100 books like The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

For me speculative fiction is about twisting one aspect of the real world, and then playing with the consequences. I love the way that Philip K Dick does this.

Some of his ideas seem absurd, but as a reader you quickly buy into them. This is not a traditional crime novel in any sense, but is about a bounty hunter tracking down escaped androids. As he confronts questions about his own humanity, it raises ethical issues for the reader as to what it is to be human.

Like all Dick’s works it is clever, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

Annie Dillard joins Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as my favorite “nature writers.” Annie is pithy, often wry, insisting that we notice and guiding us with her own noticing.

A classic quote: “In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that… No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.”

I love stories that are many things at the same time. They can open a person up to a wider perspective, a greater awareness; that’s the kind of story I love to write. Kafka’s stories can be considered as absurd allegory, as surreal evocations of mystery and magic, as psychological study, as satire, as dark comedy… as all of these and more at once. Many of Kafka’s stories were considered by the author to be unfinished but to me they seem complete. Kafka famously tried to ‘finish’ all of his stories once and for all by instructing his friend to destroy them after his death. Thankfully, he was prevented from adding that final full stop.

Long ago, I watched a dream of a movie called Street of Crocodiles by the Quay Brothers. It was based on a story by someone called Bruno Schulz. I bought the book. Though there are only two Bruno Schulz books, it is as if there are a thousand Bruno Schulz books hidden between their words. His stories are often unable to contain themselves and his writing bursts out into reverie. Shot dead by a Nazi officer at the age of fifty, his writing displays a sensitivity that is the antithesis of something as brutal as firing a bullet into a human being. He creates a mood of receptivity. You may find the world more magical, wonderful, and deep after reading Bruno Schulz.

Discovering the art of Alejandro Jodorowsky helped me to remove limitations from my own art. It was a joy to discover his work and it was a further joy to discover that his life has been just as uncompromising, surreal, and magical as his art. He has hung out with circus people, shamans, great artists (Marcel Marceau, Leonora Carrington, Jean Giraud… the list goes on). His novels, autobiographies, comic books, movies, and pictures are all fantastic. 

There’s no end of books out there on mindfulness and meditation. What I love about meditation teacher, writer, and thinker Sebene Selassie’s book is how funny, personal, awkward, and honest she is about her journey. Each chapter delivers a new perspective on how you—how we all—are connected, how disconnection is at the core of our suffering, and how the one way to get back to a sense of belonging is through the body, the breath, and presence. Selassie is that friend who gently leads you to look inward and understand the power and joy of connection.  

Published in 1980, Hejinian’s breakthrough book of poetry asks for your full attention—not in a demanding way—more like how the aroma of coffee or perfume softly takes you back to your past. It’s a poetic record of her life, year by year. There’s no linear narrative, rather the sentences build upon each other, rub up against the next sentence, lead the mind from one thought to the next like memories do. This book absolutely changed the way I perceive. It allowed me to relax, and let my memories wash in and out. It will coax you to float in the ocean of your existence. 

Unlike Hejinian’s book, this one demands your attention, almost obnoxiously. It’s strange, confusing, tough, but worth it. If you can let your mind enter into it fully, you may miss subway stops like I did while reading it. As Neuromancer was for cyberspace, Accelerando is the game changer for transhumanism—the philosophical movement claiming we will soon have the ability to escape our bodies as information. Science fiction requires extraordinary world-building, but Stross creates an entirely new universe in a series of interconnected stories about three generations of the Macx family before and after the Singularity. Characters download themselves and re-manifest, there’s an evil sentient scam called The Slug, and a mass of uploaded lobster brain scans is floating in space demanding amnesty. It’s a trip.

I reread Fire regularly because I love the heroine, Fire, and her conundrum: how can she love herself when her beauty is so destructive, when it inspires such terrible behavior in the people around her? We think of beauty as an asset, sure that we would be happier, more confident, more liked if we were more beautiful, and Cashore explores the limits of beauty in this novel. She also digs deep into a very problematic father/daughter relationship as Fire deals with the lessons her father, Cansrel, taught her about how to use her beauty for power, and decides to forge her own path. Like so many of these hard family relationships, Fire must reconcile her love for her father and her hatred of what he’s become. 

In the wake of Senate hearings into CIA scandals in the mid-1970s, former State Department official turned investigative reporter Marks used an FOIA request to gain access to a trove of agency files that he used to uncover the full story of the American intelligence community’s decade-long dive into research on LSD, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation during the first decade of the Cold war.

A marvelous example of how to uncover “secret history.” I also love the connections he draws between Fifties’ era mind control research and Sixties' era consciousness expansion.