the arts and literature and throughout the Western world—Europe, Russia, and the US—is beyond belief. No matter who is your favorite intellectual of this era, s/he is right in the narrative. We learn of the massive changes in culture that we owe to this momentous period of time, changes that are still very much with us today.

This book is all about Macaulay's incredible draftsmanship, almost like Leonardo Davinci's.

It's full of wit and wisdom and has had to be constantly revised as new technologies emerge (I don't think we had VR Goggles in 1988). So, it's a bit like science itself.

Bell, one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century, argues that having the right culture is essential for capitalism (or any other economic or political system) to flourish – and I certainly agree. But he goes further: he worries that over time the economic gains that capitalism delivers end up undermining the cultural conditions that allow capitalism to flourish in the first place. His book is about the role of culture more broadly, not religion in particular, but religion certainly fits within the overall argument.