Here are 100 books that The Origin of Birds in the Footprints of Writing fans have personally recommended if you like
The Origin of Birds in the Footprints of Writing.
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I’ve always loved science fiction because it offers a hope, a dream, or a future that we just haven't seen yet. When I write my stories, I feel there is no better use of my imagination, than to contemplate a new world, a new civilization, or future technology. At the same time, I hope to entertain readers and spark young imaginations. Inside Modified, I reached into a distant future with off-world colonies that float in the clouds of Venus, while robots toil on the planet’s surface. Of course, in such a future, when advanced modifications and recursive designs are used, leads one to wonder if my robot can love too.
It’s science fiction writers like Carol Emshwiller that must be mentioned here, especially when she writes about Ruthie and Joe, who own a robot whom they call the “grey-green” thing, the hound, the Rover, or sometimes just “bitch”. In order to increase their chances for a successful hunt, Joe programs the robot to track a bear, and it does so with ease. Eventually Joe commands the “grey-green thing” to actually kill it, and the robot carries out its deadly mission. At the end you shudder at the thought of the careless use of the machine, not to mention what would happen if the “grey-green thing” had been programmed to kill a human being.
Crossing the boundaries between fabulist literature, science fiction, and magical realism, the stories in this collection offer a valuable glimpse into the evolution of Carol Emshwiller’s ideas and style during her more than 50-year career. Influenced by J. G. Ballard, Steven Millhauser, Philip K. Dick, and Lydia Davis, Emshwiller has a range of works that is impressive and demonstrates her refusal to be labeled or to stick to one genre. This exhilarating new collection marks the first time many of the early stories have been published in book form and is evidence of the genius of Emshwiller, one of America’s…
As a kid, I loved fantasy; it was my escape from real life. Portal Fantasy is one of the oldest sub-genres in that regard, with works such as Wizard of Oz, Through the Looking Glass, and Chronicles of Narnia, to name a few. LitRPG is a newer genre, though its roots extend back to the 80s. Fantasy is full of magical worlds that embrace the reader’s mind, allowing them to live beyond their own life. I have experienced what it is like to fall in love countless times, to fly a ship through the sky using magic and swordfight, and to die and be reborn. Through these stories, I have lived.
I know many people seem to like his other series more, but this is one that actually grabbed me. An AI intelligence being sent back to the past, only its one that has magic. I mean come on, how fun does that premise sound? It uses a fairly traditional LitRPG setup, but there is nothing wrong with that in the slightest.
I do have a few nitpicks with the story, but they can be explained away with magic more than anything else.
After tragically losing the only person he ever cared about, Alexander, a rogue artificial intelligence, opens a portal to an alternate dimension to escape his grief.
Scanning trillions of different dimensions, Alexander finally finds a world that is reminiscent of the only time he was ever happy, back when he could play virtual reality games with his only friend. He doesn't know why, or how, such a world exists, but he doesn't care. All he cares about is finding a place where he can escape the misery of Earth and start over.…
I’ve been a huge fan of D&D and RPG games since I’ve been old enough to play them. The idea of grooming a character, growing it in terms of strength and levels until it becomes powerful enough to take on gods always captured my imagination. LitRPG is a relatively new book genre, and reading it (the good ones at least) makes you feel like you’re playing those games yourselves. Following a new protagonist growth and journey, often illustrated by actual numeric values you can easily keep track of (like skills and levels) is so much fun, and I think more people should be aware it exists.
An excellent Litrpg sci-fi series. The protagonist goes out beyond earth to discover new races and worlds, slowly gain power, and unearth the secret of the ancient race that started it all. He’s just a human, but he’ll change the galaxy in his quest for knowledge.
The best scfi-fi litrpg in my opinion, the character growth is very visible and keeps you glued to the pages as the protagonist struggle to raise himself. Through his eyes, I got to experience unearthing ancient, hidden cultures, find ancient relics, and uncover galactic-wide schemes that blew my mind away.
An Artificial Intelligence, LitRPG, Cyberpunk adventure.
The Earth is changing. The alien invasion brought social upheaval, advanced technology, and an armada of peacekeeping robots. But Alan, a college student pursuing a now-useless degree, cares little about all of this. He has only one thing on his mind: the Game.
A fully immersive virtual reality, the Game appears to be a major part of the invading civilization. Alan can't wait to play, recklessly diving into the digital universe. Soon though, Alan realizes the Game is anything but simple, and the stakes are higher than he ever imagined.
I am an African Australian writer and have a deep passion for black people's stories. I write across genres and forms, and my award-winning works are mostly Afrocentric. I have a master's degree in distributed computer systems, with distinction, a master's degree in creative writing, and a PhD in creative writing. I am especially curious about unique voices in black speculative fiction in transformative stories of culture, diversity, climate change, writing the other, and betwixt. I am an author of several novels and fiction collections, and a finalist in the 2022 World Fantasy Award. I was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’.
This Nommo-award-winning collection is experiential in its offerings of literary fragments yet bold and playful—a clean taste of Wole Talabi’s creativity and curiosity on genre and reimagining a future Africa. Talabi is unlike your typical short story writer, if there’s ever one. His stories are sharp, brisk, hauling the reader to mindful captivation. The collection is a transcultural odyssey into Yoruba mythology in stories of logic, illogic, the known and unknown, relationship and fallout, trust and betrayal, transposition, exposition, and much escapade. Virtual reality has a role here, as do gods and goddesses, victors, and survivors. Incomplete Solutions is a cross-genre degustation of possibilities and impossibilities that deconstruct the reader’s mindset.
An elderly woman in early 22nd century Lagos is called in to help test the artificial intelligence built from her genius mother’s mind, but all is not as it seems in the Nommo-award winning story, “The Regression Test”.
Exiled from Earth for a crime of passion, a young man must learn to survive a barely habitable prison planet and come to peace with his past in “Polaris”.
“Wednesday’s Story”, nominated for the 2018 Caine Prize, is at once a retelling of nursery rhymes and folklore and a meta-fictional meditation on the mechanics, art and power of storytelling.
Ever since I can remember I’ve been curious about history and how past events connect to our present; And how challenging it is to predict the future, even with all our advanced technologies. In the internet era, everything seems to be changing faster than ever before. I’m no expert, but I do know that if we don’t try to understand all the pieces of this complex puzzle, we’ll never be able to build the future we want. I don’t want to be left behind, so my book is an attempt at understanding the past and outlining a future of investing in people, the most undervalued asset class.
I love this book and try to reread it every couple of years.
This book doesn’t make any specific predictions about the future but instead identifies technological trends that are inevitable.
Trends like accessing, tracking, and sharing, just to name a few. I like to think of the future as an ever-evolving entity that we get to shape. Kelly explains how technology changes in patterns that we can anticipate.
If you feel like the increasing rate of technological change is getting too fast to keep up with, then I recommend reading—and rereading—The Inevitable.
“A quintessential work of technological futurism.” – James Surowiecki, strategy + business, “Best Business Books 2017 – Innovation”
From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the twelve technological imperatives that will shape the next thirty years and transform our lives
Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives—from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to…
In my teenage years, it was sci-fi (and later fantasy) comedies that made me fall in love with reading. There was just something about exploring worlds where anything could happen mixed with the joy of laughter that kept drawing me back in. Naturally, in the many...many...years that followed, I've read countless novels from a wide variety of genres, but sci-fi comedy will always hold a special place in my heart.
Is it even a list of sci-fi books if you don’t include a story with a rogue artificial intelligence? Sure, it’s not necessarily the funniestpremise, but when you throw in the fact that the A.I. in question has the mind of a six-year-old, the heroes trying to catch him are essentially his daycare providers, and the author is Scott Meyer, creator of the webcomic Basic Instructions and the Magic 2.0 series, and you’re sure to have a good time.
From the author of the popular Magic 2.0 series comes the witty tale of a mischievous A.I. gone rogue.
Al, a well-meaning but impish artificial intelligence, has the mind of a six-year-old and a penchant for tantrums. And the first one to discover just how much trouble Al could cause is Hope Takeda, the lab assistant in charge of educating and socializing him. Day care is a lot more difficult when your kid is an evolving and easily frightened A.I.
When Al manages to access the Internet and escape the lab days before his official unveiling, Hope and her team…
Software developers love to question the assumptions that underpin their practice. Some of the most exciting phases of my career have come about as a result of such questions. Often they are revolutionary in the literal sense that they ask you to turn your thinking upside down – to design systems from the bottom up rather than the top down, for example, or to write your tests before your components. I may not adopt every practice, but each challenge enriches the conceptual world in which I work. Over the years, I have come to look for similar shifts and inversions across other subject areas. Here are some recommendations from my reading.
As a coder and a lifelong SF reader, I am fascinated by AI. I've even written a LLM chat client named Shelley. Fascination, though, is not the same as uncritical fanboyism.
It is tempting to treat AI as a natural or magical apparition. Crawford's book turns this illusion on its head and explores AI literally from the ground up, beginning with its vast hunger for natural resources. She describes a similar hunger for training data as well as the implicit (or disguised) biases underlying the systems of classification that drive an AI's "understanding" of the world.
This is not a book about the future of AI so much as a particular map of the state of the project – a look into the wizard's booth. It offers an essential first step in considering what is to come and how we might negotiate it.
The hidden costs of artificial intelligence-from natural resources and labor to privacy, equality, and freedom
"This study argues that [artificial intelligence] is neither artificial nor particularly intelligent. . . . A fascinating history of the data on which machine-learning systems are trained."-New Yorker
"A valuable corrective to much of the hype surrounding AI and a useful instruction manual for the future."-John Thornhill, Financial Times
"It's a masterpiece, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it."-Karen Hao, senior editor, MIT Tech Review
What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our…
I’ve been a geeky kid all my life. (I don’t think I’ve quite grown up yet.) Born in the 1970s, my childhood was a wonderful playground of building robots and software. I was awarded one of the early degrees in AI, and a PhD in genetic algorithms. I’ve since spent 25 years exploring how to make computers think, build, invent, compose… and I’ve also spent 20 years writing popular science books. I’m lucky enough to be a Professor in one of the world’s best universities for Computer Science and Machine Learning: UCL, and I guess I’ve written two or three hundred scientific papers over the years. I still think I know nothing at all about real or artificial intelligence, but then does anyone?
I’ve not met Harry, but he seems to have a logical and sensible head on his shoulders. His writing is considered and grounded, which is exactly what you need when discussing the hype that forever seems to surround AI. This book is another look at this topic and finds yet more ways to explain to readers the difference between human intelligence and our algorithmic attempts at intelligence – which are frequently pretty stupid.
Recent startling successes in machine intelligence using a technique called 'deep learning' seem to blur the line between human and machine as never before. Are computers on the cusp of becoming so intelligent that they will render humans obsolete? Harry Collins argues we are getting ahead of ourselves, caught up in images of a fantastical future dreamt up in fictional portrayals. The greater present danger is that we lose sight of the very real limitations of artificial intelligence and readily enslave ourselves to stupid computers: the 'Surrender'.
By dissecting the intricacies of language use and meaning, Collins shows how far…
My passion for generative AI first ignited in 2016 when I spoke about it at a conference, and ever since then, I can’t stop! I've created an online course, a newsletter and even wrote a book to spread knowledge on this groundbreaking technology. As an instructor, I empower others to explore the boundless potential of generative AI applications. Day in day out, I assist clients in crafting their own generative AI solutions, tailoring them to their unique needs.
I absolutely love Nick Bostrom's book because it dives deep into the fascinating yet daunting future of artificial intelligence, a topic that resonates with my own work. Bostrom's exploration of how superintelligent AI could emerge and the profound risks it poses is both thought-provoking and essential reading for anyone curious about technology's trajectory.
His insights on the challenges of control and alignment really struck a chord with me, as they highlight the importance of designing AI systems that prioritize human values. This book not only raises critical questions but also inspires a sense of urgency to navigate the future responsibly, making it a personal favorite and a vital resource for anyone interested in the intersection of AI and ethics.
The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains.
If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.
Having studied literature at university and been a closet nerd, coding at night in a dank basement room, I've always been intrigued by the interface between human and machine. Then, as a senior executive in a large multinational, I was acutely aware of the value of empathy as a leadership skill. In a world that is increasingly divided and divisive, I’ve become an empathy activist. I believe that the business world can be a force for positive change, but as a society we will need to engage in a much more meaningful and rigorous debate about the ethics involved in the opportunities offered by using artificial intelligence and robots in the workplace.
Telving’s book is ahead of its time in exploring the deep questions of what our humanity is, with perspectives on our future life with AI and intelligent robots. I was particularly intrigued by the ways that the author explores how we evaluate our own consciousness, how we tend to anthropomorphize animals and objects, and the tricky ethical questions around how to legislate a life with robots. Telving deals with one subject that had been far off my radar in the form of the difference between the hard and easy problem of consciousness. It’s a very philosophical question, but in today’s world, where our values, beliefs, and interactions are in mutation, this understanding of consciousness is ever more pertinent.
Humanlike robots and digital humans are both fun and useful in many situations. But the more we interact with technology with human traits, the more we believe it to possess real human characteristics like consciousness and personality. As a new breed of artificial beings enter society on a large scale, many of us will start believing they deserve moral consideration and perhaps even rights. In this entertaining and humorously written book, Thomas Telving argues that even though the above scenario is close to inevitable, we should still do all we can to avoid it. Presenting us with thought-provoking future scenarios,…
